What had happened in the interval between Shakspere and Milton was the diversion of the mass of mental energy from imaginative to ratiocinative literature, from questions of aesthetics and poetry to questions of life and conduct; so that the drama passed to ineptitude in the hands of weak imitators, and poetry became essentially a pastime, though one pursued by some intelligences of remarkable eccentric power. The great work of Milton marks the reaction that might have been made under a continued Puritan règime, could that have escaped the freezing influence or judaising fanaticism in this any more than in the other arts; the concrete literature of the Restoration and the next century was the reaction possible in the political circumstances. Dryden's early verses on the death of a young lord from the small-pox mark the limit of endurance. As M. Taine puts it, "the excess of folly in poetry, like the excess of injustice in politics, prepares and predicts revolutions."[1] And from the preciosity of literary specialists we pass rapidly to the language and the sentiment of the new man of the world, coloured only by the reminiscence of the preciosities of the past. Literature becomes the interest, if not of all, at least of all men and women of any education; and language conforms of necessity to common sense and common thought. The reign of preciosity, which is wayward one-sidedness and strenuous limitation, is over. It may be that the new literary commonweal is relatively commonplace, charmless, and unsubtle in its speech and thinking; but none the less it has the strength which comes of standing on Mother Earth. Its tongue is the tongue of a new philosophy, a new science, a new criticism, and a new prose fiction; and in these exercises lies the gymnastic which will later redeem the new-fashioned poetry itself from the
- ↑ iii. 164.
