perambulations of the antiquaries. The two combined gave to the historical writer of the time an inspiring and confident assurance of the dignity and importance of his subject.

On the other hand English history made great advances in the sixteenth century in its command over a variety of minute historical fact and in its sense of the reality of the materials out of which history is made. Much of the Elizabethan historian's detail is indeed trivial, and only slowly was the lesson learned of the difference between detail which was genuinely significant, which really gave the personal coloring to character and action, and that which was of ephemeral or of merely ornamental interest. Nevertheless historical writing did gradually become more immediate and personal in its interests, more and more a record of credible human beings in a world of credible circumstances. One finds in sixteenth-century historians a much clearer realization of the life of the state than had hitherto existed, both with respect to the development of internal policies and privileges, and with respect to the relations of England to foreign nations. The histories of the time clearly reflect the growth of the English national consciousness. Even in ecclesiastical matters, which were the prime and often the exclusive concern of medieval historians, the sixteenth-century historian, as Bacon pointed out, had an entirely new story to tell, a story, too, which came much nearer to common humanity in its daily acts and experiences than the chroniclings of the monastic historians had ever done. And finally, with historians like More, Cavendish, and Bacon, one finds human character analyzed with a realization of its subtleties and shades of meaning such as the historians of the medieval school never remotely approached. In some respects it was an advantage to the English historians of the sixteenth century that they concerned themselves relatively so little with the philosophic interpretation

of events. By keeping their attention directed to concrete detail and to specific character and motive they gave to their writing a much to be desired solidity and reality which otherwise it might have lacked.

These two characteristics combined, the new sense of the largeness of the meaning of history and the new feeling for the reality of the characters, the setting and the events of historical narrative, appear as the distinctive merits of the histories of the sixteenth century when they are compared with the cruder historical writings of the earlier centuries. They are also the condition of the special applications of the art of English prose writing to historical composition in this period. The lofty seriousness with which history was regarded encouraged the historian in the cultivation of a dignified and substantial technic in writing, at the same time restraining in him, to a very considerable degree, the strong tendency of the age towards extravagance and artificiality of style. The feeling for varied life and color in detail also gave to the historical literature of the period a much greater vivacity of effect, a much greater illusion of truth and reality than the earlier historians were capable of producing. The objective existence of the world of history exercised, on the whole, a beneficial effect upon the historians' command of the technical art of composition. It kept them in the middle way, providing them with abundant materials for the exercise of their art, and steadying them also with the sense of a duty towards these materials to be soberly and worthily performed. It would be too much to expect, even of historians, that they should forego all extravagance and fantasy in style, but compared with the writers of fictitious narrative, they remained engagingly natural and simple.

VIII

THE MODERNISTS

MODERNISM AND REALISM-REALISM IN THE DRAMA-BEN JONSON-ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DISCUSSION-MEDICINE AND QUACKERY-MERRY JESTS AND TALESROGUE TRACTS-MODERNISM AND VILLAINY-NASHE

GREENE-PEELE-LODGE-DEKKER-DELONEY

READERS of Shakspere will not need to be reminded that the Elizabethan sense of the word 'modern' was not the same as it is in present-day English. To the Elizabethan, the adjective meant approximately 'commonplace,' ' familiar,' and Elizabethan modernism, as a literary style, may fairly be equated with nineteenth-century realism. But realism, like M. Jourdain's prose, is ever with us, waiting only for the philosopher to give it a name. The mere process of naming it, however, often makes realistic writing seem to mean more than was intended. Realists who would have recognized themselves as such and who were professed practitioners of a cult are not to be found until much later than the period covered by this book. Before critical opinion had formulated a theory with respect to it, realistic writing was in the main merely an occasional outcropping of the rock bottom of daily life. It would be a vain refinement, therefore, to attempt to state clearly what had not yet taken clear form, and in the present chapter many writers will be mentioned whose work was not consistently or prevailingly, sometimes not even intentionally realistic.

Though realism, or modernism, in the sixteenth century is not susceptible of a sharp and clear definition, there is little difficulty in recognizing the numerous manifestations of the realistic spirit when they appear; and perhaps it will be sufficient to say that in the following discussion the term realism will be used, somewhat loosely from the philosophic point of view, to designate the reflection of the world of sensible fact and of everyday human experience in literature, whether presented in a simply descriptive spirit, or as reflections of the anti-heroic endeavor to escape from the idealistic refinements of poetry and romance.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century there were some indications that the experiences and circumstances of familiar life were coming to be recognized more clearly than ever before as valuable material for literary purposes, and indications also that at this time something like a realistic school was beginning to be formed. In his hostile discussion of what he called modernism and villainy, Gabriel Harvey even gave a name to these tendencies. But the time was not ripe for the full apprehension of the possibilities of a realistic method, and the literary pictures of London life in Dekker, Greene, Nashe, and others, were continued only in slight sketches which served as settings for popular anecdotes. When the young Milton sought for a great subject, it was not London that occurred to him, not the moral struggles of men facing the troubles and complications of contemporary life, but instead the misty King Arthur and the battles of the angels in heaven.

Certain kinds of writing not originally devised to hold a realistic content, by their nature are more open to the reception of such materials than others. The drama especially has proved to be a peculiarly favorable medium for the reproduction of the setting and characters of real life. In the sixteenth century meter was the form imperatively

prescribed by tradition for all serious dramatic efforts, and from this prescription Elizabethan drama successfully freed itself in but relatively few instances. Interesting parallelisms can be observed, however, in the use of prose in the drama and in the development of the feeling for realistic effect. The mysteries, moralities, and interludes of the earliest English drama were written mainly in a four-stress line ultimately derived from the Old English alliterative line. In its Middle English and early Modern English developments, this four-stress line followed two tendencies, the one a regularizing and restraining tendency, leading towards a fixed seven- or eight-syllable line with weak cæsura and little alliteration but with clearly marked rime, and the other a free and expanding tendency, resulting in a line with an irregular number of unstressed syllables, a clearly marked break or cæsura in the line, and a considerable retention of the native ornament of alliteration with a correspondingly weak sense for rime. It was this latter kind of verse, known as tumbling verse, which connects directly, as has already been pointed out,1 with the development of a certain type of English prose. In the mysteries and moralities, in the interludes and early comedies, this tumbling verse, often passing over into a tumbling prose, was frequently employed in passages of boasting, of exhortation, of popular and sometimes realistically humorous volubility. It is often difficult to tell where the metrical intention leaves off and the prose begins in this kind of writing. The persistence of this style in the popular drama is remarkable, so late a comedy as The Taming of a Shrew (1594) exhibiting a thorough confusion between prose and tumbling verse. The differentiation and separation of a popular tumbling prose from tumbling verse never became complete, however, and the significance of the tumbling 1 See above, p. 15.