The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was as we have seen not favourable to literature.  Puritanism drove itself like a wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it went.  Had there been no more in it than the moral earnestness and religiousness of Sidney and Spenser, Cavalier would not have differed from Roundhead, and there might have been no civil war; each party was endowed deeply with the religious sense and Charles I. was a sincerely pious man.  But while Spenser and Sidney held that life as a preparation for eternity must be ordered and strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is lived, Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a sterner and darker creed.  The doctrine of original sin, face to face with the fact that art, like other pleasures, was naturally and readily entered into and enjoyed, forced them to the plain conclusion that art was an evil thing.  As early as Shakespeare’s youth they had been strong enough to keep the theatres outside London walls; at the time of the Civil War they closed them altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a generation between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of the literary drama.  In the brief years of their ascendancy they produced no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied down to their negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his qualities, his love of music and his sensuousness for instance, he is antagonistic to the temper of his day.  With the Restoration their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to America.  It is noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there till two centuries after the time of its passage.  Hawthorne’s novels are the fruit—­the one ripe fruit in art—­of the Puritan imagination.

(2)

If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and takes stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize speedily that their work reached various stages of completeness.  They perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, blank verse; they perfected, though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet; they wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish short lyrics in which a simple and freer manner drawn from the classics took the place of the mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau.  And in the forms which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble work.  The splendour of The Fairy Queen is in separate passages; as a whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a great work.  The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of the long poem; the abstract idea of the “heroic” epic which was in all their minds had to wait for embodiment till Paradise Lost.  In a way their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too.  They used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built.