The name is absent

Poetry and Democracy         47

democracy rested on insecure foundations. Like so many
bright things, it came quickly to confusion, leaving behind
it only a memory and an ideal to inspire all future ages.
Many centuries had to elapse before the ideal of a civilised
democracy was again raised as a standard before mankind
by the founders of the American Republic.

The crimes and follies of the Middle Ages, it has been
well said, were those of a complex bureaucracy in a half-
civilised state. It is towards the end of the Middle Ages
that we find the beginnings of national self-consciousness,
and, with it, of democratic poetry, embodying patterns of
national life. Nor was this all. As the inchoate or em-
bryonic democracy began to be conscious of itself, it began
also to be conscious of art, even when that art was the art
produced among and for a limited class. As it began to be
civilised, it began to have sympathy with the products of
civilisation, and to take, if not yet to assert, some share in
them. The ideal world of romance and chivalry opened out
before it as something in which it could find patterns of life
for itself. A common and universal religion, which in
theory at least recognised no distinction between classes,
between riches and poverty, between prince and people,
gave a wide popular basis to all the arts which were em-
ployed in its service. Education began to leaven the com-
munity. Poetry sought and found a wider audience. Shake-
speare produced his plays not for a literary class nor for a
court circle, but for the populace of London who flocked to
see and hear them. His own sympathies with the people
have been doubted or denied; he seems, in the mouths of his
characters, to speak of them with something like contempt.
But he gave them a national drama. Even the epic, that
stately form of poetry which has thriven in the courts of
princes and deals with the high actions and passions of the

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