Herbert John Clifford Grierson

“ It is in our period that the classicism of the Augustan ages is taking shape; and the two shaping forces are the organisation of polite society, and the rationalist ideal of precision in the use of words, logical and lucid order. From the opening of the Hôtel de Rambouillet dates the organisation of polite society as a conscious force in life and letters, the beginning of the process which was to make literature, poetry and prose, the finest flower of social intercourse, its greatest beauties that elegance and dignity which are the adornment of aristocratic manners. ”

“ The finest scenes in these portray no conflict of passions, no resolution taking shape, but present in a style less rich and fanciful than Fletcher's, less thrilling than Webster's, less declamatory than Massinger's, but with a grave intensity of its own, some fixed phase of a high-flown not to say morbid sentiment. And if the sentiments are unreal the characters are more so. Ford's dramatis personæ are not creatures of flesh and blood. The best resemble delicate wax-works, touched with a pale and feverish beauty at times by the intensity of the sentiment which the poet puts into their mouths. ”

“ He saw how deeply the competitive instinct enters into man's intellectual and moral constitution; how much positive right depends on might; and he saw these truths so clearly that he ignored others which modify and complicate them. And Hobbes' style is the image of his thought, lucid, precise, ordered,—no prose of the century is more so,—but wanting in nuances and harmonies; not so complex ever as Descartes', but a little hard, and wearing after a time; never irradiated with poetry like Bacon's, though he has some of his command of felicitous figure and aphorism ”

“ The main story of Celadon and Astrée—their love, their misunderstanding and separation, his life of seclusion in the forest and service of Astrée in the disguise of a shepherdess, and the heroic achievement which leads to the recognition—is told in flowing and rhythmical prose, interspersed with poems and interrupted by more than thirty other love-stories. The action proceeds with the leisureliness of the sun across an orchard wall. Refined and adoring love is the key-note of the whole, broken only by the lively sallies of the inconstant Hylas, the most brightly drawn character in the romance. ”

“ The best characters in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are those the very breath of whose life is sentiment. Arethusa and Aspatia, Bellario and Ordella, are charming if ethereal figures. Devoted love and sweet submissiveness flow in golden phrases from their lips. But on the other hand, where energy of will and intensity of passion are most imperatively required, Beaumont and Fletcher appear to me to fall short. Their handling of evil characters and terrible incidents is inferior to that of Webster or Middleton or Ford. Nothing is forbidden to the poet if his treatment be adequate. ”

“ Almost as by an accident Corneille had divined the right way, seen whither the centre of the interest must be transferred to produce great serious drama. From a Spanish play crowded with incongruous incident he constructed a tragedy, in which all the interest of suspense that the most skilfully woven tragi-comedy could evoke is sustained and intensified, not by elaborate intrigue and surprising recognitions, but by a moral dilemma, a conflict of the soul. ”

“ Pascal reflected as carefully as Bacon on the art of persuasion, and neither the method which he pursued in the Lettres Provinciales nor that which he adumbrated in the Pensées was attained by haphazard. He was at one with Montaigne in his scorn of eloquence cultivated for its own sake,—eloquence such as Balzac's, "qui nous destourne à soy,"—and in his love of a style which is "la peinture de la pensée." "Quand on voit le style naturel," says Pascal, "on est tout étonné et ravi car on s'attendait de voir un auteur et on trouve un homme." ”

“ Prose, like poetry, felt the strain of the growing seriousness and combativeness of the age, the increasing intellectuality of temper. Pure poetry is somewhat of an exotic in the seventeenth century; even Milton's purest poetry is his earliest. Both poetry and prose are enlisted in the service of religious controversy or the growing interest in science and philosophy. The earlier seventeenth century cannot be called an age of prose, in the sense that its temper is prosaic. It was not, like the next age, suspicious of enthusiasm: enthusiasm was too much the air it breathed. ”

“ No love-poetry of the closing sixteenth century has more of the sting of real feeling in it except Shakespeare's. There is nothing quite like Donne's love-poems in the language, except, perhaps, some of Browning's. Passion seems to affect both poets in the same way, not evoking the usual images, voluptuous and tender, but quickening the intellect to intense and rapid trains of thought, and finding utterance in images, bizarre sometimes and even repellent, often of penetrating vividness and power. ”

“ It is only a beginning that we have in these years. In the literature of the period there is still much of the ruder, freer, larger spirit of the sixteenth century. In the badinage of the Hôtel there is a good deal of coarseness; in the refinements of style which they cultivate, a large admixture of the precious and fantastic. But before the first sixty years of the century are over, modern French prose has taken shape. In moulding it, the two great influences of classicism are at work. Balzac represents the one, the influence of society and its conscious pursuit of dignity and elegance ”

“ His artistic temperament felt the charm of church music and architecture, and his ardent disposition responded, like the Dutch Vondel's, to the Catholic glorification of love as well as faith, the devotion to Christ and the Virgin of the martyr and the saint. He read Italian and Spanish, and was infected by the taste for what one might call the religious confectionery of which Marino's poems are full. ”

“ And just because it is frankly a farce, and the reader is not called on to look through the play at the object of the satire, has it been so popular. One is left free to enjoy the art—the cleverly invented characters, the cunningly constructed plot, the learned and brilliant dialogue. It is not a faultless art; it is not the art of Shakespeare, or even of Molière; but it none the less arrests and compels our admiration and, in this play certainly, our delighted amusement.
Such as it is, Jonson's art reached its culminating point in The Alchemist. The closely woven The Alchemist. ”

“ His command of word, phrase, and figure, learned and poetical, homely and sublime, is unlimited; and if the rhythm of his sentences is not as regular as Hooker's and Browne's, or so flowing as Taylor's, it has at its best a larger compass, and in none is the poet's fine ear for musical combinations of consonants and vowels so obvious. Rich in prose poetry as English literature is, it has nothing that in sustained elevation of thought and splendour of phrase surpasses Areopagitica. ”

“ The lyrical poetry of the Renaissance, that wonderful product, stimulated in its growth from Italy, but in all the countries north of the Alps striking a deeper root into the health-giving soil of popular song, blooms in full splendour and fragrance throughout these years in England and Holland, blossoms even in Germany despite adverse circumstances, and in Italy puts forth late flowers, somewhat waxy and gaudy but not without charm. ”

“ In the affectations of Marino and his contemporaries—and one may not except altogether Chiabrera and Tassoni—we see an art which, whatever its limitations, had reached perfection, running to seed in the strained and feverish pursuit of novelty undirected by any new and fruitful inspiration. In "secentismo," one might venture to say, nothing is new but everything is novel. To startle and amaze was the motive of each new departure in form or verse or conceit. ”

“ Learning is its idol, "an immoderate hydroptic thirst of learning." The old learning, scholastic and traditional, subtle and argumentative, revives with vigour in the work of the ecclesiastical and theological controversialists at the very time that in the writings of Bacon and Hobbes the new spirit of inquiry, distrustful of enthusiasm and distrustful of tradition, is growing active. Such an age naturally begot a rich and strong but varied prose. To a uniform and perfect medium, like that which Balzac, Descartes, and Pascal evolved in France, it did not attain. ”

“ Does a mariner desire wind to fill his sails, bring the poet. Is an unfortunate person freezing in winter, let him draw near. Love has put water in his eyes, the wind in his mouth, fire in his heart. And the proof that he is all fire is just that he is all water. He is like green wood which gives out water when it burns." In this poetry at the same time the more ideal conception of love gave place to the classical and sensual. [2]
Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano endeavoured to give new life to the Italian lyric by refining and enriching the fresh and living songs of the people ”

“ But poetry was still didactic and heavy: no artist had yet appeared to do for Dutch poetry what Spenser by The Shepheardes Kalender did for English in 1579,—no poet capable of transplanting the flower of Renaissance poetry from Italian or French soil and naturalising it in Holland. But the seventeenth century had not long to wait before such a poet appeared in Pieter Cornelisz Hooft, [8] not certainly a poet of the creative genius ofHooft. Spenser, but a true poet, an artist to the finger-tips, and a man of no less vigour and independence of mind than varied and complete culture. ”

“ The patriotic note of Spenser and Shakespeare is heard only from belated Elizabethans as Drayton and Chapman. The Protestant religious poets form a group by themselves; the Catholic Anglicans another. The courtly poets, whether religious or secular, are out of touch with the nation at large, their poetry a delicate exotic. One poet, indeed, emerges with the power that genius gives to harmonise diverse elements. Milton, like Spenser, unites the spirit of the Renaissance with that of the Reformation, and both with patriotism. ”

“ The whirligig of time brings its revenges. A living drama must have its roots in popular taste. The country which had rendered most obsequious reverence to classical authority in drama and criticism, had to allow a blend of kinds more inharmonious and inartistic than that at which tragi-comedy aimed, and which Shakespeare achieved in so many different ways.
Of prose writers Italy in the seventeenth century produced abundance, whose work in science, theology, Prose. history, and travels can be but touched on. ”

“ In Holland, the result of the dissensions in Protestantism and of the Catholic reaction is seen in the strange phenomenon, that the greatest and not least representative poet of a Protestant country is an ardent Catholic, using the stage to set forth Catholic doctrine, and pouring out his heart in poetic apologetics, and hymns to the Virgin and saintly martyrs. And a deep religious strain runs through all the Dutch poetry of this period. Hooft alone has the blended epicureanism and stoicism which mark the pure child of the Classical Renaissance. ”

“ At the same time, the essentially pagan spirit of the Italian Renaissance was not easily exorcised even by Spenser, and the emancipated artistic-enthusiasm which created the Elizabethan drama, poems such as Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, and the sonnets of Shakespeare, was to the stern spirit of Puritanism simply anathema. Before the sixteenth century ended poets were beginning to form different schools, or else the two strains, the secular and the religious, run side by side in a single poet's work without his endeavouring to reconcile them in any way. ”

“ And d'Urfé's love, high-flown as it is, is not so much a mere code of gallantry as it became in his followers and in the tragi-comedies, "amour postiche, froid et ridicule," a pretext for absurdly heroic resolutions and refinements of casuistry and eloquence. There is no passion in the love which d'Urfé paints, but there was some degree of beauty in the sentiment, and of elevation in the morality which gained the admiration not only of the Hôtel but of so fine a critic of the heart as Saint Francis of Sales. ”

“ Browne's prose and Milton's verse are the finest fruits of seventeenth century Latinism. It is difficult to conceive of a purely Teutonic language achieving such at once sonorous and melodious effects as Browne and Milton produced, in different ways, by the admixture of racy English with Latin polysyllables rich in labials and open vowels. In impassioned and sustained eloquence Browne is not the compeer of Hooker, or Donne, or Milton, or Taylor. He is too prone in the midst of a noble flight to check at some passing sparrow of antiquarian fancy. ”