Ars et Natura

Left: Amphora depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes (450–440 BC, MFA Houston) Middle:  Oedipe explique l'énigme du sphinx (1808, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Louvre) Right:  Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864, Gustave Moreau, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) An abridgement of G. H. Mair's sweeping yet concise survey of modern English literature (1911, Oxford University Press, The Home University Library Series), recast as an essay on the meanings of classic, romantic, decadent. The Decline of Elizabethan Drama                          [The] voluminous plays of  Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama.  Decadence is a term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces ...

Left: King James I (c. 1605) after John de Critz; Right: The Authorized King James Bible (1611)                          In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude, the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social, political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to examine the causes that have produced such great results.                           The Authorized Version is not, of course, a purely seventeenth century work. Though the scholars who wrote and compiled it had before them all the previous vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they found them or devised new ones in accordance with the original, the basis is undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less, the quali...

Left:  John Donne  (17th-century copy of a 1616 original) after Isaac Oliver; Right:  Robert Browning  (1858) by Michele Gordigiani                           Very different from his [Ben Jonson's] direct and dignified manner is the closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining together.                           In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays,  obscurity arises not because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before...

                         Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the “University Wits” [1] who fused the academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of literature and leaning to mould it to finer issues, gave us Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here... Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. Historical relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of his time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power and life inspires all his pages.                       ...

Left:  Sir Philip Sidney  (18th century copy of a c. 1578 original) after Antonis Mor; Right: Henry Peacham's  The Compleat Gentleman  (Francis Constable, London, 1634)                          In the course of the history of English letters certain authors disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position: they are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There are not many of them and they could be easily numbered: Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably Tennyson. But the greatest of them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his symbolical relation to the time in which he lived was realized by his contemporaries, and it has been a commonplace of history and criticism ever since. Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at the age of tw...