Whose being is all beings to invade,
To have no ending though it did begin;
And so of past, things present and to come,
To give depriving, not tormenting doom.
But horror in the understanding mixed....
Like most of his contemporaries in those happy days before the notion of progress had been invented, Lord Brooke was what Peacock would have called a “Pejorationist.” His political views (and they were also Sidney’s) are reflected in his Life of Sir Philip Sidney. The best that a statesman can do, according to these Elizabethan pessimists, is to patch and prop the decaying fabric of society in the hope of staving off for a little longer the final inevitable crash. It seems curious to us, who have learnt to look at the Elizabethan age as the most splendid in English history, that the men who were the witnesses of these splendours should have regarded their time as an age of decadence.
The notion of the Fall was fruitful in despairing poetry. One of the most remarkable products of this doctrine is a certain “Sonnet Chrétien” by the seventeenth-century writer, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, surnamed “le Beau Ténébreux.”
Cette source de mort, cette homicide peste,
Ce péché dont l’enfer a le monde infecté,
M’a laissé pour tout être un bruit d’avoir été,