Introduction to Browning | Page 8

for Love, or the
World well Lost') by Dryden.
In Milton, though there is a noticeable, an even distinctly marked,
reduction of the life of the spirit (in the sense in which I have been
using these words) exhibited by Shakespeare, it is still very strong and
efficient, and continues uninfluenced by the malign atmosphere around
him the last fifteen years of his life, which were lived in the reign of

Charles II. Within that period he wrote
the `Paradise Lost', `Paradise
Regained', and `Samson Agonistes'. "Milton," says Emerson, "was the
stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits
of Shakespeare."
"These heights could not be maintained. They were followed by a
meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels;
the loss of
wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was
unknown, became the type of philosophy,
and his "understanding"
the measure, in all nations,
of the English intellect. His countrymen
forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which they had once walked
with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers
of thought fell into neglect."
The highest powers of thought cannot be realized without the life of the
spirit. It is this, as I have already said, which has been the glory of the
greatest thinkers since the world began;
not their intellects, but the
co-operating, unconscious power IMMANENT in their intellects.
During the Restoration period, and later, spiritual life
was at its very
lowest ebb. I mean, spiritual life
as exhibited in the poetic and
dramatic literature of the time, whose poisoned fountain-head was the
dissolute court of Charles II. All the slops of that court went into the
drama,
all the `sentina reipublicae', the bilge water of the ship of state.
The dramatic writers of the time, to use the words of St. Paul in his
letter to the Ephesians, "walked in the vanity of their mind; having the
understanding darkened, being alienated from
the life of God through
the ignorance that was in them
because of the blindness of their heart;
who, being past feeling, gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to
work all uncleanness with greediness." The age, as Emerson says, had
no live, distinct, actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a
negative condition. As represented by its drama and poetry, it may
almost be said to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual
disease affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign
of the Georges. There appears to have been but little belief in the
impulse which the heart imparts to the intellect,
or that the latter

draws greatness from the inspiration of the former. There was a time in
the history of the Jews in which, it is recorded, "there was no open
vision". It can be said, emphatically,
that in the time of Charles II.
there was no open vision.
And yet that besotted, that spiritually dark
age, which was afflicted with pneumatophobia, flattered itself that there
had never been an age so flooded with light. The great age of Elizabeth
(which designation I would apply to the period of fifty years or more,
from 1575 to 1625, or somewhat later), in which the human faculties,
in their whole range, both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a
degree of expansion as they had never before reached in the history of
the world, -- that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher,
Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list of
great names might be continued), -- that great age, I say, was regarded
by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous in comparison with
their own. But beneath all, still lay
the restorative elements of the
English character, which were to reassert themselves and usher in a
new era of literary productiveness, the greatest since the Elizabethan
age, and embodying
the highest ideals of life to which the race has
yet attained. We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or
spiritual life, but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and
licentiousness of the court which the exiled Charles brought back with
him, and the release from Puritan restraint, explain partly
the state of
things, or rather the degree to which the state of things was pushed.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, or somewhat earlier, the rise of
the spiritual tide is distinctly observable.
We see a reaction setting in
against the soulless poetry
which culminated in Alexander Pope,
whose `Rape of the Lock' is the masterpiece of that poetry. It is, in fact,
the most brilliant society-poem in the literature. De Quincey
pronounces it to be, though somewhat extravagantly, "the most
exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."
Bishop Warburton, one of the great critical authorities of the age,
believed in the infallibility of