The loss has been for the people.
The opposition between courtly taste and popular taste is hard to analyse,
but we have only to turn our eyes from England to Scotland, which lost its
royal court in 1603, in order to appreciate the reality of the
opposition. In Scotland the courtly poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries soon disappeared when James I exchanged Holyrood for Whitehall,
but popular poetry continued to live and grow. The folk-song gathered
power and sweetness all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
till it culminated at last in the lyric of Burns. Popular drama, never
firmly rooted in Scotland, was stamped out by the Reformation, but the
popular ballad outlived the mediaeval minstrel, was kept alive in the
homes of Lowland farmers and shepherds, and called into being the great
ballad revival of the nineteenth century.
It is idle to speculate what would have been the progress of poetry in
England if the Renaissance had not come and the Elizabethan courtier had
not enriched himself at the expense of the people. What we have to bear
in mind is that all through the centuries that followed the Renaissance
the working men and women of England looked almost in vain to their poets
for a faithful interpretation of their life and aims.
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