EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 37 



Such, to indicate the outlines of the subject rapidly, is the 

 history of the rise, progress, decline, and dissolution of what 

 we call Elizabethan Drama. The Evolutionist differs from 

 previous students mainly in this, that he regards the totality 

 of the phenomena presented as something necessitated by 

 conditions to which the prime agents in the process, Marlowe 

 and even Shakespeare, were subordinated. For him, this type 

 of art exhibits qualities analogous to those of an organic 

 complex undergoing successive phases of germination, expan- 

 sion, efflorescence, and decay, which were independent of the 

 volition of the men who effected them. To him the interest 

 of Sackville and Norton, of Hughes and Sidney, of Jonson 

 and his followers, consists in this : that they were unable, by 

 thwarting or counteracting its development, to arrest its 

 course, or to import nutriment from alien sources into the 

 structure which it was bound to evolve from embryonic 

 elements. When everything which the embryo contained 

 had been used up in the formation of structure, it came 

 to an end. 



IV 



The law of sequence, which I am attempting to describe, 

 admits of wide and manifold demonstration, Indeed, the 

 more we study those types of art which are in a true sense 

 national, which have occupied the serious attention of whole 

 peoples for considerable periods, and which are not the 

 sporadic products of culture or of personal capacity, the more 

 shall we become convinced that its operation is universal. 

 I have pictured those phases of incipient and embryonic 

 energy, of maturely perfected type, of gradual disintegration, 

 and of pronounced decadence, under the metaphor of organic 

 development and dissolution. But it must be remembered 

 that this is, after all, a metaphor. It would, in many 

 respects, have been quite as appropriate to choose a simile 

 from the expansive force which carries projectiles for some 

 space above the earth, and failing, leaves them to sink down 

 again inert. That figure, allowing for its purely symbolic 

 value, nicely expresses the curve described by art in one of 



