Enthusiasm burned
fierce and clear, displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton,
in the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle,
steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant
curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the impossible;
wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they could not carry,
as when Fletcher in _The Purple Island_ designed to allegorize all that
the physiology of his day knew of the human body, or Donne sought to
convey abstruse scientific fact in a lyric. It gave men a passion for
pure learning, set Jonson to turn himself from a bricklayer into the
best equipped scholar of his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among
English records and gathering for the first time materials of scientific
value for English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once
full of learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal
in its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a
school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency,
pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning which
was the fruit of its own excess.
The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was as we
have seen not favourable to literature.
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