passing of pagan gaiety and the coming of moral fear. And from fear came hardness of mind and narrowness of sympathy, and eventually the defeat of poetry by dogma. To state it in another way, we may say that for English poetry, the age of feudalism, of Latinism, and of aristocracy, died with Spenser. The poetry which accepted the licence and passion of life as its uncriticised content, and refined upon it only in the form of its presentation, in the technical grace of art, without questioning its truth, was superseded. Nature had exhausted her energy for a time, and religion had woken to the catastrophes that ensued in life from a servile surrender to instinct. And because it did not understand the nature of Beauty, and could not discriminate between a vulgar satisfaction of desire and an imaginative rendering of sensuous experience, it bid men distrust life's impulse altogether. It visioned virtue not in nature truly discriminated, but rather in life denied, creating a negative morality and substituting for the passion of wise living the dead letter of an angry law.

This morality has by many writers been condemned. In itself it deserves many of their strictures. Yet it served a necessary purpose without which neither poetry nor civilisation could have made much advance. The main stream of Elizabethan energy was democratic, and it was rude and uncouth as all young democracies are. The paganism, therefore, which

had been so sifted by the educated minds of Italian writers that only a delicate sensationalism, sometimes vicious, sometimes falsely sublime, remained, impelled many English poets, little educated by learning or experience, into brutal excess and discord. The old wine went to the heads of a young people unused to drinking, and an alien paganism combined forcefully with an indigenous naturalism, which was uncontrolled, as in older civilisations, by any tradition of art. And although such Elizabethans as Sidney and Spenser were sufficiently educated in the language and thought of the Renaissance to reflect all the refinements of another civilisation together with a native honesty, the secret of that exquisite sensuousness, the last direct echo of classical times, was bound to die with them in the turmoil of increasingly modern and material conditions.

Religion, which knew little of art, was not ignorant of life, and the negative morality which it inculcated, even if its principles were narrow and its methods savage, aimed at convincing man of the need to control the forces apt to be rampant in any young and healthy organism. It taught men to deny nature for the time, that they might return to her armed with principles which would enable them to use her to their own honour, and to that of art and of life.

CHAPTER IV

IDEALISM AND PURITANISM

To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him the thought of Duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God.-R. L. STEVENSON.

MILTON on a large canvas, Donne on a small, illustrate the conflict of Paganism and Protestantism; such mystical poets as Vaughan, Herbert, or Traherne, a first attempt to reconcile a natural ecstasy with Christian devotion. Milton to some extent unites in himself the Renaissance and the Reformation, a creative age and a critical, a worship of vital beauty and of absolute law, of God's sunlight and of God's judgment. The two are not contraries, as has so often been said, but consequences. The worship of life grew naturally into the service of God, the love of the finite and visible world into the quest of the infinite and invisible, as reason pierced deeper into experience.

Milton was born too late to surrender to the intoxication of life, even in youth, as completely as the poets of the creative age, which immediately preceded him. His earlier poems reflect the grace

and artifice, but not the wantonness, of the Renaissance. Even in their revelry they are artistically austere, while in his Hymn to the Nativity, religious fervour speaks with that purity and gaiety of natural innocence, which, except in the so-called metaphysical poets, was never again to be attained until Puritan zeal eventually exhausted itself. Life was to Milton in his young day as it was to Adam and Eve on that memorable evening in Eden:

With thee conversing, I forget all time,

All seasons, and their change; all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit and flower,
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful Evening mild; then silent Night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair Moon,
And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train.

But in him, as in all great creative genius, we see the same advance, partial and imperfect though it was, towards truth, which the genius of humanity at large has pursued so slowly by comparison, and is still pursuing.

The plucking of the fruit of knowledge exiled him, no less than Adam and Eve, from his early Paradise. Paradise Lost is an epic of its author's spiritual history as well as of man's. The religion of the senses is enchanting in youth, but disaster dogs its indulgence, and so impels a poet to examine rationally

his experience. It teaches him first to dread life and either to withdraw from contact with her or to rear between himself and her the barrier of moral law, at best an imperfect method of avoiding nature's excesses, at worst a summary denial of life's fairest expressions. Milton's cultivation of human and personal values, of morality in any real sense, did not go very far. For he was considerably more mediæval than he was critical, and so, except where such interested motives as a recalcitrant wife, or political partisanship, dictated a liberal and individual standpoint, he was, with all his repetition of religious dogma and scriptural myths, predominantly pagan. Only very occasionally can he be said even to harmonise the Renaissance and the Reformation. He is a humanist merely in the pomp of his learning and no more than a Political Protestant. Certainly life placed the orthodox despot in awkward predicaments, and forced him against his will to adopt the rôle of the rebel. The mediæval antifeminist is also the impassioned pleader for divorce; the loyal prophet of a Calvinistic God is also the sympathetic creator of a Satan who is the noblest free-thinker in our literature; the biblical dramatist of Samson preaches the exultant ethic of a Greek tragedian. But the reason is that he had a personal interest in furthering divorce, in drawing rebellion heroically, and in blackening a Dalila.

But fundamentally Milton was a pagan, troubled