"The sixteenth century," he says, "is like a
den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking.
Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If
nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire
man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and
finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites,
without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether
in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he
will under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the Restoration." He has
entered like a young man into all the lusty experiences of life, every
allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty of things are strong with
him. He plunges into all sensations. "Such were the men of this time,
Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII himself, excessive and inconstant,
ready for devotion and for crime, violent in good and evil, heroic with
strange weaknesses, humble with sudden changes of mood, never vile with
premeditation like the roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on
principle like the Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like
children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once
true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of
bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take
in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality
of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept
all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass
quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen
alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers.
Pages:
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82