nd at the same time
entered into possession of immense spiritual treasures, which were as
novel as they were extensive. A New World promised adventures to the
adventurous, untold wealth to the enterprising. The Orient had become
newly known. The Old World of literature had been born anew. The Bible
spoke for the first time in a tongue understanded of the people. Man
faced his God and his fate without any intervention of Pope or priest.
Even the very earth beneath his feet began to move. Instead of a
universe with dimensions known and circumscribed with Dantesque
minuteness, the mystic glow of the unknown had settled down on the whole
face of Nature, who offered her secrets to the first comer. No wonder
the Elizabethans were filled with an exulting sense of man's
capabilities, when they had all these realms of thought and action
suddenly and at once thrown open before them. There is a confidence in
the future and all it had to bring which can never recur, for while man
may come into even greater treasures of wealth or thought than the
Elizabethans dreamed of, they can never be as new to us as they were to
them. The sublime confidence of Bacon in the future of science, of which
he knew so little, and that little wrongly, is thus eminently and
characteristically Elizabethan.[2]

[Footnote 1: It was suggested to me, if I remember right, by my
friend Mr. R. G. Moulton.]

[Footnote 2: There was something Elizabethan in the tone of men of
science in England during the "seventies," when Darwinism was to
solve all the problems. The Marlowe of the movement, the late
Professor Clifford, found no Shakespeare.]

The department of Elizabethan literature in which this exuberant energy
found its most characteristic expression was the Drama, and that for a
very simple though strange reason. To be truly great a literature must
be addressed to the nation as a whole. The subtle influence of audience
on author is shown equally though conversely in works written only for
sections of a nation. Now in the sixteenth century any literature that
should address the English nation as a whole--not necessarily all
Englishmen, but all classes of Englishmen--could not be in any literary
form intended to be merely read. For the majority of Englishmen could
not read. Hence they could only be approached by literature when read
or recited to them in church or theatre. The latter form was already
familiar to them in the Miracle Pl