In our greatest literary
epoch, that of the Elizabethan age,[154] English society at large was
accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them, to a
degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique
greatness in English literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
They were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation;
they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas,--the ideas of
the Renascence and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great
English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose
intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of
Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred
years. _He enlargeth a nation_, says Job, _and straiteneth it again._
[155]
In the literary movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century the
signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by
two members of the aristocratic class, Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies
are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but their individual
members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man of
genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the
aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from
freely developing it.
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