374 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 



associated with it, came those songs for music in which the 

 English of the sixteenth century excelled. The lyric rapture, 

 that which has been called the lyric cry, penetrates all verbal 

 music of that period. We find it modulating blank verse and 

 controlling the rhythms of the couplet and the stanza. 

 The best subsidiary work of the age consisted of transla- 

 tions, adaptations, and free handlings of antique themes in 

 narrative verse. Chapman's * Homer,' Fairfax's ' Tasso,' 

 Marlowe's ' Hero and Leander,' Shakespeare's ' Venus and 

 Adonis ' and the ' Rape of Lucrece,' rank among the master- 

 pieces of Elizabethan poetry. But drama and song, when 

 all accounts are settled, remain the crowning glories of that 

 literature. 



The Victorian age can boast no national drama. Poetical 

 plays have indeed been produced which do credit to the talents 

 of their authors. 1 Yet the century has not expressed its real 

 stuff, nor shown its actual clairvoyance in that line. We 

 cannot point to a Victorian drama as we do to an Elizabethan 

 drama, and challenge the world to match it. This is due 

 perhaps in part to those incalculable changes which have 

 substituted the novel for the drama. The public of the present 

 time is a public of readers rather than of hearers, and the 

 muster-roll of brilliant novelists, from Scott and Jane Austen, 

 through Thackeray and Dickens, down to George Eliot and 

 George Meredith, can be written off against the playwrights 

 of the sixteenth century. Poetry, surveyed from a sufficient 

 altitude, claims these imaginative makers, though they used 

 the vehicle of prose. Even less than the sixteenth has 

 the nineteenth produced an epic, and for similar reasons. 

 Tennyson chose the right name for his Arthurian string of 

 studies when he called them * Idylls of the King.' To claim 

 for them epical coherence was only a brilliant afterthought. 

 It is not given to any race under the conditions of conscious 

 culture to create a genuine epic. That rare flower of art puts 

 forth its bloom in the first dawn of national existence. If ws 



1 Darley, Landor, Beddoes, Home, Procter, Shelley, Browning, 

 Taylor, Swinburne, and possibly Tennyson, demand commemoration in 

 a footnote. 



