368 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



Elizabethan literature has a marked unity of style. We 

 notice a strong generic similarity in those poets which veils 

 their specific differences. That is perhaps the first and mos' 

 salient point of contrast between Elizabethan and Victorian 

 literature. It makes a cautious critic pause. After the lapse 

 of two centuries, he asks himself, will Byron, Keats, Shelley 

 Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, Tennyson, Campbell, William 

 Morris, Rogers, Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, Browning, Mrs 

 Browning, Matthew Arnold, and the rest of them, seem 

 singing to one dominant tune, in spite of their so obvious 

 differences? Will our posterity discern in them the note in 

 common which we find in Sidney, Herrick, Spenser, Shake- 

 speare, Fletcher, Marlowe, Jonson, Barnfield, Dekker, Marston, 

 Chapman, Raleigh, Drayton, Drummond, Webster, and the 

 rest of those great predecessors ? The question has to be 

 asked ; but the answer is not easily given. We can neither 

 reject ourselves into the past nor project ourselves into the 

 future, with certainty sufficient to decide whether what looks 

 like similarity in the Elizabethan poets, and what looks like 

 diversity in the Victorian poets, are illusions of the present. 



Yet something can be attempted in explanation of the 

 apparent puzzle. The circumstances of the Elizabethan age 

 favoured unity of style. The language, to begin with, had 

 recently been remade under the influence of new ideals and 

 new educational systems. Far more than lapse of years 

 and wastes of desolating warfare separated sixteenth-century 

 English from the speech of Chaucer. The spirit itself, which 

 shapes language to the use of mind, had changed through 

 the action of quickening conceptions and powerfully excited 

 energies. And to this change in the spirit the race was 

 eagerly responsive. In a certain way all writers felt the 

 Bible, Greece, Rome, Italy, France, Germany ; all strove to 

 be in tune with the new learning. At the same time, 

 criticism was hardly in its cradle ; you find a trace of it in 

 Jonson, Bacon, Selden, Camden ; but it does not touch the 

 general. The people were anything but analytical, and poetry 

 issued from the very people's hearts, as melody from the 

 strings of the violoncello. The spontaneity which we have 



