Books: Plays and Puritans
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Charles Kingsley >> Plays and Puritans
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 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 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 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 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
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 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 paean 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:
{1} 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.
{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 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.
{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.