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A new era had opened.
It was the day of small things.
Yet it would be wrong to regard the new movement as merely negative.
Had that been all, it would be impossible to account for the passionate
enthusiasm it aroused in those who came beneath its spell; an enthusiasm
which lived long after the movement itself was spent, and which--except
in so far as it led to absurd comparisons with the Elizabethans--was
abundantly justified by the genius of Butler and Dryden, of Congreve
and Swift and Pope. Negative, on one side, the ideal of Restoration
and Augustan poetry undoubtedly was. It was a reaction against the
"unchartered freedom", the real or fancied extravagances, of the
Elizabethan poets. But, on the higher side, it was no less positive,
though doubtless far less noble, than the ideal it displaced.
The great writers of the eighty years following the Restoration were
consumed by a passion for observation--observation of the men and
things that lay immediately around them. They may have seen but little;
but what they did see, they grasped with surprising force and clearness.


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