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Charles Kingsley >> Plays and Puritans
Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the least
struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress's affection. He is
very resigned and loving, and so forth. To win renown by great
deeds, and so prove his wife in the right to her brothers and all the
world, never crosses his imagination. His highest aim (and that only
at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for
the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an
improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which
he has lived,--'ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui.' The
prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful
enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them
really noble; and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken
half as much pains with her as he has with the madmen, ruffians,
ghosts, and screech-owls in which his heart really delights. The
only character really worked out so as to live and grow under his
hand is Bosola, who, of course, is the villain of the piece, and
being a rough fabric, is easily manufactured with rough tools.
Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and there -
'Cariola. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas
What will you do with my lady? Call for help!
Duchess. To whom? to our next neighbours? they are mad folk.
Farewell, Cariola.
I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.--Now, what you please;
What death?'
And so the play ends, as does 'Vittoria Corrombona,' with half a
dozen murders coram populo, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles;
putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book
of the same era, 'Reynolds's God's Revenge,' in which, with all due
pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for
abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish
histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or
two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the
playwrights of the day.
The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley,
one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He
appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the
Queen's favourite poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was 'one of
such incomparable parts that he was the chief of the second-rate
poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.'
We must entreat the reader's attention while we examine Shirley's
'Gamester.' Whether the examination be a pleasant business or not,
it is somewhat important; 'for,' says Mr. Dyce, 'the following
memorandum respecting it occurs in the office-book of the Master of
the Records:- "On Thursday night, 6th of February, 1633, 'The
Gamester' was acted at Court, made by Sherley out of a plot of the
king's, given him by mee, and well likte. The king sayd it was the
best play he had seen for seven years."'
This is indeed important. We shall now have an opportunity of fairly
testing at the same time the taste of the Royal Martyr and the
average merit, at least in the opinion of the Caroline court, of the
dramatists of that day.
The plot which Charles sent to Shirley as a fit subject for his muse
is taken from one of those collections of Italian novels of which we
have already had occasion to speak, and occurs in the second part of
the 'Ducento Novelle' of Celio Malespini; and what it is we shall see
forthwith.
The play opens with a scene between one Wilding and his ward
Penelope, in which he attempts to seduce the young lady, in language
which has certainly the merit of honesty. She refuses him, but
civilly enough; and on her departure Mrs. Wilding enters, who, it
seems, is the object of her husband's loathing, though young,
handsome, and in all respects charming enough. After a scene of
stupid and brutal insults, he actually asks her to bring Penelope to
him, at which she naturally goes out in anger; and Hazard, the
gamester, enters,--a personage without a character, in any sense of
the word. There is next some talk against duelling, sensible enough,
which arises out of a bye-plot,--one Delamere having been wounded in
a duel by one Beaumont, mortally as is supposed. This bye-plot runs
through the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of
the usual play-house type,--a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course,
as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play-
house fathers were then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most
commonplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be
hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have
recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which
is this,--Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband's
affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant his suit; while Mrs.
Wilding herself is in reality to supply her niece's place, and shame
her husband into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the good fortune
which he fancies is coming, in scenes of which one can only say, that
if they are not written for the purpose of exciting the passions, it
is hard to see why they were written at all. But, being with Hazard
in a gambling-house at the very hour at which he is to meet Penelope,
and having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a hundred pounds of
Hazard, stays at the table to recover his losses, and sends Hazard to
supply his place with the supposed Penelope. A few hours before
Penelope and Hazard have met for the first time, and Penelope
considers him, as she says to herself aside, 'a handsome gentleman.'
He begins, of course, talking foully to her; and the lady, so far
from being shocked at the freedom of her new acquaintance, pays him
back in his own coin in such good earnest that she soon silences him
in the battle of dirt-throwing. Of this sad scene it is difficult to
say whether it indicates a lower standard of purity and courtesy in
the poet, in the audience who endured it, or in the society of which
it was, of course, intended to be a brilliant picture. If the
cavaliers and damsels of Charles the First's day were in the habit of
talking in that way to each other (and if they had not been, Shirley
would not have dared to represent them as doing so), one cannot much
wonder that the fire of God was needed to burn up (though, alas! only
for a while) such a state of society; and that when needed the fire
fell.
The rest of the story is equally bad. Hazard next day gives Wilding
descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding is in the height of
self-reproach at having handed over his victim to another, his wife
meets him and informs him that she herself and not Penelope has been
the victim. Now comes the crisis of the plot, the conception which
so delighted the taste of the Royal Martyr. Wilding finds himself,
as he expresses it, 'fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;'
and his rage, shame, and base attempts to patch up his own dishonour
by marrying Penelope to Hazard (even at the cost of disgorging the
half of her portion, which he had intended to embezzle) furnish
amusement to the audience to the end of the play; at last, on Hazard
and Penelope coming in married, Wilding is informed that he has been
deceived, and that his wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard
to keep up the delusion in order to frighten him into good behaviour;
whereupon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good husband henceforth, and
the play ends.
Throughout the whole of this farrago of improbable iniquity not a
single personage has any mark of personal character, or even of any
moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding's case) that of patience under
injury. Hazard 'The Gamester' is chosen as the hero, for what reason
it is impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which
may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that
he is, as we are told,
'A man careless
Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck
To kill so many as another, dares
Fight with all them that have.'
He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred pounds from
a foolish old city merchant (city merchants are always fools in the
seventeenth century) to let his nephew, young Barnacle, give him a
box on the ear in a tavern, and (after the young cit has been
transformed into an intolerable bully by the fame so acquired) takes
another hundred pounds from the repentant uncle for kicking the youth
back into his native state of peaceful cowardice. With the exception
of some little humour in these scenes with young Barnacle, the whole
play is thoroughly stupid. We look in vain for anything like a
reflection, a sentiment, even a novel image. Its language, like its
morality, is all but on a level with the laboured vulgarities of the
'Relapse' or the 'Provoked Wife,' save that (Shirley being a
confessed copier of the great dramatists of the generation before
him) there is enough of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up
to hide, at first sight, the utter want of anything like their
matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger and the artificial
smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected
blackguardism of the earlier poets' men.
This, forsooth, is the best comedy which Charles had heard for seven
years, and the plot, which he himself furnished for the occasion,
fitted to an English audience by a Romish convert.
And yet there is one dramatist of that fallen generation over whose
memory one cannot but linger, fancying what he would have become, and
wondering why so great a spirit was checked suddenly ere half
developed by a fever which carried him off, with several other Oxford
worthies, in 1643, when he was at most thirty-two (and according to
one account only twenty-eight) years old. Let which of the two dates
be the true one, Cartwright must always rank among our wondrous
youths by the side of Prince Henry, the Admirable Crichton, and
others, of whom one's only doubt is, whether they were not too
wondrous, too precociously complete for future development. We find
Dr. Fell, some time Bishop of Oxford, saying that 'Cartwright was the
utmost man could come to'; we read how his body was as handsome as
his soul; how he was an expert linguist, not only in Greek and Latin,
but in French and Italian, an excellent orator, admirable poet; how
Aristotle was no less known to him than Cicero and Virgil, and his
metaphysical lectures preferred to those of all his predecessors, the
Bishop of Lincoln only excepted; and his sermons as much admired as
his other composures; and how one fitly applied to him that saying of
Aristotle concerning OEschron the poet, that 'he could not tell what
OEschron could not do.' We find pages on pages of high-flown
epitaphs and sonnets on him, in which the exceeding bad taste of his
admirers makes one inclined to doubt the taste of him whom they so
bedaub with praise; and certainly, in spite of all due admiration for
the Crichton of Oxford, one is unable to endorse Mr. Jasper Mayne's
opinion, that
'In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare's style';
or that he possest
'Lucan's bold heights match'd to staid Virgil's care,
Martial's quick salt, joined to Musaeus' tongue.'
This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and the age
from which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of
Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651)
gives us; the offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly
stored with everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom
genius has been rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed: but
genius was present, without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial
trappings; and Ben Jonson spoke but truth when he said, 'My son
Cartwright writes all like a man.' It is impossible to open a page
of 'The Lady Errant,' 'The Royal Slave,' 'The Ordinary,' or 'Love's
Convert,' without feeling at once that we have to do with a man of a
very different stamp from any (Massinger perhaps alone excepted) who
was writing between 1630 and 1640. The specific gravity of the
poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his
contemporaries; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learning.
He is never weak or dull; though he fails often enough, is often
enough wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never laid bare
the deeper arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. Neither is he
altogether an original thinker; as one would expect, he has over-read
himself: but then he has done so to good purpose. If he imitates,
he generally equals. The table of fare in 'The Ordinary' smacks of
Rabelais or Aristophanes: but then it is worthy of either; and if
one cannot help suspecting that 'The Ordinary' never would have been
written had not Ben Jonson written 'The Alchemist,' one confesses
that Ben Jonson need not have been ashamed to have written the play
himself: although the plot, as all Cartwright's are, is somewhat
confused and inconsequent. If he be Platonically sentimental in
'Love's Convert,' his sentiment is of the noblest and the purest; and
the confest moral of the play is one which that age needed, if ever
age on earth did.
''Tis the good man's office
To serve and reverence woman, as it is
The fire's to burn; for as our souls consist
Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble,
Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm
All your desires, as reason quiets ours. .
Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth
In us; here only lies the difference, -
Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time;
But the woman's soul is ripe when it is young;
So that in us what we call learning, is
Divinity in you, whose operations,
Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.'
For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous
generation, we will love young Cartwright, in spite of the suspicion
that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before
his queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat,
and racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a
virtue that very uxoriousness of the poor king which at last cost him
his head. The 'Royal Slave,' too, is a gallant play, right-hearted
and lofty from beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible
court-cloud-world, akin to that in which the classic heroes and
heroines of Corneille and Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame.
As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when
necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality. 'The Ordinary'
is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay
figure, and depending for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated
language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need not have been ashamed
to draw.
The 'Royal Slave' seems to have been considered, both by the Court
and by his contemporaries, his masterpiece. And justly so; yet our
pleasure at Charles's having shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat
marred by Langbaine's story, that the good acting of the Oxford
scholars, 'stately scenes, and richness of the Persian habits,' had
as much to do with the success of the play as its 'stately style,'
and 'the excellency of the songs, which were set by that admirable
composer, Mr. Henry James.' True it is, that the songs are
excellent, as are all Cartwright's; for grace, simplicity, and
sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare's) which the seventeenth
century produced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculty seems to
have exhausted itself in these half-dozen songs. His minor poems are
utterly worthless, out Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic
conceits; and his varied addresses to the king and queen are as
bombastic and stupid and artificial as anything which bedizened the
reigns of Charles II. or his brother.
Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really an
original genius, but only a magnificent imitator; that he could write
plays well, because others had written them well already, but only
for that reason; and that for the same reason, when he attempted
detached lyrics and addresses, he could only follow the abominable
models which he saw around him? We know not; for surely in Jonson
and Shakspeare's minor poems he might have found simpler and sweeter
types; and even in those of Fletcher, who appears, from his own
account, to have been his especial pattern. Shakspeare however, as
we have seen, he looked down on; as did the rest of his generation.
Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of
Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a
prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous,
and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their
majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on
the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but
copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he,
unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses are
sometimes) to prophecy; and two of his prophecies, at least, have
hardly been fulfilled. He was somewhat mistaken when, on the birth
of the Duke of York, he informed the world that
'The state is now past fear; and all that we
Need wish besides is perpetuity';
and after indulging in various explanations of the reason why
'Nature' showed no prodigies at the birth of the future patron of
Judge Jeffreys, which, if he did not believe them, are lies, and if
he did, are very like blasphemies, declares that the infant is
'A son of Mirth,
Of Peace and Friendship; 'tis a quiet birth.'
Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of human
affairs, can Mr. Cartwright be now altogether satisfied with his
rogue's augury as to the capacities of the New England Puritans, when
he intends to pick pockets in the New World, having made the Old too
hot to hold him -
'They are good silly people; souls that will
Be cheated without trouble: one eye is
Put out with zeal, th' other with ignorance,
And yet they think they're eagles.'
Whatsoever were the faults of the Pilgrim Fathers (and they were
many), silliness was certainly not among them. But such was the
court fashion. 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), passes 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 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.