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 classical 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,
Ennobled 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 God’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 passage 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 coarse 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 noble thoughts and feelings, or to analyse 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 class of Germans: God 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
nobleman, 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 dædalian 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 pawnbroker’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 ‘snob 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 fashions
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
fashion 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
undistinguishing and immoral Autotheism of the playwrights, and the
luxury and heathendom of the higher classes, first in Italy and then in
England, were the natural revolt of the human mind against the Manichæism
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 God-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 asserted, 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 class who sided with
the poor playwrights in asserting 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 classed 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 Judæus_. 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 Thoresby, of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen, because his
father had thought fit to give him an ugly and silly name, the less of a
noble 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 Thoresby 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 cuirass 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 hell: 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 Thoresby
dyke, 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 dyke 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 God was going before him in his path? Did not the sweet clamour
of the wild-fowl, gathering for one rich pæan ere they sank into rest,
seem to him as God’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 lasses 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 nobles 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 God willed, in God’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 passions
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
{3} _The North British Review_, No. XLIX.—1. ‘Works of Beaumont and
Fletcher.’ London, 1679.—2. ‘Works of Ben Jonson.’ London, 1692—3.
‘Massinger’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 Shirley.’ 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.
{27a} ‘The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres.’ Penned by a
Play-poet.
{27b} This was written sixteen years ago. We have become since then
more amenable to the influences of French civilisation.
{46} What canon of cleanliness, now lost, did Cartwright possess, which
enabled him to pronounce Fletcher, or indeed himself, purer than
Shakspeare, and his times ‘nicer’ than those of James? To our
generation, less experienced in the quantitative analysis of moral dirt,
they will appear all equally foul.
{53} 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.