This time it was completely wakened, and arose and
slept no more. And one of the great and fruitful things achieved by
English poetry in this its final awakening was to give to the world the
new, the modern, perhaps the definitive, the final ideal of love.
England drank a deep draught--how deep we see from Sidney's and
Spenser's sonnets--of Petrarch; and in this pleasant dilution, tasted
and felt the burning essence of the "Vita Nuova;" for though Dante
remained as the poet, the poet of heaven and hell, this happy
half-and-half Petrarch had for full two centuries completely driven into
oblivion the young Dante who had loved Beatrice. For England, for this
magnificent and marvellous outburst of all the manifold poetic energy
stored up and quintupled during that long period of inertness, there
could however be no foreign imported ideal of love; there was no
possibility of a new series of spectral Lauras, shadows projected by a
shadow. Already, long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by
the side of the merely mediaeval love types--of brutish lust and doglike
devotion--of the Wife of Bath and of Griseldis, had rough-sketched a
kind of modern love, the love which is to become that of Romeo and
Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite. Among the poetic material
which existed in England at the close of the sixteenth century was the
old, long-neglected, domestic love, quiet, undemonstrative, essentially
unsinging, of the early Northern (as indeed also of the Greek and
Hindoo) epics; a domestic love which, in a social condition more closely
resembling our own than any other, even than that of the Italian
democracies, which had preceded it; among a people who permitted a woman
to choose her own husband, and forbade a man wooing another man's wife,
had already, in ballads and folk poetry, begun a faint-twitter of song.
To this love of the man and the woman who hope to marry, strong and
tender, but still (as Coleridge remarked of several of the lesser
Elizabethan playwrights) most outspokenly carnal, was united by the pure
spirit of Spenser, by the unerring genius of Shakespeare, that vivifying
drop of burning, spiritual love taken from out of the "Vita Nuova,"
which had floated, like some sovereign essential oil, on the top of
Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world possesses a new kind of
love: the love of Romeo, of Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of
Juliet; the love of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, o