having "Calais" written on her heart, when the last relic of the
mediaeval conquests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic
half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often
pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old
enemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation Cromwell
exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye
on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the
Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have had
it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary
nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the most
tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the
coincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name
of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish
prince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had
done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was
more cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached to
the new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage
for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured which
was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman,
standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt
falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.
Wooden _cliches_ about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious
days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the
crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in some
imperial fashion, now first realized that she was great. It would be far
truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great
poet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only as
small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled
until the eighteenth century; and even when it came it was far less
vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was not
Imperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginning
of her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find
heroic--the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was
to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers--a
victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was
Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable
since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It
was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only
when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, as
undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciate
the height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We can
only grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of
the Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The
Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate--logically, it is hard to see
what else he could say, having declared her mother's marriage invalid;
but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering England
from the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers who
had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in the
South simply as pirates, and technically the description was true; only
technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judged
with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp the contrast in an
imperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain for its
centre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with a
navy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed
island with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgment; sailors or
pirates struck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon,
fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of
grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island,
and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness and
abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched a nerve that has
never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopeless
hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope.
The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small
thing which escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there is truly
a sense in which we may never be so small or so great again.
For the splendour of the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as a
sunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it as the end of
the Renascence or the end of the old mediaeval civilization, no candid
critic can deny that its chief glories ended with it. Let the reader
ask himself what strikes him specially in the Elizabethan magnificence,
and he will generally find it is something of which there were at least
traces in mediaeval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. The
Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies--its tempestuous
torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to say
that the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for the
comedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both
foreign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being
humorous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be noted that the
givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearian love-stories
nearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friars
or fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, often
embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the Virgin
Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarse
and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics might
indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin
Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a false
one. But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited,
contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular Virgin Queen,
the tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole procession of virgin
queens. And it is certain that the mediaevals would have understood much
better than the moderns the martyrdom of _Measure for Measure_. And as
with the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mystical
monarchy glorified in _Richard II._ was soon to be dethroned much more
ruinously than in _Richard II._ The same Puritans who tore off the
pasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the real
crowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to be
forbidden, and all monarchy to be called mummery.
Shakespeare died upon St. George's Day, and much of what St. George had
meant died with him. I do not mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or
of England died; that remained and even rose steadily, to be the noblest
pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had been
involved in that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart had
dedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The conception
of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very unique and
as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism.
The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy times
seven in the patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very
idea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimate
rivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The Guild of the
Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of St.
Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the streets; but
they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fighting
each other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle on
St. George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriously
believe that St. George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St.
Denis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many modern
people would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what most
modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious
schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more inhuman division
appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints who
were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods who
were themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named after
St. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the
new England; soon it was to mean something almost cosmically
conflicting, as if they were named after Baal or Thor. These are indeed
mere symbols; but the process of which they are symbols was very
practical and must be seriously followed. There entered with the
religious wars the idea which modern science applies to racial wars; the
idea of _natural_ wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from the
nature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism first
fell across our path, and far away in distance and darkness something
moved that men had almost forgotten.
Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as loose
and drifting as a sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian wars.
Most of it was now formally Christian, but barely civilized; a faint awe
of the culture of the south and west lay on its wild forces like a light
frost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep; but it had begun
to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with all
his violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in his
sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs,
but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian
scheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild
doctrines in the old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclic
war of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the Holy
Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old
religion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. The
continental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and more
complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They were
complicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in the
full modern sense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; a
purpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to give
diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad, simply because it
preserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation of
Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a Calvinistic
and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant, defending its
own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall be
right if we see the first throes of the modern international problems in
what is called the Thirty Years' War; whether we call it the revolt of
half-heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the
coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north.
Sweden took a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the help
of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere
exhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complex
strategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces
besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to the
north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of
money-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly
selfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend
their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They were
well paid for it by step after step of promotion; but at this time their
principality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg. Their own name was
Hohenzollern.
XIII
THE AGE OF THE PURITANS
We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most
exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such
as "snark" or "boojum" were systematically substituted for the names of
the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king
was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering
the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of
a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the
snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern
attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distaste
for theology in this generation--or rather in the last generation. Thus
the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for
what they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose it
on others; sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise it
themselves; but in no case can justice be done to what was finest in
their characters, as well as first in their thoughts, if we never by
any chance ask what "it" was that they wanted to impose or to practise.
Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the
Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the
Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with
indifference or more often detested with frenzy--such as religious
liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even
undervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did care
about--such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they
would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly
burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing
in which they were interested at all.
We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in England
were simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, and that is the only
truth to be told about the matter. But it was far otherwise with the
individuals a generation or two after, to whom the wreck of the Armada
was already a legend of national deliverance from Popery, as miraculous
and almost as remote as the deliverances of which they read so
realistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The august
accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well
with their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may
have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the
English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was
easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier
hold upon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized state may
fall from being a Christian nation to being a Chosen People. But even if
their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous to
the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last the
Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked superiority
over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first but
one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church and
were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely the
creatures of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconscious
creatures of it. They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, but
a great number were of the middle classes, though almost wholly the
middle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, which
was still by far the largest part of the population, they were simply
derided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that, while they
led the nation in many of its higher departments, they could produce
nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly called
folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts,
rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find no
great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.
All these things, however, are simply things that other people might
have noticed about them; they are not the most important things, and
certainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the
movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the first being
the moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, and
the second the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with the
first, especially as it was this which determined all that external
social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest
Puritan, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage,
possessed himself of a first principle which is one of the three or four
alternative first principles which are possible to the mind of man. It
was the principle that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the
mind of God. It may shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle;
but it really applies, and he really applied it, to many things besides
the sacraments of the Church. It equally applies, and he equally applied
it, to art, to letters, to the love of locality, to music, and even to
good manners. The phrase about no priest coming between a man and his
Creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophic
doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or
story-teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the
tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of
genius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion;
denounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his own admirers to read
his own admirable novels. Now, the English Puritans were not only
Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness
of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an
English thing. But this was the driving power and the direction; and the
doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectual truth was the
only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the next
step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the
truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct
as well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God
which meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and
milder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say that
nothing a man did could help him except his confession of Christ; with
Calvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could not
help him, since Omnipotence must have disposed of all his destiny
beforehand; that men must be created to be lost and saved. In the purer
types of whom I speak this logic was white-hot, and we must read the
formula into all their parliamentary and legal formulae. When we read,
"The Puritan party demanded reforms in the church," we must understand,
"The Puritan party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men are
created to be lost and saved." When we read, "The Army selected persons
for their godliness," we must understand, "The Army selected those
persons who seemed most convinced that men are created to be lost and
saved." It should be added that this terrible trend was not confined
even to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed
it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be a
permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the
immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or
non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured
Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton,
without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, "How
splendid! How glorious!... and oh what an escape!"
The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was
in a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason,
turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yet
it was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be a
small republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. In
relation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but an
aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the
elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and
alone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we
have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican
virtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above
all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues--publicity. One of
the Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all the
unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: "This thing was
not done in a corner." But their most drastic idealism did nothing to
recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came
into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people.
They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which the
Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they may
have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never
to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular.
England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when
she was a republic.
The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history,
arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance,
between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism
which affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashion
of Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made that
creed and perhaps that cultured world possible--the aristocratic revolt
under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and a
son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really from
hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is at
once the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal
passion that passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion that
remained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland;
and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at
Worcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist
matter in both countries--a mere brigandage of barons; and even John
Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely
anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that of
Cardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did become
popular in the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our
own land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixed
with Parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England Parliamentary
oligarchy was the main thing, and was mixed with Puritanism. When the
storm began to rise against Charles I., after the more or less
transitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the
instances commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic
religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny
Geddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English
legend is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raised a county
against the King. The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed,
almost wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies the merchants.
They were squires who may well have regarded themselves as the real and
natural leaders of the English; but they were leaders who allowed no
mutiny among their followers. There was certainly no Village Hampden in
Hampden Village.