The Netherlands became the battlefield of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in even a stricter sense than France. Here the antagonistic principles were plainly posed in the course o struggle against foreign despotism. The conflict ended in the assertion of political independence as opposed to absolute dominion. Europe in large measure Dutch wars of independence. owes the modern ideal of political liberty to that spirit of stubborn resistance which broke the power of Spain. Recent history, and in particular the history of democracy, claims for its province the several stages whereby this principle was developed in England and America, and its outburst in the frenzy of the French Revolution. It is enough here to have alluded to the part played by the Low Countries in the genesis of a motive force which may be described as the last manifestation of the Renaissance striving after self-emancipation.
The insular position of England, combined with the nature of the English people, has allowed us to feel the vibration of European movements later and with less of shock than any of the continental nations. Before a wave of progress has reached our shores we have had the opportunity of watching it as spectators, and of considering England in the Renaissance period. how we shall, receive it. Revolutions have passed from the tumultuous stages of their origin into some settled and recognizable state before we have been called upon to cope with them. It was thus that England took the influences of the Renaissance and Reformation simultaneously, and almost at the same time found herself engaged in that struggle with the Counter-Reformation which, crowned by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, stimulated the sense of nationality and developed the naval forces of the race. Both Renaissance and Reformation had been anticipated by at least a century in England. Chaucer’s poetry, which owed so much to Italian examples, gave an early foretaste of the former. Wickiiffe’s teaching was a vital moment in the latter. But the French wars, the Wars of the Roses and the persecution of the Lollards deferred the coming of the new age; and the year 1536, when Henry VIII. passed the Act of Supremacy through parliament, may be fixed as the date when England entered definitively upon a career of intellectual development abreast with the foremost nations of the continent. The circumstances just now insisted on explain the specific character of the English Renaissance. The Reformation had been adopted by consent of the king, lords and commons; and this change in the state religion, though it was not confirmed without reaction, agitation and bloodshed, cost the nation comparatively little disturbance. Humanism, before it affected the bulk of the English people, had already permeated Italian and French literature. Classical erudition had been adapted to the needs of modern thought. The hard work of collecting, printing, annotating Combined Influences of Renaissance and Reformation. and translating Greek and Latin authors had been accomplished. The masterpieces of antiquity had been interpreted and made intelligible. Much of the learning popularized by our poets and dramatists was derived at second hand from modern literature. This does not mean that England was deficient in ripe and sound scholars. More, Colet, Ascharn, Cheke, Camden were men whose familiarity with the classics was both intimate and easy. Public schools and universities conformed to the modern methods of study; nor were there wanting opportunities for youths of humble origin to obtain an education which placed them on a level with Italian scholars. The single case of Ben Jonson sufficiently proves this. Yet learning did not at this epoch become a marked speciality in England. There was no class corresponding to the humanists. It should also be remembered that the best works of Italian literature were introduced into Great Britain together with the classics. Phaer’s Virgil, Chapman’s Homer, Harrington’s Orlando, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Fairfax’s Jerusalem Delivered, North’s Plutarch, Hoby’s Courtier—to mention only a few examples–placed English readers simultaneously in possession of the most eminent and representative works of Greece, Rome and Italy. At the same time Spanish influences reached them through the imitators of Guevara and the dramatists; French influences in the versions of romances; German influences in popular translations of the Faust legend, Eulenspiegel and similar productions. The authorized version of the Bible had also been recently given to the people-so that almost at the same period of time England obtained in the vernacular an extensive library of ancient and modern authors. This was a privilege enjoyed in like measure by no other nation. It sufficiently accounts for the richness and variety of Elizabethan literature, and for the enthusiasm with, which the English language was cultivated.
Speaking strictly, England borrowed little in the region of the arts from other nations, and developed still less that was original. What is called Jacobean architecture marks indeed an interesting stage in the transition from the Gothic style. But, compared with Italian, French, Spanish, German and Flemish work of a like period, it is both timid and dry. Arts, letters and the drama. Sculpture was represented in London for a brief space by Torrigiani; painting by Holbein and Antonio More; music by Italians and Frenchmen of the Chapel Royal. But no Englishmen rose to European eminence in these departments. With literature the case was very different. Wyat and Surrey began by engrafting the forms and graces of Italian poetry upon the native stock. They introduced the sonnet and blank verse. Sidney followed with the sestine and terza rima and with Various experiments in classic metres, none of which took root on English soil. The translators handled the octave stanza, Marlowe gave new vigour to the couplet. The first period of the English Renaissance was one of imitation and assimilation. Academies after the Italian type were founded. Tragedies in the style of Seneca, rivalling Italian and French dramas of the epoch, were produced. Attempts to Latinize ancestral rhythms, similar to those which had failed in Italy and France, were made. Tentative essays in criticism and dissertations on the art of poetry abounded. It seemed as though. the Renaissance ran a risk of being throttled in its cradle by superfluity of foreign and pedantic nutriment. But the natural vigour of the English genius resisted influences alien to itself, and showed a robust capacity for digesting the varied diet offered to it. As there was nothing despotic in the temper of the ruling classes, nothing oppressive in English culture, the literature of that age evolved itself freely from the people. It was under these conditions that Spenser gave his romantic epic to the world, a poem which derived its allegory from the middle ages, its decorative richness from the Italian Renaissance, its sweetness, purity, harmony and imaginative splendour from the most poetic nation of the modern world. Under the same conditions the Elizabethan drama, which in its totality is the real exponent of the English Renaissance, came into existence. This drama very early freed itself from the pseudo-classic mannerism which imposed on taste in Italy and France. Depicting feudalism in the vivid colours of an age at war with feudal institutions, breathing into antique histories the breath of actual life, embracing the romance of Italy and Spain, the mysteries-of German legend, the hctions of poetit fancy and the facts of daily life, humours of the moment and abstractions of philosophical speculation, in one homogeneous amalgam instinct with intense vitality, this extraordinary birth of time, with Shakespeare for the master of all ages, left a monument of the Renaissance unrivalled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch. To complete the sketch, we must set Bacon, the expositor of modern scientific method, beside Spenser and Shakespeare, as the third representative of the Renaissance in England. Nor should Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins. the semi-buccaneer explorers of the ocean, be omitted. They, following the lead ofEnglish reaction against Catholicism, monarchical absolutism, and Renaissance culture. Portuguese and Spaniards, combating the Counter-Reformation on the seas, opened for England her career of colonization and plantation. All this while the political policy of Tudors and Stewarts tended towards monarchical absolutism, while the Reformation in England, modified by Contact with the Low Countries during their struggles, was narrowing into strict reactionary intolerance. Puritanism indicated a revolt of the religious conscience of the nation against the arts and manners of the Renaissance, against the encroachments of belligerent Catholicism, against the corrupt and Italianated court of James I., against the absolutist pretensions of his son Charles. In its final manifestation during the Commonwealth, Puritanism won a transient victory over the mundane forces of both Reformation and Renaissance, as these had taken shape in England. It also secured the eventual triumph of constitutional independence. Milton, the greatest humanistic poet of the English race, lent his pen and moral energies during the best years of his life to securing that principle on which modern political systems at present rest. Thus the geographical isolation of England, and the comparatively late adoption by the English of matured Italian and German influences, give peculiar complexity to the phenomena of Reformation and Renaissance simultaneously developed on our island. The period of our history between 1536 and 1642 shows how difficult it is to separate these two factors in the re-birth of Europe, both of which contributed so powerfully to the formation of modern English nationality.
