editor puts it) were Puritans, and all the others were members of the established church. The spirit of devotion which sought utterance in verse rose superior to the narrowness of mere dogma and the inspiration of poetry waited not alone on a favored sect. Indeed nothing could better prove the strong religious feeling which continued to animate the average Englishman of the seventeenth century than the great popularity of books like Quarles' and Herbert's among the communicants of the Church of England. The Non-Conformists had their imaginative literature too, and produced in this century a man who, if not a poet, is almost everything else that literature can demand. Pilgrim's Progress is not much later than the latest work of Vaughan and marks a long step forward when compared to the contorted and mystical allegory of Quarles. In devotional literature, as in secular, the coming age was the age of prose, and in this immortal work the change was already complete.

With the return of Charles and the exiles, the popularity of religious verse decreased, controversial prose coming more and more to take its place with devout readers. However some few lesser poets of conservative tastes, like John Norris of Bemerton, continued to cultivate "divine poetry " far into the last quarter of the century. Samson Agonistes and the great epics of Milton do not concern us directly here, although they are the loftiest poetical utterances which the English Muse has devoted to religion. It is well known that contemporary influences contributed little to them, and that they were written upon a long

formed determination, and come as the late and crowning glory of a rich poetical past. The poems of Milton have lost somewhat in our day of rational thinking; criticism shudders at a cosmogony in which Christian legend and pagan mythology are mingled in Titanic confusion. It is with Paradise Lost much as it is with the stately fugues of John Sebastian Bach, the father of modern music. We prefer something very different. Let us not offend such poetic and musical taste as may be left us by allusion to qualities which the vogue of the moment governs. But the undergrowth of the arts, with its weeds or brambles, has existed in every age to live its day and fade with the evanescent flowerings that wither as the seasons wane and change. It is the tall trees that last, renewed in fresh beauty age after age, and it is the larger arts that endure beyond the moment of their creation to give new joy and consolation to those who come to know them.

X

THE SUPERNATURAL IN OLD ENGLISH

Τ

DRAMA

HE ELIZABETHAN attitude towards the world that lies beyond, push forward the barriers of human knowledge as we may, was very different from our own. Before what Arthur Hugh Clough wittily called "the Supreme Bifurcation," the Elizabethan never paused in modern puzzled, agnostic doubt, but confidently chose his horn of the dilemma and cheerfully suffered his tossing or goring as the case might be. Astrologers, alchemists, and wisewomen flourished and grew rich on the ignorance and credulity of their dupes; tellers of fortunes, mixers of philters, finders of hidden treasure and lost articles by divination prospered alike. Many, like Owen Glendower, could "call spirits from the vasty deep," and "command the devil; " and few there were, like Hotspur, to question, “Will they come when you do call for them?" Nor were these superstitions confined to the ignorant and the vulgar. The Earl of Leicester consulted the celebrated astrologer Doctor Dee as to the auspicious day on which to hold the coronation of of Queen Elizabeth. Excellent Reginald Scot, although he humanely wrote a very long book to display

1

the shallowness of the evidence on which witches were convicted, did not venture to deny the existence of witchcraft; and even Bacon, who incredulously doubted the Copernican system of astronomy, shared with his royal master King James a belief in many of the popular superstitions of his day. In an environment such as this, the supernatural as a dramatic motive had a sanction and a potency well nigh inconceivable today.

2

The supernatural first entered English drama as an artistic motive with the advent of Faustus. "Of all that [Marlowe] hath written for the stage," wrote Edward Philips, "his Doctor Faustus hath made the greatest noise." And many editions and alterations for revival point to this as having been one of the most popular dramas of the day. As we have it The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is little more than a succession of scenes void of continuity or cohesion, except for the unity of the main figure and the unrelenting progress of the whole towards the overwhelming catastrophe. Moreover, this fragment is disfigured and disgraced by the interpolation of scenes of clownage and ribaldry which, in view of the strictures enunciated in the famous prologue of Tamburlaine as to such conceits as clownage keeps in pay," and the apology of the printer in the preface of that play, it is next to impossible to believe that Marlowe wrote. And yet, broken torso that it is, there is a grandeur

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1 The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584.

2 See Sylva Sylvarum, passim.

3 Theatrum Poetarum (1675), ed. 1800, 113.

beyond mere description in this conception of the lonely, grace-abandoned scholar, in whom the promptings of remorse alone betray the touch of human weakness, whose inordinate desire for power and knowledge, rather than mere gratification of appetite, have impelled to the signing of his terrible compact with the Evil One, and whose mortal agonies have in them a dignity which not even the mediaeval conception of hoofed and horned deviltry could destroy. Perilous is the practice of the art of comparison, and yet, when all has been said, there remains an impassioned reserve, a sense of mastery and a poignancy of feeling about this battered fragment of the old Elizabethan age that I find not in the grotesque Teutonic diablerie, the symbolical aesthetics, even in the consummate poetic art, wisdom, and philosophy of Goethe's Faust.

The story of Faustus, with its conjuring of demons, its infernal compact, the alternate promptings of the good and bad angel, and its appalling catastrophe, is a mediaeval story of black art. There seems little reason to doubt that the "white magic" of the English Friar Bacon was worked into his romantic drama, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, by Robert Greene in direct emulation of the foreign black magic of Marlowe's Faustus. The romantic part of Greene's engaging play tells of the love of Prince Edward for the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, a keeper's daughter, with the fair maid's anticipation of the rôle of Priscilla, in The Courtship of Miles Standish, in favor of her lover Lacey, Earl of Lincoln. But with this is united a tale of the magical doings of Friar Bacon - how he created