Drydcii and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 7 r 



that modern classicism has always been more Latin than Greek. 

 In their time there existed only one great literary achievement 

 in English, the Elizabethan, comprising two or three poets of 

 considerable magnitude and no such very great number of lesser 

 lights. A man could read through the bulk of it in a few weeks. 

 But this literature was then in discredit by reason of its final ex- 

 travagances, to say nothing of certain very conspicuous faults 

 even in its greatest writers, faults to which the succeeding age 

 was particularly sensitive without being particularly sympathetic 

 for its stupendous powers. It lay, as a matter of fact, almost 

 wholly outside the tradition of human culture ; its parentage and 

 its congenital temper were decidedly medieval ;^ while familiar- 

 ity and distance had as yet failed to soften its numerous asper- 

 ities. In the eyes of the humanist who was trying conscientiously 

 to form his taste in accordance with the great tradition of human 

 culture it was thoroughly anomalous and erratic. On the other 

 hand, the literature of contemporary France, which was, besides, 

 in fashion in England for various causes political and social, was 

 just the kind of literature that would appeal to such a critic. It 

 was classical ; it was conscious of ancient culture ; it was in the 

 great tradition. For these reasons it was likely to encourage 

 him in his distaste of Elizabethanisni and to draw his attention 

 to itself and its like away from the literature of his own country. 

 And he was the more confirmed in this error because of the new 

 criticism which was springing up across the channel under the 

 hands of Bossu and Boileau. It has always been one of the fun- 

 damental weaknesses of English literature never to know what 

 it wants. And it is, therefore, not astonishing that a criticism 

 such as was produced under Louis XIV. should impose upon a 

 literature like English in making it conscious of its own rather 

 vague aspirations and in supplying it with those definite ideas in 

 which it has always been more or less lacking. As a practical 

 result, what struck the Englishman as good was that which re- 



^"I maintain that our national drama was directly evolved from native 

 antecedents, however indirectly modified through the interest which the 

 Renaissance had awakened in the glories of antiquity." Lewis Campbell. 

 Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare. 



