Plays and Puritans Part 3

Whatsoever were the faults of the Pilgrim Fathers (and they were many), silliness was certainly not among them. But such was the court fas.h.i.+on. Any insult, however shallow, ribald, and doggrel (and all these terms are just of the mock-Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher sings in 'The Ordinary,' just after an epithalamium so graceful and melodious, though a little warm in tone, as to be really out of place in such a fellow's mouth), pa.s.ses current against men who were abroad the founders of the United States, and the forefathers of the acutest and most enterprising nation on earth; and who at home proved themselves, by terrible fact, not only the physically stronger party, but the more cunning. But so it was fated to be. A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy court in blind security, till 'the breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall, which cometh suddenly in an instant.'

'But, after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, good or bad, all belonged to the Royalists.

All? There are those who think that, if mere concettism be a part of poetry, Quarles is as great a poet as Cowley or George Herbert, Vaughan or Withers. On this question, and on the real worth of the seventeenth century lyrists, a great deal has to be said hereafter.

Meanwhile, there are those, too, who believe John Bunyan, considered simply as an artist, to be the greatest dramatic author whom England has seen since Shakspeare; and there linger, too, in the libraries and the ears of men, words of one John Milton. He was no rigid hater of the beautiful, merely because it was heathen and Popish; no more, indeed, were many highly-educated and highly-born gentlemen of the Long Parliament: no more was Cromwell himself, whose delight was (if we may trust that double renegade Waller) to talk over with him the worthies of Rome and Greece, and who is said to have preserved for the nation Raphael's cartoons and Andrea Mantegna's triumph when Charles's pictures were sold. But Milton had steeped his whole soul in romance. He had felt the beauty and glory of the chivalrous Middle Age as deeply as Shakspeare himself: he had as much cla.s.sical lore as any Oxford pedant. He felt to his heart's core (for he sang of it, and had he not felt it he would only have written of it) the magnificence and worth of really high art, of the drama when it was worthy of man and of itself.

'Of gorgeous tragedy, Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line, Or the Tale of Troy divine, Or what, though rare, of later age, Enn.o.bled hath the buskin'd stage.'

No poet, perhaps, shows wider and truer sympathy with every form of the really beautiful in art, nature, and history: and yet he was a Puritan.

Yes, Milton was a Puritan; one who, instead of trusting himself and his hopes of the universe to second-hand hearsays, systems, and traditions, had looked G.o.d's Word and his own soul in the face, and determined to act on that which he had found. And therefore it is that to open his works at any stray page, after these effeminate Carolists, is like falling asleep in a stifling city drawing-room, amid Rococo French furniture, not without untidy traces of last night's ball, and awaking in an Alpine valley, amid the scent of sweet cyclamens and pine boughs, to the music of trickling rivulets and shouting hunters, beneath the dark cathedral aisles of mighty trees, and here and there, above them and beyond, the spotless peaks of everlasting snow; while far beneath your feet -

'The hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken, Stretched to the amplest reach of prospect, lies.'

Take any--the most hackneyed pa.s.sage of 'Comus,' the 'Allegro,' the 'Penseroso,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and see the freshness, the sweetness, the simplicity which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; take him even, as an experimentum crucis, when he trenches upon ground heathen and questionable, and tries the court poets at their own weapons -

'Or whether (as some sager sing), The frolic wind that breathes the spring, Zephyr, with Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying, There on beds of violets blue, And fresh-blown roses washed in dew--'

but why quote what all the world knows?--where shall we find such real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in anything written for five and twenty years before him? True, he was no great dramatist. He never tried to be one; but there was no one in his generation who could have written either 'Comus' or 'Samson Agonistes.' And if, as is commonly believed, and as his countenance seems to indicate, he was deficient in humour, so were his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Cartwright. Witty he could be, and bitter; but he did not live in a really humorous age: and if he has none of the rollicking fun of the foxhound puppy, at least he has none of the obscene gibber of the ape.

After all, the great fact stands, that the only lasting poet of that generation was a Puritan; one who, if he did not write dramas in sport, at least acted dramas in earnest. For drama means, etymologically, action and doing: and of the drama there are, and always will be, two kinds: one the representative, the other the actual; and for a world wherein there is no superabundance of good deeds, the latter will be always the better kind. It is good to represent heroical action in verse, and on the stage: it is good to 'purify,' as old Aristotle has it, 'the affections by pity and terror.' There is an ideal tragedy, and an ideal comedy also, which one can imagine as an integral part of the highest Christian civilisation. But when 'Christian' tragedy sinks below the standard of heathen Greek tragedy; when, instead of setting forth heroical deeds, it teaches the audience new possibilities of crime, and new excuses for those crimes; when, instead of purifying the affections by pity and terror, it confounds the moral sense by exciting pity and terror merely for the sake of excitement, careless whether they be well or ill directed: then it is of the devil, and the sooner it returns to its father the better for mankind. When, again, comedy, instead of stirring a divine scorn of baseness, or even a kindly and indulgent smile at the weaknesses and oddities of humanity, learns to make a mock of sin,--to find excuses for the popular frailties which it pretends to expose,--then it also is of the devil, and to the devil let it go; while honest and earnest men, who have no such exceeding love of 'Art' that they must needs have bad art rather than none at all, do the duty which lies nearest them amid clean whitewash and honest prose. The whole theory of 'Art, its dignity and vocation,' seems to us at times questionable, if coa.r.s.e facts are to be allowed to weigh (as we suppose they are) against delicate theories. If we are to judge by the example of Italy, the country which has been most of all devoted to the practice of 'Art,' then a nation is not necessarily free, strong, moral, or happy because it can 'represent' facts, or can understand how other people have represented them. We do not hesitate to go farther, and to say that the now past weakness of Germany was to be traced in a great degree to that pernicious habit of mind which made her educated men fancy it enough to represent n.o.ble thoughts and feelings, or to a.n.a.lyse the representations of them: while they did not bestir themselves, or dream that there was a moral need for bestirring themselves, toward putting these thoughts and feelings into practice. Goethe herein was indeed the type of a very large cla.s.s of Germans: G.o.d grant that no generation may ever see such a type common in England; and that our race, remembering ever that the golden age of the English drama was one of private immorality, public hypocrisy, ecclesiastical pedantry, and regal tyranny, and ended in the temporary downfall of Church and Crown, may be more ready to do fine things than to write fine books; and act in their lives, as those old Puritans did, a drama which their descendants may be glad to put on paper for them long after they are dead.

For surely these Puritans were dramatic enough, poetic enough, picturesque enough. We do not speak of such fanatics as Balfour of Burley, or any other extravagant person whom it may have suited Walter Scott to take as a typical personage. We speak of the average Puritan n.o.bleman, gentleman, merchant, or farmer; and hold him to have been a picturesque and poetical man,--a man of higher imagination and deeper feeling than the average of court poets; and a man of sound taste also. What is to be said for his opinions about the stage has been seen already: but it seems to have escaped most persons' notice, that either all England is grown very foolish, or the Puritan opinions on several matters have been justified by time.

On the matter of the stage, the world has certainly come over to their way of thinking. Few highly educated men now think it worth while to go to see any play, and that exactly for the same reasons as the Puritans put forward; and still fewer highly educated men think it worth while to write plays: finding that since the grosser excitements of the imagination have become forbidden themes, there is really very little to write about.

But in the matter of dress and of manners, the Puritan triumph has been complete. Even their worst enemies have come over to their side, and the 'whirligig of time has brought about its revenge.'

Most of their canons of taste have become those of all England. High Churchmen, who still call them Roundheads and Cropped-ears, go about rounder-headed and closer cropt than they ever went. They held it more rational to cut the hair to a comfortable length than to wear effeminate curls down the back. We cut ours much shorter than they ever did. They held (with the Spaniards, then the finest gentlemen in the world) that sad, i.e. dark colours, above all black, were the fittest for all stately and earnest gentlemen. We all, from the Tractarian to the Anythingarian, are exactly of the same opinion.

They held that lace, perfumes, and jewellery on a man were marks of unmanly foppishness and vanity. So hold the finest gentlemen in England now. They thought it equally absurd and sinful for a man to carry his income on his back, and bedizen himself out in reds, blues, and greens, ribbons, knots, slashes, and treble quadruple daedalian ruffs, built up on iron and timber, which have more arches in them for pride than London Bridge for use. We, if we met such a ruffed and ruffled worthy as used to swagger by dozens up and down Paul's Walk, not knowing how to get a dinner, much less to pay his tailor, should look on him as firstly a fool, and secondly a swindler: while if we met an old Puritan, we should consider him a man gracefully and picturesquely drest, but withal in the most perfect sobriety of good taste; and when we discovered (as we probably should), over and above, that the harlequin cavalier had a box of salve and a pair of dice in one pocket, a pack of cards and a few p.a.w.nbroker's duplicates in the other; that his thoughts were altogether of citizens' wives and their too easy virtue; and that he could not open his mouth without a dozen oaths: then we should consider the Puritan (even though he did quote Scripture somewhat through his nose) as the gentleman; and the courtier as a most offensive specimen of the 'sn.o.b triumphant,' glorying in his shame. The picture is not ours, nor even the Puritan's. It is Bishop Hall's, Bishop Earle's, it is Beaumont's, Fletcher's, Jonson's, Shakspeare's,--the picture which every dramatist, as well as satirist, has drawn of the 'gallant' of the seventeenth century. No one can read those writers honestly without seeing that the Puritan, and not the Cavalier conception of what a British gentleman should be, is the one accepted by the whole nation at this day.

In applying the same canon to the dress of women they were wrong. As in other matters, they had hold of one pole of a double truth, and erred in applying it exclusively to all cases. But there are two things to be said for them; first, that the dress of that day was palpably an incentive to the profligacy of that day, and therefore had to be protested against; while in these more moral times ornaments and fas.h.i.+ons may be harmlessly used which then could not be used without harm. Next, it is undeniable that sober dressing is more and more becoming the fas.h.i.+on among well-bred women; and that among them, too, the Puritan canons are gaining ground.

We have just said that the Puritans held too exclusively to one pole of a double truth. They did so, no doubt, in their hatred of the drama. Their belief that human relations were, if not exactly sinful, at least altogether carnal and unspiritual, prevented their conceiving the possibility of any truly Christian drama; and led them at times into strange and sad errors, like that New England ukase of Cotton Mather's, who is said to have punished the woman who should kiss her infant on the Sabbath day. Yet their extravagances on this point were but the honest revulsion from other extravagances on the opposite side. If the undistinguis.h.i.+ng and immoral Autotheism of the playwrights, and the luxury and heathendom of the higher cla.s.ses, first in Italy and then in England, were the natural revolt of the human mind against the Manichaeism of monkery: then the severity and exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality; a protest for man's G.o.d-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer animalism. While Italian prelates have found an apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English playwrights in Mr. Gifford, the old Puritans, who felt and a.s.serted, however extravagantly, that there was an eternal law which was above all Borgias and Machiavels, Stuarts and Fletchers, have surely a right to a fair trial. If they went too far in their contempt for humanity, certainly no one interfered to set them right. The Anglicans of that time, who held intrinsically the same anthropologic notions, and yet wanted the courage and sincerity to carry them out as honestly, neither could nor would throw any light upon the controversy; and the only cla.s.s who sided with the poor playwrights in a.s.serting that there were more things in man, and more excuses for man, than were dreamt of in Prynne's philosophy, were the Jesuit Casuists, who, by a fatal perverseness, used all their little knowledge of human nature to the same undesirable purpose as the playwrights; namely, to prove how it was possible to commit every conceivable sinful action without sinning. No wonder that in an age in which courtiers and theatre- haunters were turning Romanists by the dozen, and the priest-ridden queen was the chief patroness of the theatre, the Puritans should have cla.s.sed players and Jesuits in the same category, and deduced the parentage of both alike from the father of lies.

But as for these Puritans having been merely the sour, narrow, inhuman persons they are vulgarly supposed to have been, credat Judaeus. There were sour and narrow men among them; so there were in the opposite party. No Puritan could have had less poetry in him, less taste, less feeling, than Laud himself. But is there no poetry save words? No drama save that which is presented on the stage? Is this glorious earth, and the souls of living men, mere prose, as long as 'carent vate sacro,' who will, forsooth, do them the honour to make poetry out of a little of them (and of how little!) by translating them into words, which he himself, just in proportion as he is a good poet, will confess to be clumsy, tawdry, ineffectual?

Was there no poetry in these Puritans because they wrote no poetry?

We do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and the charge; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet home-drama, love-poetry of the heart and the hearth, and the beauties of everyday human life.

Take the most commonplace of them: was Zeal-for-Truth Th.o.r.esby, of Th.o.r.esby Rise in Deeping Fen, because his father had thought fit to give him an ugly and silly name, the less of a n.o.ble lad? Did his name prevent his being six feet high? Were his shoulders the less broad for it, his cheeks the less ruddy for it? He wore his flaxen hair of the same length that every one now wears theirs, instead of letting it hang half-way to his waist in essenced curls; but was he therefore the less of a true Viking's son, bold-hearted as his sea- roving ancestors who won the Danelagh by Canute's side, and settled there on Th.o.r.esby Rise, to grow wheat and breed horses, generation succeeding generation, in the old moated grange? He carried a Bible in his jack-boot: but did that prevent him, as Oliver rode past him with an approving smile on Naseby field, thinking himself a very handsome fellow, with his moustache and imperial, and bright red coat, and cuira.s.s well polished, in spite of many a dint, as he sate his father's great black horse as gracefully and firmly as any long- locked and essenced cavalier in front of him? Or did it prevent him thinking, too, for a moment, with a throb of the heart, that sweet Cousin Patience far away at home, could she but see him, might have the same opinion of him as he had of himself? Was he the worse for the thought? He was certainly not the worse for checking it the next instant, with manly shame for letting such 'carnal vanities' rise in his heart while he was 'doing the Lord's work' in the teeth of death and h.e.l.l: but was there no poetry in him then? No poetry in him, five minutes later, as the long rapier swung round his head, redder and redder at every sweep? We are befooled by names. Call him Crusader instead of Roundhead, and he seems at once (granting him only sincerity, which he had, and that of a right awful kind) as complete a knight-errant as ever watched and prayed, ere putting on his spurs, in fantastic Gothic chapel, beneath 'storied windows richly dight.' Was there no poetry in him, either, half an hour afterwards, as he lay bleeding across the corpse of the gallant horse, waiting for his turn with the surgeon, and fumbled for the Bible in his boot, and tried to hum a psalm, and thought of Cousin Patience, and his father, and his mother, and how they would hear, at least, that he had played the man in Israel that day, and resisted unto blood, striving against sin and the Man of Sin?

And was there no poetry in him, too, as he came wearied along Th.o.r.esby d.y.k.e, in the quiet autumn eve, home to the house of his forefathers, and saw afar off the knot of tall poplars rising over the broad misty flat, and the one great abele tossing its sheets of silver in the dying gusts; and knew that they stood before his father's door? Who can tell all the pretty child-memories which flitted across his brain at that sight, and made him forget that he was a wounded cripple? There is the d.y.k.e where he and his brothers snared the great pike which stole the ducklings--how many years ago?- -while pretty little Patience stood by trembling, and shrieked at each snap of the brute's wide jaws; and there, down that long dark lode, ruffling with crimson in the sunset breeze, he and his brothers skated home in triumph with Patience when his uncle died. What a day that was! when, in the clear bright winter noon, they laid the gate upon the ice, and tied the beef-bones under the four corners, and packed little Patience on it. How pretty she looked, though her eyes were red with weeping, as she peeped out from among the heap of blankets and horse--hides; and how merrily their long fen-runners whistled along the ice-lane, between the high banks of sighing reed, as they towed home their new treasure in triumph, at a pace like the race-horse's, to the dear old home among the poplar-trees. And now he was going home to meet her, after a mighty victory, a deliverance from heaven, second only in his eyes to that Red Sea one. Was there no poetry in his heart at that thought? Did not the glowing sunset, and the reed-beds which it transfigured before him into sheets of golden flame, seem tokens that the glory of G.o.d was going before him in his path? Did not the sweet clamour of the wild-fowl, gathering for one rich paean ere they sank into rest, seem to him as G.o.d's bells chiming him home in triumph, with peels sweeter and bolder than those of Lincoln or Peterborough steeple-house? Did not the very lapwing, as she tumbled, softly wailing, before him, as she did years ago, seem to welcome the wanderer home in the name of heaven?

Fair Patience, too, though she was a Puritan; yet did not her cheek flush, her eye grow dim, like any other girl's, as she saw far off the red coat, like a sliding spark of fire, coming slowly along the strait fen-bank, and fled upstairs into her chamber to pray, half that it might be, half that it might not be he? Was there no happy storm of human tears and human laughter when he entered the courtyard gate? Did not the old dog lick his Puritan hand as lovingly as if it had been a Cavalier's? Did not lads and la.s.ses run out shouting?

Did not the old yeoman father hug him, weep over him, hold him at arm's length, and hug him again, as heartily as any other John Bull, even though the next moment he called all to kneel down and thank Him who had sent his boy home again, after bestowing on him the grace to bind kings in chains and n.o.bles with links of iron, and contend to death for the faith delivered to the saints? And did not Zeal-for- Truth look about as wistfully for Patience as any other man would have done, longing to see her, yet not daring even to ask for her?

And when she came down at last, was she the less lovely in his eyes because she came, not flaunting with bare bosom, in tawdry finery and paint, but shrouded close in coif and pinner, hiding from all the world beauty which was there still, but was meant for one alone, and that only if G.o.d willed, in G.o.d's good time? And was there no faltering of their voices, no light in their eyes, no trembling pressure of their hands, which said more, and was more, ay, and more beautiful in the sight of Him who made them, than all Herrick's Dianemes, Waller's Saccharissas, flames, darts, posies, love-knots, anagrams, and the rest of the insincere cant of the court? What if Zeal-for-Truth had never strung two rhymes together in his life? Did not his heart go for inspiration to a loftier Helicon when it whispered to itself, 'My love, my dove, my undefiled, is but one,'

than if he had filled pages with sonnets about Venuses and Cupids, lovesick shepherds and cruel nymphs?

And was there no poetry, true idyllic poetry, as of Longfellow's 'Evangeline' itself in that trip round the old farm next morning; when Zeal-for-Truth, after looking over every heifer, and peeping into every sty, would needs canter down by his father's side to the horse-fen, with his arm in a sling; while the partridges whirred up before them, and the lurchers flashed like gray snakes after the hare, and the colts came whinnying round, with staring eyes and streaming manes; and the two chatted on in the same sober businesslike English tone, alternately of 'The Lord's great dealings'

by General Cromwell, the pride of all honest fen-men, and the price of troop-horses at the next Horncastle fair?

Poetry in those old Puritans? Why not? They were men of like pa.s.sions with ourselves. They loved, they married, they brought up children; they feared, they sinned, they sorrowed, they fought--they conquered. There was poetry enough in them, be sure, though they acted it like men, instead of singing it like birds.

Footnotes:

{1} The North British Review, No. XLIX.--1. 'Works of Beaumont and Fletcher.' London, 1679.--2. 'Works of Ben Jonson.' London, 1692-- 3. 'Ma.s.singer's Plays.' Edited by William Gifford, Esq. London, 1813.--4. 'Works of John Webster.' Edited, etc., by Rev. Alexander Dyce. Pickering, London, 1830. 5. 'Works of James s.h.i.+rley.' Edited by Rev. A. Dyce. Murray, 1833.--6. 'Works of T. Middleton.' Edited by the Rev. A. Dyce. Lumley, 1840.--7. 'Comedies,' etc. By Mr.

William Cartwright. London, 1651.--8. 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.' By Charles Lamb. Longmans and Co., 1808--9.

'Histriomastix.' By W. Prynne, Utter-Barrister of Lincoln's Inn.

London, 1633.--10. 'Northbrooke's Treatise against Plays,' etc.

(Shakspeare Soc.), 1843.--11. 'The Works of Bishop Hall.' Oxford, 1839.--12. 'Marston's Satires.' London, 1600. 13. 'Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Profaneness, etc., of the English Stage.' London, 1730.--14. 'Langbaine's English Dramatists.' Oxford, 1691.--15.

'Companion to the Playhouse.' London, 1764.--16. 'Riccoboni's Account of the Theatres in Europe. 1741.

{2} 'The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres.' Penned by a Play-poet.

{3} This was written sixteen years ago. We have become since then more amenable to the influences of French civilisation.

{4} What canon of cleanliness, now lost, did Cartwright possess, which enabled him to p.r.o.nounce Fletcher, or indeed himself, purer than Shakspeare, and his times 'nicer' than those of James? To our generation, less experienced in the quant.i.tative a.n.a.lysis of moral dirt, they will appear all equally foul.

{5} C. Lamb, 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' p. 229. From which specimens, be it remembered, he has had to expunge not only all the comic scenes, but generally the greater part of the plot itself, to make the book at all tolerable.