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to the Sovereign as the fountain of justice? These raise constitutional questions of no small magnitude or importance. The affirmative answer to the first would involve the assumption that a Minister can bind the Crown in the transfer of territory by means of documents vague and uncertain, a power never hitherto successfully asserted. Until it is ascertained that the Queen's Minister has so transferred a portion of the Empire, it should not be assumed that a precedent so dangerous exists—a precedent, be it said, apparently in conflict with the considered advice of the Queen's constitutional advisers of her Privy Council, who have declared that, whether or no the Crown possesses the power without the sanction of Parliament to cede any portion of the Empire, it is clear such a cession of territory cannot be established by any uncertain inference from equivocal acts.*

FRANK SAFFORD.

* 1 A. C. 332.

PURITANISM AND ENGLISH

LITERATURE.

I.

HE greatness of Elizabethan literature arose from the unity of the national mind, in which the streams of the Renaissance and the Reformation had met and mingled. The enthusiasm of the years which followed the destruction of the Spanish Armada fused together powers which often work in opposition or apart. Reason, passion, and imagination co-operated one with another, and through their co-operancy gave substance and form to the poetry of Shakespeare and of Spenser, to the prose of Bacon and of Hooker. The literature of pleasure had never before attained to such seriousness in beauty, the literature of knowledge had never before been so infused with imaginative power. In such works as "Hamlet," "Measure for Measure," and "The Tempest " there is a depth of reflection equal to their heights of poetical vision. Spenser is at once a weaver of dreams and a teacher of truth. Hooker cannot discuss the sign of the cross in baptism or the rites of burial until he has first expounded his magnificent conception of the universe under a reign of law. The scientific writings of Bacon-later as these are in date-are the utterances of a great imaginative seer rather than of a fully equipped scientific student. If his nature was lacking in passion of other kinds, he had assuredly an unbounded passion for universal knowledge, and for the power to enhance the worth of human life which knowledge confers. But gradually in the history of our literature there was a descent from the heights. The unity of the national mind was broken or impaired. Passion in large measure transferred itself from literature to the affairs of politics and religion. Reason, confronted with urgent practical problems, grew perplexed. Imagination waned, and often yielded to the seductions of easy and vulgar pleasure. A period of doubt and difficulty followed a period of steadfast and daring

advance. Two doctrines in religion arrayed themselves each against the other. Two parties in the State entered upon a great contention. Two theories of life and conduct stood opposed. All things tended towards a vast disruption; and in the strife of King and Commonwealth, of Puritan and of Anglican, that disruption was accomplished.

The chief glory of Elizabethan literature was the drama, with the deepest passion and the most heroic actions of humanity for its theme. It had its basis in what is most real in the life of man, and what is real was interpreted into the highest meanings by imagination. During the later years of the reign of James I. and during the reign of Charles the drama lost touch with reality; it was cut off from its true basis of supply. It advanced with a showy gallantry, but its strength and solidity of movement were gone. It relied too often, as with Massinger and Fletcher, on overstrained, fantastic motives. It deserted the substantial ground of national history. It endeavoured to excite a jaded imagination with extravagances of romantic passion or even of unnatural lust. It sought for curiosities of prettiness in sentiment and imagery. It supported its decline by splendours appealing to the senses; vast sums of money were expended upon the masque. It grew shallow in true passion and meditative wisdom. It grew rhetorical; its moralities are often those of eloquent periods. And if at times less rudely gross than the earlier drama, it was infected with a subtler and a baser spirit of evil. of poetry compensate the decline of the drama. Jacobean and Caroline lyric poetry is admirable in its kind, a charming intermixture of nature with art, of grace with gay effrontery, it does not often deal with the great lyric themes in a spirit of serious beauty; it ceases to be in any large sense an interpretation of life.

Nor do other forms While much in the

To us, looking back upon the period, the literature of pleasure may be worth far more than its theological treatises or its political pamphlets grace and gaiety are always welcome gifts, fresh and living, while the theological and political controversy of the seventeenth century concerns us chiefly as a matter of history. The questions so fiercely debated then are not the questions which concern us to-day, or at least they require for our uses to be re-stated in modern terms. But to a man of serious mind, living in the years which preceded the struggle between the King and the Parliament, the poetry of the time would have appeared as no more than a decorative fringe; the warp and woof of thought would have been found by him in those folios and quartos on which the dust now gathers in our libraries. The same cannot be said of the contemporaries of Shakespeare or of Spenser : for them the poetry of the time was a large and true interpretation of life. And science and theology were then a genuine portion of literature.

Was there a check, an interruption, of the higher intellectual life

of England? Yes-to a certain extent. The Renaissance influence in literature, separated from the serious temper of the Reformation, dwindled and suffered degradation; the spirit of liberty, entangled with politics, set itself to resolve urgent, practical problems, and lost some of its nobler ideality. Human freedom-that indeed was still sought; but freedom came to mean deliverance from an unjust tax or from an inquisitorial bishop. The spirit of the Reformation separated from the Renaissance influence lost some of its more liberal temper in a narrow Scripturalism and in pettinesses of moral rigour. But the political and religious questions could not be put aside; they, too, supplied a stern discipline for the intellect; in their solution an effort was made on behalf of liberty of thought, narrowed in its meaning though liberty of thought might be by the exigencies of the time. The more enlightened Puritanism contained within it a portion of the spirit of the Renaissance. The mundane spirit of the Renaissance, in its lower form of commercial interests, by degrees allied itself with Puritanism. The higher tendencies of the Renaissance re-emerged in the great scientific movement of the second half of the seventeenth century. Through the strife of parties and the tangle of interests a real progress is discernible.

Poetical literature, in the years of growing trouble, had in some degree, as has been said, lost touch with reality. The Cavalier poets produced their gallant songs of pleasure, of fancy, of delicate melody; but they do not, and they did not, sway the life of man. Two things, however, became more real and gravely earnest. One of these concerned the corporate life of the nation-the great contention between King and people. The other concerned primarily the inner life of the individual soul. In Elizabethan literature these two things had not fallen apart. Spenser's "Faerie Queene " deals essentially with the life of the soul and its combat with the various foes and tempters which beset that life; but it is also a poem concerning the honour and well-being of England. It is a moral or spiritual allegory; but at the same time it is an historical allegory. Gloriana is at once the glory of God and the Queen of England; St. George is at once the knight of Holiness and the patron saint of England. Shakespeare can search the mysteries of the solitary soul in Hamlet, but he can also celebrate the glories of his country at Agincourt, and raise his chant of patriotic triumph. Such poetry became impossible in the days of James and of Charles. Men who were interested in public life were putting on their armour for an internecine struggle. Men who were concerned for the life of the soul, if they did not carry that concern into the public strife and become the zealots of a party, were tempted to retreat from the world of action, like the devout company at Little Gidding or certain of the Puritan fugitives to America, and they nourished the spirit of religion in secret or in little communities.

The highest Elizabethan literature is at once mundane and, in the truest sense of the word, religious. At a later time the mundane literature became wholly mundane, often even frivolously or basely mundane; the religious literature, when it ceases from controversy, often ceases to regard the affairs of earth, which is but a City of Destruction or a Vanity Fair, and has its gaze intensely fixed upon another world, where the Saint will attain his Rest.

II.

One of the first effects of the Protestant Reformation was a quickening of self-consciousness in matters of religion. External rites, ordinances, and ceremonies seemed for many devout men and women to lose much of their virtue. To some they became matters of indifference; to others they appeared hostile to the true life of the soul. The realm of sense was viewed as if it were separated by a deep gulf from the realm of the spirit. There have, indeed, always existed the two types of mind which we may call the Catholic and the Puritan, to one of which the visible and the invisible are only different aspects of one great reality, while to the other they stand apart as sundered or even as antagonistic powers. In a review of Newman's "Phases of Faith," written many years ago by the most venerable of living thinkers, Dr. Martineau endeavours to distinguish between these two conceptions of life and the world and of God's relation to it in a passage which it is worth while to quote at some length. According to the Catholic conception the two spheres of sense and spirit seem to melt into each other under the mediation of a kind of divine chemistry; "hence," he goes on,

"the invariable presence of some physical element in all that Catholicism looks upon as venerable. Its rites are a manipular invocation of God. Its miracles are examples of incarnate divineness in old clothes and winking pictures. Its ascetic discipline is founded on the notion of a gradual consumption of the grosser body by the encroaching fire of the spirit; till in the ecstatica the frame itself becomes ethereal and the light shines through. Nothing can be more offensive than all this to the Evangelical [or, as we may put it, the Puritan] conception, which plants the natural and the spiritual in irreconcilable contradiction, denies to them all approach or contact, and allows each to exist only by the extinction of the other. This unmediated dualism follows the Evangelical into his theory as to the state of each individual soul before God. The Catholic does not deny all divine light to the natural conscience, or all power to the natural will of unconverted men he maintains that these also are already under a law of obligation, may do what is well-pleasing before God, and by superior faithfulness qualify themselves to become subjects of grace; so that the Gospel shall come upon them as a divine supplement to the sad and feeble moral life of nature. To the Evangelical, on the contrary, the soul that is not saved is lost. . . . So, again, the contrast turns up in the opposite views taken of the divine economy in human affairs. The Evangelical detaches

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