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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Plays and Puritans, by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Plays and Puritans
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2014  [eBook #3142]
+[This file was first posted on January 2, 2001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYS AND PURITANS***
+
+
+Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays”, 1890
+Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                          PLAYS AND PURITANS {3}
+
+
+THE British Isles have been ringing for the last few years with the word
+‘Art’ in its German sense; with ‘High Art,’ ‘Symbolic Art,’
+‘Ecclesiastical Art,’ ‘Dramatic Art,’ ‘Tragic Art,’ and so forth; and
+every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about
+Art.  Yet in spite of all translations of German ‘Æsthetic’ treatises,
+and ‘Kunstnovellen,’ the mass of the British people cares very little
+about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of ‘bad taste.’
+Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; our
+music, like our architecture, only reproduces the past; our painting is
+only first-rate when it handles landscapes and animals, and seems likely
+so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody cares.  Some of the deepest and most
+earnest minds vote the question, in general, a ‘sham and a snare,’ and
+whisper to each other confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be
+a ‘bore,’ and that Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all;
+while the middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a
+pretty toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think,
+apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is merely
+used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to mention that,
+if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand down to posterity
+likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family.  But when ‘Art’ dares to
+be in earnest, and to mean something, much more to connect itself with
+religion, Smith’s tone alters.  He will teach ‘Art’ to keep in what he
+considers its place, and if it refuses, take the law of it, and put it
+into the Ecclesiastical Court.  So he says, and what is more, he means
+what he says; and as all the world, from Hindostan to Canada, knows by
+most practical proof, what he means, he sooner or later does, perhaps not
+always in the wisest way, but still he does it.
+
+Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward ‘Art’ is simply
+that of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and widened, but only
+enough so as to permit Art, not to encourage it.
+
+Some men’s thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form of
+some æsthetic _à priori_ disquisition, beginning with ‘the tendency of
+the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,’ and ending—who can tell
+where?  But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any skill in the
+_scientia scientiarum_, or say, ‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning
+of His way, before His works of old.  When He prepared the heavens, I was
+there, when He set a compass upon the face of the deep;’ we shall leave
+æsthetic science to those who think that they comprehend it; we shall, as
+simple disciples of Bacon, deal with facts and with history as ‘the will
+of God revealed in facts.’  We will leave those who choose to settle what
+ought to be, and ourselves look patiently at that which actually was
+once, and which may be again; that so out of the conduct of our old
+Puritan forefathers (right or wrong), and their long war against ‘Art,’
+we may learn a wholesome lesson; as we doubtless shall, if we believe
+firmly that our history is neither more nor less than what the old Hebrew
+prophets called ‘God’s gracious dealings with his people,’ and not say in
+our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings Jacobite ballads
+(written forty years ago by men who cared no more for the Stuarts than
+for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off George the
+Fourth’s feet at his visit to Edinburgh)—‘Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed
+victa puellis.’
+
+The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and invidious
+task.  For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases, arise not merely
+from the crimes of a few great men, but from a general viciousness and
+decay of the whole, or the majority, of the nation; and that viciousness
+is certain to be made up, in great part, of a loosening of domestic ties,
+of breaches of the Seventh Commandment, and of sins connected with them,
+which a writer is now hardly permitted to mention.  An ‘evil and
+adulterous generation’ has been in all ages and countries the one marked
+out for intestine and internecine strife.  That description is always
+applicable to a revolutionary generation; whether or not it also comes
+under the class of a superstitious one, ‘seeking after a sign from
+heaven,’ only half believing its own creed, and, therefore, on tiptoe for
+miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely
+persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems about
+to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from sinking into
+the abyss.  In describing such an age, the historian lies under this
+paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to
+state it.  If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and respectable
+multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these, will either
+shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them as
+incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find similar horrors and
+abominations among people of their own rank, of whom they are naturally
+inclined to judge by their own standard of civilisation.  Thus if any
+one, in justification of the Reformation and the British hatred of Popery
+during the sixteenth century, should dare to detail the undoubted facts
+of the Inquisition, and to comment on them dramatically enough to make
+his readers feel about them what men who witnessed them felt, he would be
+accused of a ‘morbid love of horrors.’  If any one, in order to show how
+the French Revolution of 1793 was really God’s judgment on the profligacy
+of the _ancien régime_, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the
+_ancien régime_ unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would
+have a right to demand, ‘How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts
+from their merited oblivion?’  Those, again, who are really acquainted
+with the history of Henry the Eighth’s marriages, are well aware of facts
+which prove him to have been, not a man of violent and lawless passions,
+but of a cold temperament and a scrupulous conscience; but which cannot
+be stated in print, save in the most delicate and passing hints, to be
+taken only by those who at once understand such matters, and really wish
+to know the truth; while young ladies in general will still look on Henry
+as a monster in human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, to
+undeceive them by anything beyond bare assertion without proof.
+
+‘But what does it matter,’ some one may say, ‘what young ladies think
+about history?’  This it matters; that these young ladies will some day
+be mothers, and as such will teach their children their own notions of
+modern history; and that, as long as men confine themselves to the
+teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the history of their own
+country to be handled exclusively by their unmarried sisters, so long
+will slanders, superstitions, and false political principles be
+perpetuated in the minds of our boys and girls.
+
+But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the historian’s case is
+often too strong to be stated.  There is always a reactionary party, or
+one at least which lingers sentimentally over the dream of past golden
+ages, such as that of which Cowley says, with a sort of naïve blasphemy,
+at which one knows not whether to smile or sigh—
+
+    ‘When God, the cause to me and men unknown,
+    Forsook the royal houses, and his own.’
+
+These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the defeated
+system; but the historian has no such liberty to state the case against
+it.  If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare not state
+them, he is at once met with a _præjudicium_.  The mere fact of his
+having ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of
+prudish cant.  ‘What a very improper person he must be to like to dabble
+in such improper books that they must not even be quoted.’  If in
+self-defence he desperately gives his facts, he only increases the
+feeling against him, whilst the reactionists, hiding their blushing
+faces, find in their modesty an excuse for avoiding the truth; if, on the
+other hand, he content himself with bare assertion, and with indicating
+the sources from whence his conclusions are drawn, what care the
+reactionists?  They know well that the public will not take the trouble
+to consult manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but
+will content themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on
+unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after she
+has been painfully haled up to the well’s mouth, to tumble miserably to
+the bottom of it again.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of the
+great cause, Puritans _v._ Players, before our readers, trusting to find
+some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common notions
+on the point to form a fair decision.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+What those notions are is well known.  Very many of her Majesty’s
+subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth century
+(if the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the most
+beautiful period of the English nation’s life; that in it the chivalry
+and ardent piety of the Middle Age were happily combined with modern art
+and civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the Court, of stage-plays,
+of the fashions of the time, was only ‘a scrupulous and fantastical
+niceness’; barbaric and tasteless, if sincere; if insincere, the basest
+hypocrisy; that the stage-plays, though coarse, were no worse than
+Shakspeare, whom everybody reads; and that if the Stuarts patronised the
+stage they also raised it, and exercised a purifying censorship.  And
+many more who do not go all these lengths with the reactionists, and
+cannot make up their mind to look to the Stuart reigns either for model
+churchmen or model courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan
+‘preciseness,’ and to say lazily, that though, of course, something may
+have been wrong, yet there was no need to make such a fuss about the
+matter; and that at all events the Puritans were men of very bad taste.
+
+Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger’s plays (1813), was
+probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a great part
+of this generation also, when he informs us, that ‘with Massinger
+terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry; indeed, the stage itself
+survived him but a short time.  The nation was convulsed to its centre by
+contending factions, and a set of austere and gloomy fanatics, enemies to
+every elegant amusement and every social relaxation, rose upon the ruins
+of the State.  Exasperated by the ridicule with which they had long been
+covered by the stage, they persecuted the actors with unrelenting
+severity, and consigned them, together with the writers, to hopeless
+obscurity and wretchedness.  Taylor died in the extreme of poverty,
+Shirley opened a little school at Brentford, and Downe, the boast of the
+stage, kept an ale-house at Brentford.  Others, and those the far greater
+number, joined the royal standard, and exerted themselves with more
+gallantry than good fortune in the service of their old and indulgent
+master.’
+
+‘We have not yet, perhaps, fully estimated, and certainly not yet fully
+recovered, what was lost in that unfortunate struggle.  The arts were
+rapidly advancing to perfection under the fostering wing of a monarch who
+united in himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake, and munificence to
+reward.  Architecture, painting, and poetry were by turns the objects of
+his paternal care.  Shakspeare was his “closet companion,” Jonson his
+poet, and in conjunction with Inigo Jones, his favoured architect,
+produced those magnificent entertainments,’ etc.
+
+* * *
+
+He then goes on to account for the supposed sudden fall of dramatic art
+at the Restoration, by the somewhat far-fetched theory that—
+
+    ‘Such was the horror created in the general mind by the perverse and
+    unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, that
+    the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and, with
+    Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and “his
+    fellows.”  Instead, therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it
+    abruptly ceased in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it
+    were, a manner of their own, or fetched it from the heavy monotony of
+    their continental neighbours.’
+
+So is history written, and, what is more, believed.  The amount of
+misrepresentation in this passage (which would probably pass current with
+most readers in the present day) is quite ludicrous.  In the first place,
+it will hardly be believed that these words occur in an essay which,
+after extolling Massinger as one of the greatest poets of his age,
+second, indeed, only to Shakspeare, also informs us (and, it seems, quite
+truly) that, so far from having been really appreciated or patronised, he
+maintained a constant struggle with adversity,—‘that even the bounty of
+his particular friends, on which he chiefly relied, left him in a state
+of absolute dependence,’—that while ‘other writers for the stage had
+their periods of good fortune, Massinger seems to have enjoyed no gleam
+of sunshine; his life was all one misty day, and “shadows, clouds, and
+darkness rested on it.”’
+
+So much for Charles’s patronage of a really great poet.  What sort of men
+he did patronise, practically and in earnest, we shall see hereafter,
+when we come to speak of Mr. Shirley.
+
+But Mr. Gifford must needs give an instance to prove that Charles was
+‘not inattentive to the success of Massinger,’ and a curious one it is;
+of the same class, unfortunately, as that with the man in the old story,
+who recorded with pride that the King had spoken to him, and—had told him
+to get out of the way.
+
+Massinger in his ‘King and the Subject’ had introduced Don Pedro of Spain
+thus speaking—
+
+    ‘Monies!  We’ll raise supplies which way we please,
+    And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which
+    We’ll mulct you as we shall think fit.  The Cæsars
+    In Rome were wise, acknowledging no law
+    But what their swords did ratify, the wives
+    And daughters of the senators bowing to
+    Their will, as deities,’ etc.
+
+Against which passage Charles, reading over the play before he allowed of
+it, had written, ‘This is too insolent, and not to be printed.’  Too
+insolent it certainly was, considering the state of public matters in the
+year 1638.  It would be interesting enough to analyse the reasons which
+made Charles dislike in the mouth of Pedro sentiments so very like his
+own; but we must proceed, only pointing out the way in which men,
+determined to repeat the traditional clap-trap about the Stuarts, are
+actually blind to the meaning of the very facts which they themselves
+quote.
+
+Where, then, do the facts of history contradict Mr. Gifford?
+
+We believe that, so far from the triumph of dramatic poetry terminating
+with Massinger, dramatic art had been steadily growing worse from the
+first years of James; that instead of the arts advancing to perfection
+under Charles the First, they steadily deteriorated in quality, though
+the supply became more abundant; that so far from there having been a
+sudden change for the worse in the drama after the Restoration, the taste
+of the courts of Charles the First and of Charles the Second are
+indistinguishable; that the court poets, and probably the actors also, of
+the early part of Charles the Second’s reign had many of them belonged to
+the court of Charles the First, as did Davenant, the Duke and Duchess of
+Newcastle, Fanshaw, and Shirley himself; that the common notion of a ‘new
+manner’ having been introduced from France after the Restoration, or
+indeed having come in at all, is not founded on fact, the only change
+being that the plays of Charles the Second’s time were somewhat more
+stupid, and that while five of the seven deadly sins had always had free
+licence on the stage, blasphemy and profane swearing were now
+enfranchised to fill up the seven.  As for the assertion that the new
+manner (supposing it to have existed) was imported from France, there is
+far more reason to believe that the French copied us than we them, and
+that if they did not learn from Charles the First’s poets the
+superstition of ‘the three unities,’ they at least learnt to make ancient
+kings and heroes talk and act like seventeenth century courtiers, and to
+exchange their old clumsy masques and translations of Italian and Spanish
+farces for a comedy depicting native scoundrelism.  Probably enough,
+indeed, the great and sudden development of the French stage, which took
+place in the middle of the seventeenth century under Corneille and
+Molière, was excited by the English cavalier playwrights who took refuge
+in France.
+
+No doubt, as Mr. Gifford says, the Puritans were exasperated against the
+stage-players by the insults heaped on them; but the cause of quarrel lay
+far deeper than any such personal soreness.  The Puritans had attacked
+the players before the players meddled with them, and that on principle;
+with what justification must be considered hereafter.  But the fact is
+(and this seems to have been, like many other facts, conveniently
+forgotten), that the Puritans were by no means alone in their protest
+against the stage, and that the war was not begun exclusively by them.
+As early as the latter half of the sixteenth century, not merely
+Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and Reynolds had lifted up their voices
+against them, but Archbishop Parker, Bishop Babington, Bishop Hall, and
+the author of the _Mirror for Magistrates_.  The University of Oxford, in
+1584, had passed a statute forbidding common plays and players in the
+university, on the very same moral grounds on which the Puritans objected
+to them.  The city of London, in 1580, had obtained from the Queen the
+suppression of plays on Sundays; and not long after, ‘considering that
+play-houses and dicing-houses were traps for young gentlemen and others,’
+obtained leave from the Queen and Privy Council to thrust the players out
+of the city, and to pull down the play-houses, five in number; and,
+paradoxical as it may seem, there is little doubt that, by the letter of
+the law, ‘stage plays and enterludes’ were, even to the end of Charles
+the First’s reign, ‘unlawful pastime,’ being forbidden by 14 Eliz., 39
+Eliz., 1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1 Caroli, and the players subject to
+severe punishment as ‘rogues and vagabonds.’  The Act of 1 Jacobi seems
+even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which, in Elizabeth’s
+reign, had allowed companies of players the protection of a ‘baron or
+honourable person of greater degree,’ who might ‘authorise them to play
+under his hand and seal of arms.’  So that the Puritans were only
+demanding of the sovereigns that they should enforce the very laws which
+they themselves had made, and which they and their nobles were setting at
+defiance.  Whether the plays ought to have been put down, and whether the
+laws were necessary, is a different question; but certainly the court and
+the aristocracy stood in the questionable, though too common, position of
+men who made laws which prohibited to the poor amusements in which they
+themselves indulged without restraint.
+
+But were these plays objectionable?  As far as the comedies are
+concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays
+objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery?  Now, we cannot
+but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject for comedy at
+all.  It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never.  It is a sin; not
+merely theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the
+parent of seven other sins,—of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a
+whole bevy of devils.  The prevalence of adultery in any country has
+always been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and
+revolution; where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to
+treat it as a light thing, that people has been always careless, base,
+selfish, cowardly,—ripe for slavery.  And we must say that either the
+courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles the First were in that
+state, or that the poets were doing their best to make them so.
+
+We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall
+only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century, with
+the exception of Shakspeare’s, in which adultery is not introduced as a
+subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the whole plot.  The
+seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a ‘handsome
+gentleman’; the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of
+which we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn and
+ridicule.  In this latter habit (common to most European nations) there
+is a sort of justice.  A man can generally retain his wife’s affections
+if he will behave himself like a man; and ‘injured husbands’ have for the
+most part no one to blame but themselves.  But the matter is not a
+subject for comedy; not even in that case which has been always too
+common in France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to
+have been painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when,
+by a _mariage de convenance_, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot
+or a decrepit old man.  Such things are not comedies, but tragedies;
+subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry.  Therefore
+the men who look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked
+are not good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when
+they erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure
+in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and
+consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity, pointing
+‘Eastward Ho!’ _i.e._ to the city of London, as the quarter where court
+gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions amid the fair
+wives of dull and cowardly citizens.  If the citizens drove the players
+out of London, the playwrights took good care to have their revenge.  The
+citizen is their standard butt.  These shallow parasites, and their
+shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened,
+a fatal pleasure in insulting them.  Sad it is to see in Shirley’s
+‘Gamester,’ Charles the First’s favourite play, a passage like that in
+Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame
+and that of his fellow-merchants.  Surely, if Charles ever could have
+repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a
+humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of having given
+those base words his royal warrant and approbation.
+
+The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as
+questionable as the comedies.  That there are noble plays among them here
+and there, no one denies—any more than that there are exquisitely amusing
+plays among the comedies; but as the staple interest of the comedies is
+dirt, so the staple interest of the tragedies is crime.  Revenge, hatred,
+villany, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant themes, and
+(with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and
+perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors with little or no moral
+purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience, and of
+displaying their own power of delineation in a way which makes one but
+too ready to believe the accusations of the Puritans (supported as they
+are by many ugly anecdotes) that the play-writers and actors were mostly
+men of fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an
+acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch.  This is
+notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern
+‘Literature of Horror,’ and the two literatures are morally identical.
+We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought against the
+School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply to the average
+tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars.
+
+This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so greedily,
+tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon them (and not
+undeservedly) heavy odium.
+
+One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as against
+Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from Italy.  We must fairly
+put ourselves into the position of an honest Englishman of the
+seventeenth century before we can appreciate the huge _præjudicium_ which
+must needs have arisen in his mind against anything which could claim a
+Transalpine parentage.  Italy was then not merely the stronghold of
+Popery.  That in itself would have been a fair reason for others beside
+Puritans saying, ‘If the root be corrupt, the fruit will be also: any
+expression of Italian thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome
+while her vitals are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only
+half believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher
+classes, even those of the priesthood; but only kept up for their private
+aggrandisement.’  But there was more than hypothesis in favour of the men
+who might say this; there was universal, notorious, shocking fact.  It
+was a fact that Italy was the centre where sins were invented worthy of
+the doom of the Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all
+nations who had connection with her.  We dare give no proof of this
+assertion.  The Italian morals and the Italian lighter literature of the
+sixteenth and of the beginning of the seventeenth century were such, that
+one is almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them, although
+the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes to understand
+either the European society of the time or the Puritan hatred of the
+drama.  _Non ragionam di lor: ma guarda è passa_.
+
+It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into England by the
+young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish, travelled
+to Italy.  From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the
+middle of Elizabeth’s reign, this foul tide had begun to set toward
+England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in passing
+through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its course
+hitherward; till, to judge by Marston’s ‘Satires,’ certain members of the
+higher classes had, by the beginning of James’s reign, learnt nearly all
+which the Italians had to teach them.  Marston writes in a rage, it is
+true; foaming, stamping, and vapouring too much to escape the suspicion
+of exaggeration; yet he dared not have published the things which he
+does, had he not fair ground for some at least of his assertions.  And
+Marston, be it remembered, was no Puritan, but a playwright, and Ben
+Jonson’s friend.
+
+Bishop Hall, in his ‘Satires,’ describes things bad enough, though not so
+bad as Marston does; but what is even more to the purpose, he wrote, and
+dedicated to James, a long dissuasive against the fashion of running
+abroad.  Whatever may be thought of the arguments of ‘Quo vadis?—a
+Censure of Travel,’ its main drift is clear enough.  Young gentlemen, by
+going to Italy, learnt to be fops and profligates, and probably Papists
+into the bargain.  These assertions there is no denying.  Since the days
+of Lord Oxford, most of the ridiculous and expensive fashions in dress
+had come from Italy, as well as the newest modes of sin; and the
+playwrights themselves make no secret of the fact.  There is no need to
+quote instances; they are innumerable; and the most serious are not fit
+to be quoted, scarcely the titles of the plays in which they occur; but
+they justify almost every line of Bishop Hall’s questions (of which some
+of the strongest expressions have necessarily been omitted):—
+
+    ‘What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed?
+
+    ‘To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had the variety of our
+    vain disguises?  As if we had not wit enough to be foolish unless we
+    were taught it.  These dresses, being constant in their mutability,
+    show us our masters.  What is it that we have not learned of our
+    neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap? whom would it not vex
+    to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks and
+    monsters of themselves?  Whence come their (absurd fashions); but the
+    one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the
+    worse-minded courtesans of Italy?  Whence else learned they to daub
+    these mud-walls with apothecaries’ mortar; and those high washes,
+    which are so cunningly licked on that the wet napkin of Phryne should
+    he deceived?  Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their
+    borrowed hair?  As if they were ashamed of the head of God’s making,
+    and proud of the tire-woman’s.  Where learned we that devilish art
+    and practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are
+    taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men?  Where had we
+    that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the nose is no less
+    pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than either? wherein the
+    piles of dishes make barricadoes against the appetite, and with a
+    pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry guest.  Where those forms of
+    ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make gods of
+    others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason while they
+    pretend to do reason?  Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a
+    wild tongue, that runs, with reins on the neck, through the
+    bedchambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and
+    spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred
+    out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness?  Where the
+    change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some
+    few butterflies?  Where the art of dishonesty in practical
+    Machiavelism, in false equivocations?  Where the slight account of
+    that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as
+    not unnecessary?  Where the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy
+    in those formal compliments which do neither expect belief from
+    others nor carry any from ourselves?  Where’ (and here Bishop Hall
+    begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of
+    matters notorious and undeniable.)  ‘Where that close Atheism, which
+    secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe,
+    wisdom to profess any religion?  Where the bloody and tragical
+    science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and
+    rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation
+    hath endangered the infection of our peace?’—Bishop Hall’s ‘Quo
+    Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,’ vol xii. sect. 22.
+
+Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of the
+drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since the
+beginning of the sixteenth century.  However much truth there may be in
+the common assertion that the old ‘miracle plays’ and ‘mysteries’ were
+the parents of the English drama (as they certainly were of the Spanish
+and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much our stage owed, from its
+first rise under Elizabeth, to direct importations from Italy.  This is
+merely thrown out as a suggestion; to establish the fact would require a
+wide acquaintance with the early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent
+facts have their due weight.  The names of the characters in most of our
+early regular comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes,
+are the manners, at least they profess to be so.  Next, the plots of many
+of the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if
+Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where
+others found poison) went to Cinthio for ‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for
+Measure,’ to Bandello for ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and to Boccaccio for
+‘Cymbeline,’ there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to the
+same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these profligate
+writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts adultery into a
+virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a duty; which revels
+in the horrible as freely as any French novelist of the romantic school;
+and whose only value is its pitiless exposure of the profligacy of the
+Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be valuable which makes a mock
+equally of things truly and falsely sacred, and leaves on the reader’s
+mind the fear that the writer saw nothing in heaven or earth worthy of
+belief, respect, or self-sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.
+
+Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to judge from
+their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to assert, were drawn
+from life, and for which they give names, places, and all details which
+might amuse the noble gentlemen and ladies to whom these stories are
+dedicated), this had been the morality of Italy for some centuries past.
+This, also, is the general morality of the English stage in the
+seventeenth century.  Can we wonder that thinking men should have seen a
+connection between Italy and the stage?  Certainly the playwrights put
+themselves between the horns of an ugly dilemma.  Either the vices which
+they depicted were those of general English society, and of themselves
+also (for they lived in the very heart of town and court foppery); or
+else they were the vices of a foreign country, with which the English
+were comparatively unacquainted.  In the first case, we can only say that
+the Stuart age in England was one which deserved purgation of the most
+terrible kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal
+measures would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the
+experience of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never
+have been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines.
+In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds of
+the people, and, instead of ‘holding up a mirror to vice,’ instructing
+frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and fully justifying old
+Prynne’s indignant complaint—
+
+    ‘The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies
+    on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the
+    spectators’ minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them,
+    till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed
+    no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill
+    spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce
+    them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious
+    ill-serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic
+    interlude.’
+
+That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police reports
+will sufficiently prove.  It is notorious that the representation in our
+own days of ‘Tom and Jerry’ and of ‘Jack Sheppard’ did excite dozens of
+young lads to imitate the heroes of those dramas; and such must have been
+the effect of similar and worse representations in the Stuart age.  No
+rational man will need the authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor
+Leighton, Archbishop Parker, Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any
+one else, Churchman or Puritan, prelate or ‘penitent reclaimed
+play-poet,’ like Stephen Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert,
+citizens’ wives (who are generally represented as the proper subjects for
+seduction) ‘have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they
+have received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned
+their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women,
+light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt, their
+children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault of a
+dangerous state;’ or that ‘The devices of carrying and re-carrying
+letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport their tokens
+by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other kinds of
+policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of their wives,
+guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants, were aptly
+taught in these schools of abuse.’ {27a}
+
+The matter is simple enough.  We should not allow these plays to be acted
+in our own day, because we know that they would produce their effects.
+We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to
+see such representations. {27b}  Why, in all fairness, were the Puritans
+wrong in condemning that which we now have absolutely forbidden?
+
+We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the old
+play-houses.  Gosson and his colleague the anonymous Penitent assert
+them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but antechambers to
+houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned in the pit were only
+not practised also in the pit.  What reason have we to doubt it, who know
+that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical reformation of this abuse,
+for which his name will be ever respected, our own comparatively purified
+stage was just the same?  Let any one who remembers the saloons of Drury
+Lane and Covent Garden thirty years ago judge for himself what the
+accessories of the Globe or the Fortune must have been, in days when
+players were allowed to talk inside as freely as the public behaved
+outside.
+
+Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of
+demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting them.
+We will lay on them the blame of no special _malus animus_: but, at the
+same time, we must treat their fine words about ‘holding a mirror up to
+vice,’ and ‘showing the age its own deformity,’ as mere cant, which the
+men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek.  It was as much an
+insincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later,
+Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth of Congreve.  If the
+poets had really intended to show vice its own deformity, they would have
+represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not as
+triumphant.  It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in works in which
+there is no moral justice.  The only condition which can excuse the
+representation of evil is omitted.  The simple fact is that the poets
+wanted to draw a house; that this could most easily be done by the
+coarsest and most violent means; and that not being often able to find
+stories exciting enough in the past records of sober English society,
+they went to Italy and Spain for the violent passions and wild crimes of
+southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition
+believed in enough to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control,
+its victims.  Those were the countries which just then furnished that
+strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is
+the immoral playwright’s fittest material; because, while the inward
+savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation
+brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of
+themselves in their worst moments, such as no ‘Mystery of Cain’ or
+‘Tragedy of Prometheus’ can give.
+
+Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama for
+its lessons in human nature?  On that special point something must be
+said hereafter.  Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one
+who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as
+high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled
+those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare.  Let
+Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to ‘Volpone’ tell us in his
+own noble prose what he thought of the average morality of his
+contemporary playwrights:—
+
+    ‘For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices
+    and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the
+    impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a
+    good man.  He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good
+    discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in
+    their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood,
+    recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the
+    interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less
+    than human, a master in manners and can alone (or with a few) effect
+    the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride
+    and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon.  But it will
+    here be hastily answered that the writers of these days are other
+    things, that not only their manners but their natures are inverted,
+    and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of poet but the abused
+    name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick,
+    or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation,
+    blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised.
+    I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not),
+    because in some men’s abortive features (and would God they had never
+    seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold
+    adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a
+    more malicious slander.  For every particular I can (and from a most
+    clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward
+    the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of such foul and
+    unwashed . . . [his expression is too strong for quotation] as is now
+    made the food of the scene.’
+
+It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty ideal
+of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints against
+the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger sentence occurs:—
+
+    ‘The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present
+    trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal
+    soul doth not abhor?  Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered,
+    and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms,
+    such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with
+    (indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn
+    the blood of a Christian to water.’
+
+So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a
+peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company.  After
+him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to
+be necessary.  He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative; but his
+bitter words suggest at least this dilemma.  Either they are true, and
+the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says it was) that of Gehenna: or
+they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against more
+successful poets.  And what does that latter prove, but that the greatest
+poet of his age (after Shakspeare has gone) was not as much esteemed as
+some poets whom we know to have been more filthy and more horrible than
+he? which, indeed, is the main complaint of Jonson himself.  It will be
+rejoined, of course, that he was an altogether envious man; that he
+envied Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at ‘The
+Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest,’ in the prologue to ‘Every Man in his
+Humour’; and, indeed, Jonson’s writings, and those of many other
+playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry called out the
+bitterest hatred and the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare’s
+great soul was giving way to the pettiest passions, when in ‘Hamlet’ he
+had his fling at the ‘aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on
+the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t.’  It may
+be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that
+‘their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own
+succession,’ _i.e._ against themselves, when ‘grown to common players.’
+Be that as it may.  Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only less
+great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly is not so
+in all his charges.  Some of the faults which he attributes to Shakspeare
+are really faults.
+
+At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his
+contemporaries, by the evidence of the men’s own plays.  We know that the
+decadence of the stage of which he complains went on uninterruptedly
+after his time, and in the very direction which he pointed out.
+
+On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of poetry ‘made a
+wall in our father’s house, and the bricks are alive to testify unto this
+day.’  So that we cannot do better than give a few samples thereof, at
+least samples decent enough for modern readers, and let us begin, not
+with a hodman, but with Jonson himself.
+
+Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was a very
+great genius, immaculate or not; ‘Rare Ben,’ with all his faults.  One
+can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of that rich
+free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance and pride
+which brood upon the lip and eyebrow,
+
+    ‘Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
+    The love of love.’
+
+A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one fancies,
+never could.  One ought to have, too, a sort of delicacy about saying
+much against him; for he is dead, and can make, for the time being at
+least, no rejoinder.  There are dead men whom one is not much ashamed to
+‘upset’ after their death, because one would not have been much afraid of
+doing so when they were alive.  But ‘Rare Ben’ had terrible teeth, and
+used them too.  A man would have thought twice ere he snapt at him
+living, and therefore it seems somewhat a cowardly trick to bark securely
+at his ghost.  Nevertheless it is no unfair question to ask—Do not his
+own words justify the Puritan complaints?  But if so, why does he rail at
+the Puritans for making their complaints?  His answer would have been
+that they railed in ignorance, not merely at low art, as we call it now,
+but at high art and all art.  Be it so.  Here was their fault, if fault
+it was in those days.  For to discriminate between high art and low art
+they must have seen both.  And for Jonson’s wrath to be fair and just he
+must have shown them both.  Let us see what the pure drama is like which
+he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his contemporaries; and, to
+bring the matter nearer home, let us take one of the plays in which he
+hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely the ‘Alchemist,’ said to have
+been first acted in 1610 ‘by the king’s majesty’s servants.’  Look, then,
+at this well-known play, and take Jonson at his word.  Allow that Ananias
+and Tribulation Wholesome are, as they very probably are, fair portraits
+of a class among the sectaries of the day: but bear in mind, too, that if
+this be allowed, the other characters shall be held as fair portraits
+also.  Otherwise, all must he held to be caricature; and then the
+onslaught on the Puritans vanishes into nothing, or worse.  Now in either
+case, Ananias and Tribulation are the best men in the play.  They palter
+with their consciences, no doubt: but they have consciences, which no one
+else in the play has, except poor Surly; and he, be it remembered, comes
+to shame, is made a laughing-stock, and ‘cheats himself,’ as he complains
+at last, ‘by that same foolish vice of honesty’: while in all the rest
+what have we but every form of human baseness?  Lovell, the master, if he
+is to be considered a negative character as doing no wrong, has, at all
+events, no more recorded of him than the noble act of marrying by deceit
+a young widow for the sake of her money, the philosopher’s stone, by the
+bye, and highest object of most of the seventeenth century dramatists.
+If most of the rascals meet with due disgrace, none of them is punished;
+and the greatest rascal of all, who, when escape is impossible, turns
+traitor, and after deserving the cart and pillory a dozen times for his
+last and most utter baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the honour
+of addressing the audience at the play’s end in the most smug and
+self-satisfied tone, and of ‘putting himself on you that are my country,’
+not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair majority who
+would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of all imitation.
+
+Now is this play a moral or an immoral one?  Of its coarseness we say
+nothing.  We should not endure it, of course, nowadays; and on that point
+something must be said hereafter: but if we were to endure plain speaking
+as the only method of properly exposing vice, should we endure the moral
+which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it?
+
+And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among the
+Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch?  What but a background of
+profligacy and frivolity?
+
+A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the age may be
+found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself.  Howsoever pure and lofty
+the ideal which he laid down for himself (and no doubt honestly) in the
+Preface to ‘Volpone,’ he found it impossible to keep up to it.  Nine
+years afterwards we find him, in his ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ catering to the
+low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at which, if one must needs
+laugh—as who that was not more than man could help doing over that scene
+between Rabbi Busy and the puppets?—shallow and untrue as the gist of the
+humour is, one feels the next moment as if one had been indulging in
+unholy mirth at the expense of some grand old Noah who has come to shame
+in his cups.
+
+But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the ‘Gipsies
+Metamorphosed,’ presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson was
+forty-seven; old enough, one would have thought, to know better.  It is
+not merely the insincere and all but blasphemous adulation which is
+shocking,—that was but the fashion of the times: but the treating these
+gipsies and beggars, and their ‘thieves’ Latin’ dialect, their filthiness
+and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely as themes for immoral and
+inhuman laughter.  Jonson was by no means the only poet of that day to
+whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads which infested England
+were only a comical phase of humanity, instead of being, as they would be
+now, objects of national shame and sorrow, of pity and love, which would
+call out in the attempt to redeem them the talents and energies of good
+men.  But Jonson certainly sins more in this respect than any of his
+contemporaries.  He takes a low pleasure in parading his intimate
+acquaintance with these poor creatures’ foul slang and barbaric laws; and
+is, we should say, the natural father of that lowest form of all
+literature, which has since amused the herd, though in a form greatly
+purified, in the form of ‘Beggars’ Operas,’ ‘Dick Turpins,’ and ‘Jack
+Sheppards.’  Everything which is objectionable in such modern
+publications as these was exhibited, in far grosser forms, by one of the
+greatest poets who ever lived, for the amusement of a king of England;
+and yet the world still is at a loss to know why sober and God-fearing
+men detested both the poet and the king.
+
+And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the degradation
+of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur passages of the old
+sweetness and grandeur; _disjecta membra poetæ_ such as these, which,
+even although addressed to James, are perfect:—
+
+                               ‘3_rd_ _Gipsy_.
+
+    Look how the winds upon the waves grow tame,
+       Take up land sounds upon their purple wings,
+    And, catching each from other, bear the same
+       To every angle of their sacred springs.
+    So will we take his praise, and hurl his name
+       About the globe, in thousand airy rings.’
+
+                                   * * * *
+
+Let us pass on.  Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit?
+
+There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here, and
+shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible.  The
+laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy’s expense, in ‘Bartholomew Fair,’
+turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women’s parts acted by boys.
+Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of puppets
+instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked nevertheless.
+What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans is hard to
+conceive.  Prynne, in his ‘Histriomastix,’ may have pushed a little too
+far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law: yet one
+would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses’ law, not
+arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did harm, as every
+antiquarian knows that it did; and that, therefore, Prynne was but
+reasonable in supposing that in his day a similar practice would produce
+a similar evil.  Our firm conviction is that it did so, and that as to
+the matter of fact, Prynne was perfectly right; and that to make a boy a
+stage-player was pretty certainly to send him to the devil.  Let any man
+of common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young boy’s mind which
+would be produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience
+not merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in
+almost every play.  We appeal to common sense—would any father allow his
+own children to personate, even in private, the basest of mankind?  And
+yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be supposed, has
+decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons to act yearly at
+Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while grave and reverend
+prelates and divines look on approving.  The Westminster play has had no
+very purifying influence on the minds of the young gentlemen who
+personate heathen damsels; and we only ask, What must have been the
+effect of representing far fouler characters than Terence’s on the minds
+of uneducated lads of the lower classes?  Prynne and others hint at still
+darker abominations than the mere defilement of the conscience: we shall
+say nothing of them, but that, from collateral evidence, we believe every
+word they say; and that when pretty little Cupid’s mother, in Jonson’s
+Christmas masque, tells how ‘She could have had money enough for him, had
+she been tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king’s
+players,’ and how ‘Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for
+him, and old Mr. Hemings too,’ she had better have tied a stone round the
+child’s neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him over
+to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation more money
+to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native town, on the
+fruits of others’ sin.  Honour to old Prynne, bitter and narrow as he
+was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the humanity and
+Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor children whom not a
+bishop on the bench interfered to save; but, while they were writing and
+persecuting in behalf of baptismal regeneration, left those to perish
+whom they declared so stoutly to be regenerate in baptism.  Prynne used
+that argument too, and declared these stage-plays to be among the very
+‘pomps and vanities which Christians renounced at baptism.’  He may or
+may not have been wrong in identifying them with the old heathen
+pantomimes and games of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under
+a mountain of quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for
+Prynne’s reading seems to have been quite enormous).  Those very prelates
+could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught in
+them which could be made to justify their own system, though perhaps it
+had really even less to do therewith than the Roman pantomimes had with
+the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had retained in her
+Catechism the old Roman word ‘pomps,’ as one of the things which were to
+be renounced; and as ‘pomps’ confessedly meant at first those very
+spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre, Prynne could not be very
+illogical in believing that, as it had been retained, it was retained to
+testify against something, and probably against the thing in England most
+like the ‘pomps’ of heathen Rome.  Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide
+whether of the two was the better Churchman—Prynne, who tried to make the
+baptismal covenant mean something, or Laud, who allowed such a play as
+‘The Ordinary’ to be written by his especial _protégé_, Cartwright, the
+Oxford scholar, and acted before him probably by Oxford scholars,
+certainly by christened boys.  We do not pretend to pry into the counsels
+of the Most High; but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when
+combined with lofty professions and pretensions, does (as all history
+tells us that it does) draw down the vengeance of Almighty God, then we
+need look no further than this one neglect of the seventeenth century
+prelates (whether its cause was stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the
+monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered), to discover full reason why it
+pleased God to sweep them out awhile with the besom of destruction.
+
+There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century, new, as
+far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and that is, the
+apotheosis of Rakes.  Let the faults of the Middle Age, or of the Tudors,
+have been what they may, that class of person was in their time simply an
+object of disgust.  The word which then signified a Rake is, in the
+‘Morte d’Arthur’ (temp. Ed. IV.), the foulest term of disgrace which can
+be cast upon a knight; whilst even up to the latter years of Elizabeth
+the contempt of parents and elders seems to have been thought a grievous
+sin.  In Italy, even, fountain of all the abominations of the age,
+respect for the fifth commandment seems to have lingered after all the
+other nine had been forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his ‘Corteggiano’
+(about 1520), regretting the modest and respectful training of the
+generation which had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan
+method of education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the
+method which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to
+Protestant, Puritan and Churchman.
+
+But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth’s reign) fathers
+became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked of their
+money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the young
+gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and Charles,
+with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and roystering,
+beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking, duelling, and
+profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of gentle birth), set
+forth not merely as harmless amusements for young gentlemen, but (as in
+Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of ‘Monsieur Thomas’) virtues without which
+a man is despicable.  On this point, as on many others, those who have,
+for ecclesiastical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the
+seventeenth century as a golden age have been altogether unfair.  There
+is no immorality of the court plays of Charles II.’s time which may not
+be found in those of Charles I.’s.  Sedley and Etherege are not a whit
+worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur
+Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades,
+Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken
+clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master’s till to pay his
+losses at a betting-office.  True; we of this generation can hardly
+afford to throw stones.  The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed
+high patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas
+seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and
+Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England.
+Better days, however, have dawned; ‘Tom and Jerry,’ instead of running
+three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as
+‘Monsieur Thomas’ would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are
+now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while
+if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they would,
+instead of winning a good wife, be ‘cut’ by braver and finer gentlemen
+than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact prove save that
+England has at last discovered that the Puritan opinion of this matter
+(as of some others) was the right one?
+
+There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage of
+profligate scapegraces on the stage.  They would not have been endured on
+the stage had they not been very common off it; and if there had not
+been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking excuse for them: it
+requires no great penetration to see what that excuse must have been.  If
+the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy
+them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and inexcusable,
+probably impossible.  But if it was (as it may be proved to have been) an
+utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot
+but look on Monsieur Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity.
+Take him as he stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit,
+spirit, and courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers.
+He would have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age
+as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a
+man-of-war—anything where he could find a purpose and a work.  Doubt it
+not.  How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years ago
+one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses and
+cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not only
+fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing homeward like
+a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches at Sevastopol; and
+has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful fire of God, which could
+burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the crust of cold frivolity into
+warm and earnest life.  And even at such a youth’s worst, reason and
+conscience alike forbid us to deal out to him the same measure as we do
+to the offences of the cool and hoary profligate, or to the darker and
+subtler spiritual sins of the false professor.  But if the wrath of God
+be not unmistakably and practically revealed from heaven against youthful
+profligacy and disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or
+other, against what sin is it revealed?  It was not left for our age to
+discover that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his
+courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had to
+be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal lesson; and
+what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them, sharp shot and
+cold steel did.
+
+‘But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.’  The
+fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that this was
+low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse.  If it be said that
+Shakspeare’s is the very highest art, the answer is, that what they hated
+in him was not his high art, but his low art, the foul and horrible
+elements which he had in common with his brother play-writers.  True,
+there is far less of these elements in Shakspeare than in any of his
+compeers: but they are there.  And what the Puritans hated in him was
+exactly what we have to expunge before we can now represent his plays.
+If it be said that they ought to have discerned and appreciated the
+higher elements in him, so ought the rest of their generation.  The
+Puritans were surely not bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and
+brother poets did not see.  And it is surely a matter of fact that the
+deep spiritual knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare’s plays
+(and them alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all
+men and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who
+probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612, has
+assigned to him.
+
+    ‘I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men’s witty labours,
+    especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the
+    laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty
+    composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr.
+    Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right
+    happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr.
+    Heywood.’
+
+While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing in
+Shakspeare beyond the same ‘happy and copious industry’ which he sees in
+Dekker and Heywood,—while Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real
+genius in Charles the First’s reign, places Fletcher’s name ‘’Twixt
+Jonson’s grave and Shakspeare’s lighter sound,’ and tells him that
+
+    ‘Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
+    I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fool’s replies.
+
+    * * * * *
+
+    Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.
+
+    * * * * *
+
+    Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
+    As his, but without his scurrility;’ {46}
+
+while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul,
+only remarks on Shakspeare’s marvellous lyrical sweetness, ‘his native
+wood-notes wild’; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not
+discover the stork among the cranes?
+
+An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves
+a few moments’ consideration.  It is said, ‘the grossness of the old
+play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime.  It was the fashion
+of the age.  It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by
+it.  The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.’
+Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster’s plays, seems inclined to exalt
+this habit into a virtue.  After saying that the licentious and debauched
+are made ‘as odious in representation as they would be if they were
+actually present’—an assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the
+case of Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to
+forget that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be,
+keeps stoutly on the side of virtue—Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that
+‘perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our
+morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we
+are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a
+less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless
+of words, and only considerate of actions.’
+
+To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer that the fact
+is directly contrary; that there is a mass of unanimous evidence which
+cannot be controverted to prove that England, in the first half of the
+seventeenth century was far more immoral than in the nineteenth; that the
+proofs lie patent to any dispassionate reader: but that these pages will
+not be defiled by the details of them.
+
+Let it be said that coarseness was ‘the fashion of the age.’  The simple
+question is, was it a good fashion or a bad?  It is said—with little or
+no proof—that in simple states of society much manly virtue and much
+female purity have often consisted with very broad language and very
+coarse manners.  But what of that?  Drunkards may very often be very
+honest and brave men.  Does that make drunkenness no sin?  Or will
+honesty and courage prevent a man’s being the worse for hard drinking?
+If so, why have we given up coarseness of language?  And why has it been
+the better rather than the worse part of the nation, the educated and
+religious rather than the ignorant and wicked, who have given it up?
+Why?  Simply because this nation, and all other nations on the Continent,
+in proportion to their morality, have found out that coarseness of
+language is, to say the least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong
+to do certain things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of
+them; that even certain things which are right and blessed and holy lose
+their sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of
+being left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them.  On the
+whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as insincere.
+Certainly, in our day, it will not hold.  If any one wishes to hear
+coarse language in ‘good society’ he can hear it, I am told, in Paris:
+but one questions whether Parisian society be now ‘under the sway of a
+more energetic principle of virtue’ than our own.  The sum total of the
+matter seems to be, that England has found out that on this point again
+the old Puritans were right.  And quaintly enough, the party in the
+English Church who hold the Puritans most in abhorrence are the most
+scrupulous now upon this very point; and, in their dread of contaminating
+the minds of youth, are carrying education, at school and college, to
+such a more than Puritan precision that with the most virtuous and
+benevolent intentions they are in danger of giving lads merely a
+conventional education,—a hot-house training which will render them
+incapable hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the
+world.  They themselves republished Massinger’s ‘Virgin Martyr,’ because
+it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist—for there is
+every reason to believe that Massinger was one—setting forth how the
+heroine was attended all through by an angel in the form of a page, and
+how—not to mention the really beautiful ancient fiction about the fruits
+which Dorothea sends back from Paradise—Theophilus overcomes the devil by
+means of a cross composed of flowers.  Massinger’s account of Theophilus’
+conversation will, we fear, make those who know anything of that great
+crisis of the human spirit suspect that Massinger’s experience thereof
+was but small: but the fact which is most noteworthy is this—that the
+‘Virgin Martyr’ is actually one of the foulest plays known.  Every pains
+has been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in the play were not
+written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what grounds we know not.  If
+Dekker assisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we are
+aware of no canons of internal criticism which will enable us to decide,
+as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is Dekker’s, and
+all the poetry Massinger’s.  He confesses—as indeed he is forced to
+do—that ‘Massinger himself is not free from dialogues of low wit and
+buffoonery’; and then, after calling the scenes in question ‘detestable
+ribaldry, ‘a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of filth and dulness,’
+recommends them to the reader’s supreme scorn and contempt,—with which
+feelings the reader will doubtless regard them: but he will also, if he
+be a thinking man, draw from them the following conclusions: that even if
+they be Dekker’s—of which there is no proof—Massinger was forced, in
+order to the success of his play, to pander to the public taste by
+allowing Dekker to interpolate these villanies; that the play which,
+above all others of the seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar
+rosepink of piety, devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest
+abominations of any extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it
+as a sample of the Christianity of that past golden age of
+High-churchmanship, had to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of
+becoming amenable to the laws against abominable publications.
+
+No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have quoted,
+in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly a play
+(perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we complain
+do not exist,—few of which they do not form an integral part; and now, if
+this is the judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater
+poets, what must the lesser ones be like?
+
+Look, then, at Webster’s two masterpieces, ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ and the
+‘Duchess of Malfi.’  A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted;
+for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written
+since Shakspeare’s time.
+
+The whole story of ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ is one of sin and horror.  The
+subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest and the
+basest passions.  But the play is not a study of those passions from
+which we may gain a great insight into human nature.  There is no
+trace—nor is there, again, in the ‘Duchess of Malfi’—of that development
+of human souls for good or evil which is Shakspeare’s especial power—the
+power which, far more than any accidental ‘beauties,’ makes his plays, to
+this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, while his
+contemporaries are all but forgotten.  The highest aim of dramatic art is
+to exhibit the development of the human soul; to construct dramas in
+which the conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the
+characters; and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of
+a certain passion, or a certain ‘humour’: but persons, each unlike all
+others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own
+peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that
+destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding his
+own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and that in
+such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be able (in
+proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct
+under those circumstances.  This is indeed ‘high art’: but we find no
+more of it in Webster than in the rest.  His characters, be they old or
+young, come on the stage ready-made, full grown, and stereotyped; and
+therefore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions
+or humours in human form.  Now and then he essays to draw a character:
+but it is analytically, by description, not synthetically and
+dramatically, by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the
+‘Duchess of Mall’ he falls into the great mistake of telling, by
+Antonio’s mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than he afterwards
+makes them act.  Very different is Shakspeare’s method of giving, at the
+outset, some single delicate hint about his personages which will serve
+as a clue to their whole future conduct; thus ‘showing the whole in each
+part,’ and stamping each man with a personality, to a degree which no
+other dramatist has ever approached.
+
+But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster’s aim.  He has
+to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by
+blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power.
+There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria’s trial, which
+have been praised for their delineation of character: but it is one thing
+to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so handled in ‘Lear,’
+‘Othello,’ and ‘Richard the Third,’—‘Given a mixed character, to show how
+he may become criminal,’ and to solve Webster’s ‘Given a ready-made
+criminal, to show how he commits his crimes.’  To us the knowledge of
+character shown in Vittoria’s trial scene is not an insight into
+Vittoria’s essential heart and brain, but a general acquaintance with the
+conduct of all bold bad women when brought to bay.  Poor Elia, who knew
+the world from books, and human nature principally from his own loving
+and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria’s ‘innocence—resembling boldness’
+{53}—and ‘seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which
+inspires such gay confidence in her,’ and so forth.
+
+Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of
+bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet amounting in
+all merely to this, that the strength of Webster’s confest master-scene
+lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general.  We
+will say no more on this matter, save to ask, _Cui bono_?  Was the art of
+which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to
+mankind, much less able to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious
+accompaniments?
+
+The ‘Duchess of Malfi’ is certainly in a purer and loftier strain: but in
+spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the
+liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a ‘person’ at all.  General
+goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in
+rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough
+to distinguish her from thousands of other women: but Webster has no such
+purpose.  What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect;
+not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not
+Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and
+thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural,
+and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward.
+That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him
+and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful.  Webster himself
+seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too
+far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break
+down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten
+to explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would
+probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel,
+and therefore excuse, his mistress’s affection.  He has plenty of time to
+do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter;
+and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and
+thoughtful person.  If he gives promise of being more, he utterly
+disappoints that promise afterwards.  In the scene in which the Duchess
+tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio
+of the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive.  He hears his
+mistress’s declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is
+exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out
+of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part
+into something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good
+opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is
+Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves
+Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only
+from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that
+a man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day
+before the wedding, is not of much importance.
+
+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 Œschron the poet, that ‘he could not
+tell what Œschron 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 Musæus’ 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.
+
+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.
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Plays and Puritans, by Charles Kingsley
+
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+Title: Plays and Puritans
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
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+
+Release Date: December 26, 2014  [eBook #3142]
+[This file was first posted on January 2, 2001]
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+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAYS AND PURITANS***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from &ldquo;Plays and Puritans and Other
+Historical Essays&rdquo;, 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<h1>PLAYS AND PURITANS <a name="citation3"></a><a
+href="#footnote3" class="citation">[3]</a></h1>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> British Isles have been ringing
+for the last few years with the word &lsquo;Art&rsquo; in its
+German sense; with &lsquo;High Art,&rsquo; &lsquo;Symbolic
+Art,&rsquo; &lsquo;Ecclesiastical Art,&rsquo; &lsquo;Dramatic
+Art,&rsquo; &lsquo;Tragic Art,&rsquo; and so forth; and every
+well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something
+about Art.&nbsp; Yet in spite of all translations of German
+&lsquo;&AElig;sthetic&rsquo; treatises, and
+&lsquo;Kunstnovellen,&rsquo; the mass of the British people cares
+very little about the matter, and sits contented under the
+imputation of &lsquo;bad taste.&rsquo;&nbsp; Our stage, long
+since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; our music, like
+our architecture, only reproduces the past; our painting is only
+first-rate when it handles landscapes and animals, and seems
+likely so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody cares.&nbsp; Some of
+the deepest and most earnest minds vote the question, in general,
+a &lsquo;sham and a snare,&rsquo; and whisper to each other
+confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a
+&lsquo;bore,&rsquo; and that Sir Christopher Wren was a very good
+fellow after all; while the middle classes look on the Art
+movement half amused, as with a pretty toy, half sulkily
+suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think, apparently, that
+Art is very well when it means nothing, and is merely used to
+beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to mention that,
+if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand down to
+posterity likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family.&nbsp;
+But when &lsquo;Art&rsquo; dares to be in earnest, and to mean
+something, much more to connect itself with religion,
+Smith&rsquo;s tone alters.&nbsp; He will teach &lsquo;Art&rsquo;
+to keep in what he considers its place, and if it refuses, take
+the law of it, and put it into the Ecclesiastical Court.&nbsp; So
+he says, and what is more, he means what he says; and as all the
+world, from Hindostan to Canada, knows by most practical proof,
+what he means, he sooner or later does, perhaps not always in the
+wisest way, but still he does it.</p>
+<p>Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward
+&lsquo;Art&rsquo; is simply that of the old Puritans, softened,
+no doubt, and widened, but only enough so as to permit Art, not
+to encourage it.</p>
+<p>Some men&rsquo;s thoughts on this curious fact would probably
+take the form of some &aelig;sthetic <i>&agrave; priori</i>
+disquisition, beginning with &lsquo;the tendency of the infinite
+to reveal itself in the finite,&rsquo; and ending&mdash;who can
+tell where?&nbsp; But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves
+any skill in the <i>scientia scientiarum</i>, or say, &lsquo;The
+Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works
+of old.&nbsp; When He prepared the heavens, I was there, when He
+set a compass upon the face of the deep;&rsquo; we shall leave
+&aelig;sthetic science to those who think that they comprehend
+it; we shall, as simple disciples of Bacon, deal with facts and
+with history as &lsquo;the will of God revealed in
+facts.&rsquo;&nbsp; We will leave those who choose to settle what
+ought to be, and ourselves look patiently at that which actually
+was once, and which may be again; that so out of the conduct of
+our old Puritan forefathers (right or wrong), and their long war
+against &lsquo;Art,&rsquo; we may learn a wholesome lesson; as we
+doubtless shall, if we believe firmly that our history is neither
+more nor less than what the old Hebrew prophets called
+&lsquo;God&rsquo;s gracious dealings with his people,&rsquo; and
+not say in our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings
+Jacobite ballads (written forty years ago by men who cared no
+more for the Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, and were ready to
+kiss the dust off George the Fourth&rsquo;s feet at his visit to
+Edinburgh)&mdash;&lsquo;Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa
+puellis.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and
+invidious task.&nbsp; For Revolutions, in the great majority of
+cases, arise not merely from the crimes of a few great men, but
+from a general viciousness and decay of the whole, or the
+majority, of the nation; and that viciousness is certain to be
+made up, in great part, of a loosening of domestic ties, of
+breaches of the Seventh Commandment, and of sins connected with
+them, which a writer is now hardly permitted to mention.&nbsp; An
+&lsquo;evil and adulterous generation&rsquo; has been in all ages
+and countries the one marked out for intestine and internecine
+strife.&nbsp; That description is always applicable to a
+revolutionary generation; whether or not it also comes under the
+class of a superstitious one, &lsquo;seeking after a sign from
+heaven,&rsquo; only half believing its own creed, and, therefore,
+on tiptoe for miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time
+that it fiercely persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation
+or reform, seems about to snatch from weak faith the last plank
+which keeps it from sinking into the abyss.&nbsp; In describing
+such an age, the historian lies under this paradoxical
+disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to
+state it.&nbsp; If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and
+respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like
+these, will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful
+facts, or reject them as incredible, unaccustomed as they are to
+find similar horrors and abominations among people of their own
+rank, of whom they are naturally inclined to judge by their own
+standard of civilisation.&nbsp; Thus if any one, in justification
+of the Reformation and the British hatred of Popery during the
+sixteenth century, should dare to detail the undoubted facts of
+the Inquisition, and to comment on them dramatically enough to
+make his readers feel about them what men who witnessed them
+felt, he would be accused of a &lsquo;morbid love of
+horrors.&rsquo;&nbsp; If any one, in order to show how the French
+Revolution of 1793 was really God&rsquo;s judgment on the
+profligacy of the <i>ancien r&eacute;gime</i>, were to paint that
+profligacy as the men of the <i>ancien r&eacute;gime</i>
+unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would have a
+right to demand, &lsquo;How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting
+facts from their merited oblivion?&rsquo;&nbsp; Those, again, who
+are really acquainted with the history of Henry the
+Eighth&rsquo;s marriages, are well aware of facts which prove him
+to have been, not a man of violent and lawless passions, but of a
+cold temperament and a scrupulous conscience; but which cannot be
+stated in print, save in the most delicate and passing hints, to
+be taken only by those who at once understand such matters, and
+really wish to know the truth; while young ladies in general will
+still look on Henry as a monster in human form, because no one
+dares, or indeed ought, to undeceive them by anything beyond bare
+assertion without proof.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But what does it matter,&rsquo; some one may say,
+&lsquo;what young ladies think about history?&rsquo;&nbsp; This
+it matters; that these young ladies will some day be mothers, and
+as such will teach their children their own notions of modern
+history; and that, as long as men confine themselves to the
+teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the history of
+their own country to be handled exclusively by their unmarried
+sisters, so long will slanders, superstitions, and false
+political principles be perpetuated in the minds of our boys and
+girls.</p>
+<p>But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the
+historian&rsquo;s case is often too strong to be stated.&nbsp;
+There is always a reactionary party, or one at least which
+lingers sentimentally over the dream of past golden ages, such as
+that of which Cowley says, with a sort of na&iuml;ve blasphemy,
+at which one knows not whether to smile or sigh&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;When God, the cause to me and men
+unknown,<br />
+Forsook the royal houses, and his own.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the
+defeated system; but the historian has no such liberty to state
+the case against it.&nbsp; If he even asserts that he has
+counter-facts, but dare not state them, he is at once met with a
+<i>pr&aelig;judicium</i>.&nbsp; The mere fact of his having
+ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of
+prudish cant.&nbsp; &lsquo;What a very improper person he must be
+to like to dabble in such improper books that they must not even
+be quoted.&rsquo;&nbsp; If in self-defence he desperately gives
+his facts, he only increases the feeling against him, whilst the
+reactionists, hiding their blushing faces, find in their modesty
+an excuse for avoiding the truth; if, on the other hand, he
+content himself with bare assertion, and with indicating the
+sources from whence his conclusions are drawn, what care the
+reactionists?&nbsp; They know well that the public will not take
+the trouble to consult manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare
+biographies, but will content themselves with ready-made history;
+and they therefore go on unblushing to republish their old
+romance, leaving poor truth, after she has been painfully haled
+up to the well&rsquo;s mouth, to tumble miserably to the bottom
+of it again.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we
+dare of the great cause, Puritans <i>v.</i> Players, before our
+readers, trusting to find some of them at least sufficiently
+unacquainted with the common notions on the point to form a fair
+decision.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>What those notions are is well known.&nbsp; Very many of her
+Majesty&rsquo;s subjects are of opinion that the first half of
+the seventeenth century (if the Puritans had not interfered and
+spoilt all) was the most beautiful period of the English
+nation&rsquo;s life; that in it the chivalry and ardent piety of
+the Middle Age were happily combined with modern art and
+civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the Court, of
+stage-plays, of the fashions of the time, was only &lsquo;a
+scrupulous and fantastical niceness&rsquo;; barbaric and
+tasteless, if sincere; if insincere, the basest hypocrisy; that
+the stage-plays, though coarse, were no worse than Shakspeare,
+whom everybody reads; and that if the Stuarts patronised the
+stage they also raised it, and exercised a purifying
+censorship.&nbsp; And many more who do not go all these lengths
+with the reactionists, and cannot make up their mind to look to
+the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen or model courtiers,
+are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan
+&lsquo;preciseness,&rsquo; and to say lazily, that though, of
+course, something may have been wrong, yet there was no need to
+make such a fuss about the matter; and that at all events the
+Puritans were men of very bad taste.</p>
+<p>Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger&rsquo;s plays
+(1813), was probably the spokesman of his own generation,
+certainly of a great part of this generation also, when he
+informs us, that &lsquo;with Massinger terminated the triumph of
+dramatic poetry; indeed, the stage itself survived him but a
+short time.&nbsp; The nation was convulsed to its centre by
+contending factions, and a set of austere and gloomy fanatics,
+enemies to every elegant amusement and every social relaxation,
+rose upon the ruins of the State.&nbsp; Exasperated by the
+ridicule with which they had long been covered by the stage, they
+persecuted the actors with unrelenting severity, and consigned
+them, together with the writers, to hopeless obscurity and
+wretchedness.&nbsp; Taylor died in the extreme of poverty,
+Shirley opened a little school at Brentford, and Downe, the boast
+of the stage, kept an ale-house at Brentford.&nbsp; Others, and
+those the far greater number, joined the royal standard, and
+exerted themselves with more gallantry than good fortune in the
+service of their old and indulgent master.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;We have not yet, perhaps, fully estimated, and
+certainly not yet fully recovered, what was lost in that
+unfortunate struggle.&nbsp; The arts were rapidly advancing to
+perfection under the fostering wing of a monarch who united in
+himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake, and munificence to
+reward.&nbsp; Architecture, painting, and poetry were by turns
+the objects of his paternal care.&nbsp; Shakspeare was his
+&ldquo;closet companion,&rdquo; Jonson his poet, and in
+conjunction with Inigo Jones, his favoured architect, produced
+those magnificent entertainments,&rsquo; etc.</p>
+<p>* * *</p>
+<p>He then goes on to account for the supposed sudden fall of
+dramatic art at the Restoration, by the somewhat far-fetched
+theory that&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Such was the horror created in the general
+mind by the perverse and unsocial government from which they had
+so fortunately escaped, that the people appear to have anxiously
+avoided all retrospect, and, with Prynne and Vicars, to have lost
+sight of Shakspeare and &ldquo;his fellows.&rdquo;&nbsp; Instead,
+therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it abruptly ceased
+in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it were, a manner
+of their own, or fetched it from the heavy monotony of their
+continental neighbours.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>So is history written, and, what is more, believed.&nbsp; The
+amount of misrepresentation in this passage (which would probably
+pass current with most readers in the present day) is quite
+ludicrous.&nbsp; In the first place, it will hardly be believed
+that these words occur in an essay which, after extolling
+Massinger as one of the greatest poets of his age, second,
+indeed, only to Shakspeare, also informs us (and, it seems, quite
+truly) that, so far from having been really appreciated or
+patronised, he maintained a constant struggle with
+adversity,&mdash;&lsquo;that even the bounty of his particular
+friends, on which he chiefly relied, left him in a state of
+absolute dependence,&rsquo;&mdash;that while &lsquo;other writers
+for the stage had their periods of good fortune, Massinger seems
+to have enjoyed no gleam of sunshine; his life was all one misty
+day, and &ldquo;shadows, clouds, and darkness rested on
+it.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>So much for Charles&rsquo;s patronage of a really great
+poet.&nbsp; What sort of men he did patronise, practically and in
+earnest, we shall see hereafter, when we come to speak of Mr.
+Shirley.</p>
+<p>But Mr. Gifford must needs give an instance to prove that
+Charles was &lsquo;not inattentive to the success of
+Massinger,&rsquo; and a curious one it is; of the same class,
+unfortunately, as that with the man in the old story, who
+recorded with pride that the King had spoken to him,
+and&mdash;had told him to get out of the way.</p>
+<p>Massinger in his &lsquo;King and the Subject&rsquo; had
+introduced Don Pedro of Spain thus speaking&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Monies!&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll raise supplies
+which way we please,<br />
+And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which<br />
+We&rsquo;ll mulct you as we shall think fit.&nbsp; The
+C&aelig;sars<br />
+In Rome were wise, acknowledging no law<br />
+But what their swords did ratify, the wives<br />
+And daughters of the senators bowing to<br />
+Their will, as deities,&rsquo; etc.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Against which passage Charles, reading over the play before he
+allowed of it, had written, &lsquo;This is too insolent, and not
+to be printed.&rsquo;&nbsp; Too insolent it certainly was,
+considering the state of public matters in the year 1638.&nbsp;
+It would be interesting enough to analyse the reasons which made
+Charles dislike in the mouth of Pedro sentiments so very like his
+own; but we must proceed, only pointing out the way in which men,
+determined to repeat the traditional clap-trap about the Stuarts,
+are actually blind to the meaning of the very facts which they
+themselves quote.</p>
+<p>Where, then, do the facts of history contradict Mr.
+Gifford?</p>
+<p>We believe that, so far from the triumph of dramatic poetry
+terminating with Massinger, dramatic art had been steadily
+growing worse from the first years of James; that instead of the
+arts advancing to perfection under Charles the First, they
+steadily deteriorated in quality, though the supply became more
+abundant; that so far from there having been a sudden change for
+the worse in the drama after the Restoration, the taste of the
+courts of Charles the First and of Charles the Second are
+indistinguishable; that the court poets, and probably the actors
+also, of the early part of Charles the Second&rsquo;s reign had
+many of them belonged to the court of Charles the First, as did
+Davenant, the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, Fanshaw, and Shirley
+himself; that the common notion of a &lsquo;new manner&rsquo;
+having been introduced from France after the Restoration, or
+indeed having come in at all, is not founded on fact, the only
+change being that the plays of Charles the Second&rsquo;s time
+were somewhat more stupid, and that while five of the seven
+deadly sins had always had free licence on the stage, blasphemy
+and profane swearing were now enfranchised to fill up the
+seven.&nbsp; As for the assertion that the new manner (supposing
+it to have existed) was imported from France, there is far more
+reason to believe that the French copied us than we them, and
+that if they did not learn from Charles the First&rsquo;s poets
+the superstition of &lsquo;the three unities,&rsquo; they at
+least learnt to make ancient kings and heroes talk and act like
+seventeenth century courtiers, and to exchange their old clumsy
+masques and translations of Italian and Spanish farces for a
+comedy depicting native scoundrelism.&nbsp; Probably enough,
+indeed, the great and sudden development of the French stage,
+which took place in the middle of the seventeenth century under
+Corneille and Moli&egrave;re, was excited by the English cavalier
+playwrights who took refuge in France.</p>
+<p>No doubt, as Mr. Gifford says, the Puritans were exasperated
+against the stage-players by the insults heaped on them; but the
+cause of quarrel lay far deeper than any such personal
+soreness.&nbsp; The Puritans had attacked the players before the
+players meddled with them, and that on principle; with what
+justification must be considered hereafter.&nbsp; But the fact is
+(and this seems to have been, like many other facts, conveniently
+forgotten), that the Puritans were by no means alone in their
+protest against the stage, and that the war was not begun
+exclusively by them.&nbsp; As early as the latter half of the
+sixteenth century, not merely Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and
+Reynolds had lifted up their voices against them, but Archbishop
+Parker, Bishop Babington, Bishop Hall, and the author of the
+<i>Mirror for Magistrates</i>.&nbsp; The University of Oxford, in
+1584, had passed a statute forbidding common plays and players in
+the university, on the very same moral grounds on which the
+Puritans objected to them.&nbsp; The city of London, in 1580, had
+obtained from the Queen the suppression of plays on Sundays; and
+not long after, &lsquo;considering that play-houses and
+dicing-houses were traps for young gentlemen and others,&rsquo;
+obtained leave from the Queen and Privy Council to thrust the
+players out of the city, and to pull down the play-houses, five
+in number; and, paradoxical as it may seem, there is little doubt
+that, by the letter of the law, &lsquo;stage plays and
+enterludes&rsquo; were, even to the end of Charles the
+First&rsquo;s reign, &lsquo;unlawful pastime,&rsquo; being
+forbidden by 14 Eliz., 39 Eliz., 1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1
+Caroli, and the players subject to severe punishment as
+&lsquo;rogues and vagabonds.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Act of 1 Jacobi
+seems even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which, in
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s reign, had allowed companies of players the
+protection of a &lsquo;baron or honourable person of greater
+degree,&rsquo; who might &lsquo;authorise them to play under his
+hand and seal of arms.&rsquo;&nbsp; So that the Puritans were
+only demanding of the sovereigns that they should enforce the
+very laws which they themselves had made, and which they and
+their nobles were setting at defiance.&nbsp; Whether the plays
+ought to have been put down, and whether the laws were necessary,
+is a different question; but certainly the court and the
+aristocracy stood in the questionable, though too common,
+position of men who made laws which prohibited to the poor
+amusements in which they themselves indulged without
+restraint.</p>
+<p>But were these plays objectionable?&nbsp; As far as the
+comedies are concerned, that will depend on the answer to the
+question, Are plays objectionable, the staple subject of which is
+adultery?&nbsp; Now, we cannot but agree with the Puritans, that
+adultery is not a subject for comedy at all.&nbsp; It may be for
+tragedy; but for comedy never.&nbsp; It is a sin; not merely
+theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the
+parent of seven other sins,&mdash;of falsehood, suspicion, hate,
+murder, and a whole bevy of devils.&nbsp; The prevalence of
+adultery in any country has always been a sign and a cause of
+social insincerity, division, and revolution; where a people has
+learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light
+thing, that people has been always careless, base, selfish,
+cowardly,&mdash;ripe for slavery.&nbsp; And we must say that
+either the courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles the First
+were in that state, or that the poets were doing their best to
+make them so.</p>
+<p>We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point;
+we shall only say that there is hardly a comedy of the
+seventeenth century, with the exception of Shakspeare&rsquo;s, in
+which adultery is not introduced as a subject of laughter, and
+often made the staple of the whole plot.&nbsp; The seducer is, if
+not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a &lsquo;handsome
+gentleman&rsquo;; the injured husband is, as in that Italian
+literature of which we shall speak shortly, the object of every
+kind of scorn and ridicule.&nbsp; In this latter habit (common to
+most European nations) there is a sort of justice.&nbsp; A man
+can generally retain his wife&rsquo;s affections if he will
+behave himself like a man; and &lsquo;injured husbands&rsquo;
+have for the most part no one to blame but themselves.&nbsp; But
+the matter is not a subject for comedy; not even in that case
+which has been always too common in France, Italy, and the Romish
+countries, and which seems to have been painfully common in
+England in the seventeenth century, when, by a <i>mariage de
+convenance</i>, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a
+decrepit old man.&nbsp; Such things are not comedies, but
+tragedies; subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal
+ribaldry.&nbsp; Therefore the men who look on them in the light
+which the Stuart dramatists looked are not good men, and do no
+good service to the country; especially when they erect adultery
+into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in teaching
+their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and
+consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity,
+pointing &lsquo;Eastward Ho!&rsquo; <i>i.e.</i> to the city of
+London, as the quarter where court gallants can find boundless
+indulgence for their passions amid the fair wives of dull and
+cowardly citizens.&nbsp; If the citizens drove the players out of
+London, the playwrights took good care to have their
+revenge.&nbsp; The citizen is their standard butt.&nbsp; These
+shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have
+taken a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in
+insulting them.&nbsp; Sad it is to see in Shirley&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Gamester,&rsquo; Charles the First&rsquo;s favourite play,
+a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle
+proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his
+fellow-merchants.&nbsp; Surely, if Charles ever could have
+repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a
+humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of
+having given those base words his royal warrant and
+approbation.</p>
+<p>The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as
+questionable as the comedies.&nbsp; That there are noble plays
+among them here and there, no one denies&mdash;any more than that
+there are exquisitely amusing plays among the comedies; but as
+the staple interest of the comedies is dirt, so the staple
+interest of the tragedies is crime.&nbsp; Revenge, hatred,
+villany, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant
+themes, and (with the exception of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his
+earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger) they handle these horrors
+with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and
+amusing the audience, and of displaying their own power of
+delineation in a way which makes one but too ready to believe the
+accusations of the Puritans (supported as they are by many ugly
+anecdotes) that the play-writers and actors were mostly men of
+fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an
+acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch.&nbsp; This
+is notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the
+modern &lsquo;Literature of Horror,&rsquo; and the two
+literatures are morally identical.&nbsp; We do not know of a
+complaint which can be justly brought against the School of
+Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply to the average
+tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars.</p>
+<p>This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so
+greedily, tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon
+them (and not undeservedly) heavy odium.</p>
+<p>One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as
+against Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from
+Italy.&nbsp; We must fairly put ourselves into the position of an
+honest Englishman of the seventeenth century before we can
+appreciate the huge <i>pr&aelig;judicium</i> which must needs
+have arisen in his mind against anything which could claim a
+Transalpine parentage.&nbsp; Italy was then not merely the
+stronghold of Popery.&nbsp; That in itself would have been a fair
+reason for others beside Puritans saying, &lsquo;If the root be
+corrupt, the fruit will be also: any expression of Italian
+thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome while her vitals
+are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only half
+believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher
+classes, even those of the priesthood; but only kept up for their
+private aggrandisement.&rsquo;&nbsp; But there was more than
+hypothesis in favour of the men who might say this; there was
+universal, notorious, shocking fact.&nbsp; It was a fact that
+Italy was the centre where sins were invented worthy of the doom
+of the Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all
+nations who had connection with her.&nbsp; We dare give no proof
+of this assertion.&nbsp; The Italian morals and the Italian
+lighter literature of the sixteenth and of the beginning of the
+seventeenth century were such, that one is almost ashamed to
+confess that one has looked into them, although the painful task
+is absolutely necessary for one who wishes to understand either
+the European society of the time or the Puritan hatred of the
+drama.&nbsp; <i>Non ragionam di lor: ma guarda &egrave;
+passa</i>.</p>
+<p>It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into
+England by the young men who, under pretence of learning the
+Italian polish, travelled to Italy.&nbsp; From the days of
+Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the middle of
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s reign, this foul tide had begun to set toward
+England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in
+passing through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its
+course hitherward; till, to judge by Marston&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Satires,&rsquo; certain members of the higher classes had,
+by the beginning of James&rsquo;s reign, learnt nearly all which
+the Italians had to teach them.&nbsp; Marston writes in a rage,
+it is true; foaming, stamping, and vapouring too much to escape
+the suspicion of exaggeration; yet he dared not have published
+the things which he does, had he not fair ground for some at
+least of his assertions.&nbsp; And Marston, be it remembered, was
+no Puritan, but a playwright, and Ben Jonson&rsquo;s friend.</p>
+<p>Bishop Hall, in his &lsquo;Satires,&rsquo; describes things
+bad enough, though not so bad as Marston does; but what is even
+more to the purpose, he wrote, and dedicated to James, a long
+dissuasive against the fashion of running abroad.&nbsp; Whatever
+may be thought of the arguments of &lsquo;Quo vadis?&mdash;a
+Censure of Travel,&rsquo; its main drift is clear enough.&nbsp;
+Young gentlemen, by going to Italy, learnt to be fops and
+profligates, and probably Papists into the bargain.&nbsp; These
+assertions there is no denying.&nbsp; Since the days of Lord
+Oxford, most of the ridiculous and expensive fashions in dress
+had come from Italy, as well as the newest modes of sin; and the
+playwrights themselves make no secret of the fact.&nbsp; There is
+no need to quote instances; they are innumerable; and the most
+serious are not fit to be quoted, scarcely the titles of the
+plays in which they occur; but they justify almost every line of
+Bishop Hall&rsquo;s questions (of which some of the strongest
+expressions have necessarily been omitted):&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;What mischief have we among us which we
+have not borrowed?</p>
+<p>&lsquo;To begin at our skin: who knows not whence we had the
+variety of our vain disguises?&nbsp; As if we had not wit enough
+to be foolish unless we were taught it.&nbsp; These dresses,
+being constant in their mutability, show us our masters.&nbsp;
+What is it that we have not learned of our neighbours, save only
+to be proud good-cheap? whom would it not vex to see how that the
+other sex hath learned to make anticks and monsters of
+themselves?&nbsp; Whence come their (absurd fashions); but the
+one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the
+worse-minded courtesans of Italy?&nbsp; Whence else learned they
+to daub these mud-walls with apothecaries&rsquo; mortar; and
+those high washes, which are so cunningly licked on that the wet
+napkin of Phryne should he deceived?&nbsp; Whence the frizzled
+and powdered bushes of their borrowed hair?&nbsp; As if they were
+ashamed of the head of God&rsquo;s making, and proud of the
+tire-woman&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Where learned we that devilish art and
+practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are
+taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men?&nbsp;
+Where had we that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the
+nose is no less pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than
+either? wherein the piles of dishes make barricadoes against the
+appetite, and with a pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry
+guest.&nbsp; Where those forms of ceremonious quaffing, in which
+men have learned to make gods of others and beasts of themselves,
+and lose their reason while they pretend to do reason?&nbsp;
+Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a wild tongue, that
+runs, with reins on the neck, through the bedchambers of princes,
+their closets, their council tables, and spares not the very
+cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred out of the most
+retired secrecy of inferior greatness?&nbsp; Where the change of
+noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some few
+butterflies?&nbsp; Where the art of dishonesty in practical
+Machiavelism, in false equivocations?&nbsp; Where the slight
+account of that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and
+tolerated as not unnecessary?&nbsp; Where the skill of civil and
+honourable hypocrisy in those formal compliments which do neither
+expect belief from others nor carry any from ourselves?&nbsp;
+Where&rsquo; (and here Bishop Hall begins to speak concerning
+things on which we must be silent, as of matters notorious and
+undeniable.)&nbsp; &lsquo;Where that close Atheism, which
+secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to
+believe, wisdom to profess any religion?&nbsp; Where the bloody
+and tragical science of king-killing, the new divinity of
+disobedience and rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith
+foreign conversation hath endangered the infection of our
+peace?&rsquo;&mdash;Bishop Hall&rsquo;s &lsquo;Quo Vadis, or a
+Censure of Travel,&rsquo; vol xii. sect. 22.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the
+mother-country of the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful
+fertility ever since the beginning of the sixteenth
+century.&nbsp; However much truth there may be in the common
+assertion that the old &lsquo;miracle plays&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;mysteries&rsquo; were the parents of the English drama (as
+they certainly were of the Spanish and the Italian), we have yet
+to learn how much our stage owed, from its first rise under
+Elizabeth, to direct importations from Italy.&nbsp; This is
+merely thrown out as a suggestion; to establish the fact would
+require a wide acquaintance with the early Italian drama;
+meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due weight.&nbsp; The
+names of the characters in most of our early regular comedies are
+Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes, are the manners,
+at least they profess to be so.&nbsp; Next, the plots of many of
+the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and
+if Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey
+where others found poison) went to Cinthio for
+&lsquo;Othello&rsquo; and &lsquo;Measure for Measure,&rsquo; to
+Bandello for &lsquo;Romeo and Juliet,&rsquo; and to Boccaccio for
+&lsquo;Cymbeline,&rsquo; there were plenty of other playwrights
+who would go to the same sources for worse matter, or at least
+catch from these profligate writers somewhat of their Italian
+morality, which exalts adultery into a virtue, seduction into a
+science, and revenge into a duty; which revels in the horrible as
+freely as any French novelist of the romantic school; and whose
+only value is its pitiless exposure of the profligacy of the
+Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be valuable which makes a
+mock equally of things truly and falsely sacred, and leaves on
+the reader&rsquo;s mind the fear that the writer saw nothing in
+heaven or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self-sacrifice,
+save personal enjoyment.</p>
+<p>Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to
+judge from their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to
+assert, were drawn from life, and for which they give names,
+places, and all details which might amuse the noble gentlemen and
+ladies to whom these stories are dedicated), this had been the
+morality of Italy for some centuries past.&nbsp; This, also, is
+the general morality of the English stage in the seventeenth
+century.&nbsp; Can we wonder that thinking men should have seen a
+connection between Italy and the stage?&nbsp; Certainly the
+playwrights put themselves between the horns of an ugly
+dilemma.&nbsp; Either the vices which they depicted were those of
+general English society, and of themselves also (for they lived
+in the very heart of town and court foppery); or else they were
+the vices of a foreign country, with which the English were
+comparatively unacquainted.&nbsp; In the first case, we can only
+say that the Stuart age in England was one which deserved
+purgation of the most terrible kind, and to get rid of which the
+severest and most abnormal measures would have been not only
+justifiable, but, to judge by the experience of all history,
+necessary; for extraordinary diseases never have been, and never
+will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines.&nbsp; In the
+second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds of
+the people, and, instead of &lsquo;holding up a mirror to
+vice,&rsquo; instructing frail virtue in vices which she had not
+learned, and fully justifying old Prynne&rsquo;s indignant
+complaint&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long
+since forgotten villanies on the stage, is so far from working a
+detestation of them in the spectators&rsquo; minds (who,
+perchance, were utterly ignorant of them, till they were
+acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed no
+dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill
+spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to
+reduce them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their
+spurious ill-serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some
+tragic interlude.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own
+police reports will sufficiently prove.&nbsp; It is notorious
+that the representation in our own days of &lsquo;Tom and
+Jerry&rsquo; and of &lsquo;Jack Sheppard&rsquo; did excite dozens
+of young lads to imitate the heroes of those dramas; and such
+must have been the effect of similar and worse representations in
+the Stuart age.&nbsp; No rational man will need the authority of
+Bishop Babington, Doctor Leighton, Archbishop Parker, Purchas,
+Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any one else, Churchman or Puritan,
+prelate or &lsquo;penitent reclaimed play-poet,&rsquo; like
+Stephen Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert,
+citizens&rsquo; wives (who are generally represented as the
+proper subjects for seduction) &lsquo;have, even on their
+deathbeds, with tears confessed that they have received, at these
+spectacles, such evil infections as have turned their minds from
+chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women, light
+huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt, their
+children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault of
+a dangerous state;&rsquo; or that &lsquo;The devices of carrying
+and re-carrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars
+to transport their tokens by colourable means to sell their
+merchandise, and other kinds of policies to beguile fathers of
+their children, husbands of their wives, guardians of their
+wards, and masters of their servants, were aptly taught in these
+schools of abuse.&rsquo; <a name="citation27a"></a><a
+href="#footnote27a" class="citation">[27a]</a></p>
+<p>The matter is simple enough.&nbsp; We should not allow these
+plays to be acted in our own day, because we know that they would
+produce their effects.&nbsp; We should call him a madman who
+allowed his daughters or his servants to see such
+representations. <a name="citation27b"></a><a href="#footnote27b"
+class="citation">[27b]</a>&nbsp; Why, in all fairness, were the
+Puritans wrong in condemning that which we now have absolutely
+forbidden?</p>
+<p>We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness
+of the old play-houses.&nbsp; Gosson and his colleague the
+anonymous Penitent assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not
+only schools but antechambers to houses of a worse kind, and that
+the lessons learned in the pit were only not practised also in
+the pit.&nbsp; What reason have we to doubt it, who know that
+till Mr. Macready commenced a practical reformation of this
+abuse, for which his name will be ever respected, our own
+comparatively purified stage was just the same?&nbsp; Let any one
+who remembers the saloons of Drury Lane and Covent Garden thirty
+years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the Globe or
+the Fortune must have been, in days when players were allowed to
+talk inside as freely as the public behaved outside.</p>
+<p>Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention
+of demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of
+correcting them.&nbsp; We will lay on them the blame of no
+special <i>malus animus</i>: but, at the same time, we must treat
+their fine words about &lsquo;holding a mirror up to vice,&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;showing the age its own deformity,&rsquo; as mere
+cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in
+cheek.&nbsp; It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it
+was when, two generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its
+falsehood in the mouth of Congreve.&nbsp; If the poets had really
+intended to show vice its own deformity, they would have
+represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not
+as triumphant.&nbsp; It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in
+works in which there is no moral justice.&nbsp; The only
+condition which can excuse the representation of evil is
+omitted.&nbsp; The simple fact is that the poets wanted to draw a
+house; that this could most easily be done by the coarsest and
+most violent means; and that not being often able to find stories
+exciting enough in the past records of sober English society,
+they went to Italy and Spain for the violent passions and wild
+crimes of southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless,
+by a superstition believed in enough to darken and brutalise, but
+not enough to control, its victims.&nbsp; Those were the
+countries which just then furnished that strange mixture of
+inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the immoral
+playwright&rsquo;s fittest material; because, while the inward
+savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward
+civilisation brings the character near enough to them to give
+them a likeness of themselves in their worst moments, such as no
+&lsquo;Mystery of Cain&rsquo; or &lsquo;Tragedy of
+Prometheus&rsquo; can give.</p>
+<p>Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the
+drama for its lessons in human nature?&nbsp; On that special
+point something must be said hereafter.&nbsp; Meanwhile, hear one
+of the sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of
+any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his
+vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions
+as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare.&nbsp; Let
+Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to
+&lsquo;Volpone&rsquo; tell us in his own noble prose what he
+thought of the average morality of his contemporary
+playwrights:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;For if men will impartially and not asquint
+look toward the offices and functions of a poet, they will easily
+conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man&rsquo;s being
+a good poet without first being a good man.&nbsp; He that is said
+to be able to inform young men to all good discipline, inflame
+grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in their best and
+supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to
+their first strength; that comes forth the interpreter and
+arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human,
+a master in manners and can alone (or with a few) effect the
+business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride
+and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon.&nbsp; But
+it will here be hastily answered that the writers of these days
+are other things, that not only their manners but their natures
+are inverted, and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of
+poet but the abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now,
+especially in dramatick, or (as they term it) stage poetry,
+nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemies, all licence of
+offence toward God and man is practised.&nbsp; I dare not deny a
+great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not), because in some
+men&rsquo;s abortive features (and would God they had never seen
+the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold
+adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered,
+a more malicious slander.&nbsp; For every particular I can (and
+from a most clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to
+think toward the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of
+such foul and unwashed . . . [his expression is too strong for
+quotation] as is now made the food of the scene.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its
+lofty ideal of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan
+complaints against the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger
+sentence occurs:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The increase of which lust in liberty,
+together with the present trade of the stage, in all their
+masculine interludes, what liberal soul doth not abhor?&nbsp;
+Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered, and that with
+such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth
+of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with
+(indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to
+turn the blood of a Christian to water.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems,
+play-writing a peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers
+improving company.&nbsp; After him we should say no further
+testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to be necessary.&nbsp;
+He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative; but his bitter
+words suggest at least this dilemma.&nbsp; Either they are true,
+and the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says it was) that of
+Gehenna: or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and
+envy against more successful poets.&nbsp; And what does that
+latter prove, but that the greatest poet of his age (after
+Shakspeare has gone) was not as much esteemed as some poets whom
+we know to have been more filthy and more horrible than he?
+which, indeed, is the main complaint of Jonson himself.&nbsp; It
+will be rejoined, of course, that he was an altogether envious
+man; that he envied Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster
+plays, at &lsquo;The Winter&rsquo;s Tale&rsquo; and &lsquo;The
+Tempest,&rsquo; in the prologue to &lsquo;Every Man in his
+Humour&rsquo;; and, indeed, Jonson&rsquo;s writings, and those of
+many other playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry
+called out the bitterest hatred and the basest vanity; and that,
+perhaps, Shakspeare&rsquo;s great soul was giving way to the
+pettiest passions, when in &lsquo;Hamlet&rsquo; he had his fling
+at the &lsquo;aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on
+the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for
+&rsquo;t.&rsquo;&nbsp; It may be that he was girding in return at
+Jonson, when he complained that &lsquo;their writer did them
+wrong to make them complain against their own succession,&rsquo;
+<i>i.e.</i> against themselves, when &lsquo;grown to common
+players.&rsquo;&nbsp; Be that as it may.&nbsp; Great Shakspeare
+may have been unjust to only less great Jonson, as Jonson was to
+Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly is not so in all his
+charges.&nbsp; Some of the faults which he attributes to
+Shakspeare are really faults.</p>
+<p>At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average
+of his contemporaries, by the evidence of the men&rsquo;s own
+plays.&nbsp; We know that the decadence of the stage of which he
+complains went on uninterruptedly after his time, and in the very
+direction which he pointed out.</p>
+<p>On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of
+poetry &lsquo;made a wall in our father&rsquo;s house, and the
+bricks are alive to testify unto this day.&rsquo;&nbsp; So that
+we cannot do better than give a few samples thereof, at least
+samples decent enough for modern readers, and let us begin, not
+with a hodman, but with Jonson himself.</p>
+<p>Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was
+a very great genius, immaculate or not; &lsquo;Rare Ben,&rsquo;
+with all his faults.&nbsp; One can never look without affection
+on the magnificent manhood of that rich free forehead, even
+though one may sigh over the petulance and pride which brood upon
+the lip and eyebrow,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of
+scorn,<br />
+The love of love.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one
+fancies, never could.&nbsp; One ought to have, too, a sort of
+delicacy about saying much against him; for he is dead, and can
+make, for the time being at least, no rejoinder.&nbsp; There are
+dead men whom one is not much ashamed to &lsquo;upset&rsquo;
+after their death, because one would not have been much afraid of
+doing so when they were alive.&nbsp; But &lsquo;Rare Ben&rsquo;
+had terrible teeth, and used them too.&nbsp; A man would have
+thought twice ere he snapt at him living, and therefore it seems
+somewhat a cowardly trick to bark securely at his ghost.&nbsp;
+Nevertheless it is no unfair question to ask&mdash;Do not his own
+words justify the Puritan complaints?&nbsp; But if so, why does
+he rail at the Puritans for making their complaints?&nbsp; His
+answer would have been that they railed in ignorance, not merely
+at low art, as we call it now, but at high art and all art.&nbsp;
+Be it so.&nbsp; Here was their fault, if fault it was in those
+days.&nbsp; For to discriminate between high art and low art they
+must have seen both.&nbsp; And for Jonson&rsquo;s wrath to be
+fair and just he must have shown them both.&nbsp; Let us see what
+the pure drama is like which he wishes to substitute for the foul
+drama of his contemporaries; and, to bring the matter nearer
+home, let us take one of the plays in which he hits deliberately
+at the Puritans, namely the &lsquo;Alchemist,&rsquo; said to have
+been first acted in 1610 &lsquo;by the king&rsquo;s
+majesty&rsquo;s servants.&rsquo;&nbsp; Look, then, at this
+well-known play, and take Jonson at his word.&nbsp; Allow that
+Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome are, as they very probably are,
+fair portraits of a class among the sectaries of the day: but
+bear in mind, too, that if this be allowed, the other characters
+shall be held as fair portraits also.&nbsp; Otherwise, all must
+he held to be caricature; and then the onslaught on the Puritans
+vanishes into nothing, or worse.&nbsp; Now in either case,
+Ananias and Tribulation are the best men in the play.&nbsp; They
+palter with their consciences, no doubt: but they have
+consciences, which no one else in the play has, except poor
+Surly; and he, be it remembered, comes to shame, is made a
+laughing-stock, and &lsquo;cheats himself,&rsquo; as he complains
+at last, &lsquo;by that same foolish vice of honesty&rsquo;:
+while in all the rest what have we but every form of human
+baseness?&nbsp; Lovell, the master, if he is to be considered a
+negative character as doing no wrong, has, at all events, no more
+recorded of him than the noble act of marrying by deceit a young
+widow for the sake of her money, the philosopher&rsquo;s stone,
+by the bye, and highest object of most of the seventeenth century
+dramatists.&nbsp; If most of the rascals meet with due disgrace,
+none of them is punished; and the greatest rascal of all, who,
+when escape is impossible, turns traitor, and after deserving the
+cart and pillory a dozen times for his last and most utter
+baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the honour of
+addressing the audience at the play&rsquo;s end in the most smug
+and self-satisfied tone, and of &lsquo;putting himself on you
+that are my country,&rsquo; not doubting, it seems, that there
+were among them a fair majority who would think him a very smart
+fellow, worthy of all imitation.</p>
+<p>Now is this play a moral or an immoral one?&nbsp; Of its
+coarseness we say nothing.&nbsp; We should not endure it, of
+course, nowadays; and on that point something must be said
+hereafter: but if we were to endure plain speaking as the only
+method of properly exposing vice, should we endure the moral
+which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it?</p>
+<p>And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among
+the Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch?&nbsp; What but a
+background of profligacy and frivolity?</p>
+<p>A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the age
+may be found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself.&nbsp;
+Howsoever pure and lofty the ideal which he laid down for himself
+(and no doubt honestly) in the Preface to &lsquo;Volpone,&rsquo;
+he found it impossible to keep up to it.&nbsp; Nine years
+afterwards we find him, in his &lsquo;Bartholomew Fair,&rsquo;
+catering to the low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at
+which, if one must needs laugh&mdash;as who that was not more
+than man could help doing over that scene between Rabbi Busy and
+the puppets?&mdash;shallow and untrue as the gist of the humour
+is, one feels the next moment as if one had been indulging in
+unholy mirth at the expense of some grand old Noah who has come
+to shame in his cups.</p>
+<p>But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the
+&lsquo;Gipsies Metamorphosed,&rsquo; presented to the king in
+1621, when Jonson was forty-seven; old enough, one would have
+thought, to know better.&nbsp; It is not merely the insincere and
+all but blasphemous adulation which is shocking,&mdash;that was
+but the fashion of the times: but the treating these gipsies and
+beggars, and their &lsquo;thieves&rsquo; Latin&rsquo; dialect,
+their filthiness and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely
+as themes for immoral and inhuman laughter.&nbsp; Jonson was by
+no means the only poet of that day to whom the hordes of
+profligate and heathen nomads which infested England were only a
+comical phase of humanity, instead of being, as they would be
+now, objects of national shame and sorrow, of pity and love,
+which would call out in the attempt to redeem them the talents
+and energies of good men.&nbsp; But Jonson certainly sins more in
+this respect than any of his contemporaries.&nbsp; He takes a low
+pleasure in parading his intimate acquaintance with these poor
+creatures&rsquo; foul slang and barbaric laws; and is, we should
+say, the natural father of that lowest form of all literature,
+which has since amused the herd, though in a form greatly
+purified, in the form of &lsquo;Beggars&rsquo; Operas,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Dick Turpins,&rsquo; and &lsquo;Jack
+Sheppards.&rsquo;&nbsp; Everything which is objectionable in such
+modern publications as these was exhibited, in far grosser forms,
+by one of the greatest poets who ever lived, for the amusement of
+a king of England; and yet the world still is at a loss to know
+why sober and God-fearing men detested both the poet and the
+king.</p>
+<p>And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the
+degradation of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur
+passages of the old sweetness and grandeur; <i>disjecta membra
+poet&aelig;</i> such as these, which, even although addressed to
+James, are perfect:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&lsquo;3<i>rd</i>
+<i>Gipsy</i>.</p>
+<p>Look how the winds upon the waves grow tame,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Take up land sounds upon their purple wings,<br />
+And, catching each from other, bear the same<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To every angle of their sacred springs.<br />
+So will we take his praise, and hurl his name<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; About the globe, in thousand airy rings.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">* * * *</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Let us pass on.&nbsp; Why stay to look upon the fall of such a
+spirit?</p>
+<p>There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak
+of here, and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as
+is possible.&nbsp; The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land
+Busy&rsquo;s expense, in &lsquo;Bartholomew Fair,&rsquo; turns on
+the Puritan dislike of seeing women&rsquo;s parts acted by
+boys.&nbsp; Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall
+foul of puppets instead of live human beings: but the question is
+shirked nevertheless.&nbsp; What honest answer he could have
+given to the Puritans is hard to conceive.&nbsp; Prynne, in his
+&lsquo;Histriomastix,&rsquo; may have pushed a little too far the
+argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law: yet one
+would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses&rsquo; law,
+not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did
+harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that,
+therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day
+a similar practice would produce a similar evil.&nbsp; Our firm
+conviction is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact,
+Prynne was perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player
+was pretty certainly to send him to the devil.&nbsp; Let any man
+of common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young
+boy&rsquo;s mind which would be produced by representing
+shamelessly before a public audience not merely the language, but
+the passions, of such women as occur in almost every play.&nbsp;
+We appeal to common sense&mdash;would any father allow his own
+children to personate, even in private, the basest of
+mankind?&nbsp; And yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it
+is to be supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents
+allow their sons to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art
+of Terence, while grave and reverend prelates and divines look on
+approving.&nbsp; The Westminster play has had no very purifying
+influence on the minds of the young gentlemen who personate
+heathen damsels; and we only ask, What must have been the effect
+of representing far fouler characters than Terence&rsquo;s on the
+minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes?&nbsp; Prynne and
+others hint at still darker abominations than the mere defilement
+of the conscience: we shall say nothing of them, but that, from
+collateral evidence, we believe every word they say; and that
+when pretty little Cupid&rsquo;s mother, in Jonson&rsquo;s
+Christmas masque, tells how &lsquo;She could have had money
+enough for him, had she been tempted, and have let him out by the
+week to the king&rsquo;s players,&rsquo; and how &lsquo;Master
+Burbadge has been about and about with her for him, and old Mr.
+Hemings too,&rsquo; she had better have tied a stone round the
+child&rsquo;s neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have
+handed him over to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of
+his degradation more money to buy land withal, and settle
+comfortably in his native town, on the fruits of others&rsquo;
+sin.&nbsp; Honour to old Prynne, bitter and narrow as he was, for
+his passionate and eloquent appeals to the humanity and
+Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor children whom
+not a bishop on the bench interfered to save; but, while they
+were writing and persecuting in behalf of baptismal regeneration,
+left those to perish whom they declared so stoutly to be
+regenerate in baptism.&nbsp; Prynne used that argument too, and
+declared these stage-plays to be among the very &lsquo;pomps and
+vanities which Christians renounced at baptism.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+may or may not have been wrong in identifying them with the old
+heathen pantomimes and games of the circus, and in burying his
+adversaries under a mountain of quotations from the Fathers and
+the Romish divines (for Prynne&rsquo;s reading seems to have been
+quite enormous).&nbsp; Those very prelates could express
+reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught in them
+which could be made to justify their own system, though perhaps
+it had really even less to do therewith than the Roman pantomimes
+had with the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had
+retained in her Catechism the old Roman word &lsquo;pomps,&rsquo;
+as one of the things which were to be renounced; and as
+&lsquo;pomps&rsquo; confessedly meant at first those very
+spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre, Prynne could not be
+very illogical in believing that, as it had been retained, it was
+retained to testify against something, and probably against the
+thing in England most like the &lsquo;pomps&rsquo; of heathen
+Rome.&nbsp; Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide whether of the two
+was the better Churchman&mdash;Prynne, who tried to make the
+baptismal covenant mean something, or Laud, who allowed such a
+play as &lsquo;The Ordinary&rsquo; to be written by his especial
+<i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;</i>, Cartwright, the Oxford scholar, and
+acted before him probably by Oxford scholars, certainly by
+christened boys.&nbsp; We do not pretend to pry into the counsels
+of the Most High; but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust,
+when combined with lofty professions and pretensions, does (as
+all history tells us that it does) draw down the vengeance of
+Almighty God, then we need look no further than this one neglect
+of the seventeenth century prelates (whether its cause was
+stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the monarchs to whose tyranny
+they pandered), to discover full reason why it pleased God to
+sweep them out awhile with the besom of destruction.</p>
+<p>There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth
+century, new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and
+manners; and that is, the apotheosis of Rakes.&nbsp; Let the
+faults of the Middle Age, or of the Tudors, have been what they
+may, that class of person was in their time simply an object of
+disgust.&nbsp; The word which then signified a Rake is, in the
+&lsquo;Morte d&rsquo;Arthur&rsquo; (temp. Ed. IV.), the foulest
+term of disgrace which can be cast upon a knight; whilst even up
+to the latter years of Elizabeth the contempt of parents and
+elders seems to have been thought a grievous sin.&nbsp; In Italy,
+even, fountain of all the abominations of the age, respect for
+the fifth commandment seems to have lingered after all the other
+nine had been forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his
+&lsquo;Corteggiano&rsquo; (about 1520), regretting the modest and
+respectful training of the generation which had preceded him; and
+to judge from facts, the Puritan method of education, stern as it
+was, was neither more nor less than the method which, a
+generation before, had been common to Romanist and to Protestant,
+Puritan and Churchman.</p>
+<p>But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s reign) fathers became gradually personages who
+are to be disobeyed, sucked of their money, fooled, even now and
+then robbed and beaten, by the young gentlemen of spirit; and the
+most Christian kings, James and Charles, with their queens and
+court, sit by to see ruffling and roystering, beating the watch
+and breaking windows, dicing, drinking, duelling, and profligacy
+(provided the victim be not a woman of gentle birth), set forth
+not merely as harmless amusements for young gentlemen, but (as in
+Beaumont and Fletcher&rsquo;s play of &lsquo;Monsieur
+Thomas&rsquo;) virtues without which a man is despicable.&nbsp;
+On this point, as on many others, those who have, for
+ecclesiastical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the
+seventeenth century as a golden age have been altogether
+unfair.&nbsp; There is no immorality of the court plays of
+Charles II.&rsquo;s time which may not be found in those of
+Charles I.&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Sedley and Etherege are not a whit
+worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and
+Monsieur Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads,
+Rufflers, Blades, Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies,
+down to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or
+robbed his master&rsquo;s till to pay his losses at a
+betting-office.&nbsp; True; we of this generation can hardly
+afford to throw stones.&nbsp; The scapegrace ideal of humanity
+has enjoyed high patronage within the last half century; and if
+Monsieur Thomas seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles,
+so did Jerry and Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first
+gentlemen of England.&nbsp; Better days, however, have dawned;
+&lsquo;Tom and Jerry,&rsquo; instead of running three hundred
+nights, would be as little endured on the stage as
+&lsquo;Monsieur Thomas&rsquo; would be; the heroes who aspire
+toward that ideal are now consigned by public opinion to
+Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while if, like Monsieur Thomas,
+they knocked down their own father, they would, instead of
+winning a good wife, be &lsquo;cut&rsquo; by braver and finer
+gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact
+prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan
+opinion of this matter (as of some others) was the right one?</p>
+<p>There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart
+patronage of profligate scapegraces on the stage.&nbsp; They
+would not have been endured on the stage had they not been very
+common off it; and if there had not been, too, in the hearts of
+spectators some lurking excuse for them: it requires no great
+penetration to see what that excuse must have been.&nbsp; If the
+Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy
+them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and
+inexcusable, probably impossible.&nbsp; But if it was (as it may
+be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit,
+and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur Thomas
+with something of sympathy as well as pity.&nbsp; Take him as he
+stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and
+courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers.&nbsp;
+He would have done his work admirably in an earnest and
+enterprising age as a Hudson&rsquo;s Bay Company clerk, an Indian
+civilian, a captain of a man-of-war&mdash;anything where he could
+find a purpose and a work.&nbsp; Doubt it not.&nbsp; How many a
+Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years ago one had
+rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses and
+cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not
+only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing
+homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those
+trenches at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows,
+that merciful fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his
+heart and thaw the crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest
+life.&nbsp; And even at such a youth&rsquo;s worst, reason and
+conscience alike forbid us to deal out to him the same measure as
+we do to the offences of the cool and hoary profligate, or to the
+darker and subtler spiritual sins of the false professor.&nbsp;
+But if the wrath of God be not unmistakably and practically
+revealed from heaven against youthful profligacy and disobedience
+in after sorrow and shame of some kind or other, against what sin
+is it revealed?&nbsp; It was not left for our age to discover
+that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his
+courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so
+had to be taught the truth over again by another and a more
+literal lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could
+teach them, sharp shot and cold steel did.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art
+altogether.&rsquo;&nbsp; The fact was, that they hated what art
+they saw in England, and that this was low art, bad art, growing
+ever lower and worse.&nbsp; If it be said that Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+is the very highest art, the answer is, that what they hated in
+him was not his high art, but his low art, the foul and horrible
+elements which he had in common with his brother
+play-writers.&nbsp; True, there is far less of these elements in
+Shakspeare than in any of his compeers: but they are there.&nbsp;
+And what the Puritans hated in him was exactly what we have to
+expunge before we can now represent his plays.&nbsp; If it be
+said that they ought to have discerned and appreciated the higher
+elements in him, so ought the rest of their generation.&nbsp; The
+Puritans were surely not bound to see in Shakspeare what his
+patrons and brother poets did not see.&nbsp; And it is surely a
+matter of fact that the deep spiritual knowledge which makes, and
+will make, Shakspeare&rsquo;s plays (and them alone of all the
+seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all men and all ages,
+quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who probably put
+him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612, has
+assigned to him.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I have ever cherished a good opinion of
+other men&rsquo;s witty labours, especially of that full and
+heightened style of Master Chapman; the laboured and
+understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty composures
+of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr. Fletcher; and
+lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and
+copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr.
+Heywood.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees
+nothing in Shakspeare beyond the same &lsquo;happy and copious
+industry&rsquo; which he sees in Dekker and Heywood,&mdash;while
+Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real genius in Charles
+the First&rsquo;s reign, places Fletcher&rsquo;s name
+&lsquo;&rsquo;Twixt Jonson&rsquo;s grave and Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+lighter sound,&rsquo; and tells him that</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit
+lies<br />
+I&rsquo; th&rsquo; ladies&rsquo; questions, and the fool&rsquo;s
+replies.</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.</p>
+<p>* * * * *</p>
+<p>Nature was all his art; thy vein was free<br />
+As his, but without his scurrility;&rsquo; <a
+name="citation46"></a><a href="#footnote46"
+class="citation">[46]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all
+his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare&rsquo;s marvellous lyrical
+sweetness, &lsquo;his native wood-notes wild&rsquo;; what shame
+to the Puritans if they, too, did not discover the stork among
+the cranes?</p>
+<p>An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind,
+which deserves a few moments&rsquo; consideration.&nbsp; It is
+said, &lsquo;the grossness of the old play-writers was their
+misfortune, not their crime.&nbsp; It was the fashion of the
+age.&nbsp; It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no
+harm by it.&nbsp; The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none
+the worse for that.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of
+Webster&rsquo;s plays, seems inclined to exalt this habit into a
+virtue.&nbsp; After saying that the licentious and debauched are
+made &lsquo;as odious in representation as they would be if they
+were actually present&rsquo;&mdash;an assertion which must be
+flatly denied, save in the case of Shakspeare, who seldom or
+never, to our remembrance, seems to forget that the wages of sin
+is death, and who, however coarse he may be, keeps stoutly on the
+side of virtue&mdash;Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that &lsquo;perhaps
+the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals
+are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we
+are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the
+sway of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of
+virtue, were careless of words, and only considerate of
+actions.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer
+that the fact is directly contrary; that there is a mass of
+unanimous evidence which cannot be controverted to prove that
+England, in the first half of the seventeenth century was far
+more immoral than in the nineteenth; that the proofs lie patent
+to any dispassionate reader: but that these pages will not be
+defiled by the details of them.</p>
+<p>Let it be said that coarseness was &lsquo;the fashion of the
+age.&rsquo;&nbsp; The simple question is, was it a good fashion
+or a bad?&nbsp; It is said&mdash;with little or no
+proof&mdash;that in simple states of society much manly virtue
+and much female purity have often consisted with very broad
+language and very coarse manners.&nbsp; But what of that?&nbsp;
+Drunkards may very often be very honest and brave men.&nbsp; Does
+that make drunkenness no sin?&nbsp; Or will honesty and courage
+prevent a man&rsquo;s being the worse for hard drinking?&nbsp; If
+so, why have we given up coarseness of language?&nbsp; And why
+has it been the better rather than the worse part of the nation,
+the educated and religious rather than the ignorant and wicked,
+who have given it up?&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Simply because this
+nation, and all other nations on the Continent, in proportion to
+their morality, have found out that coarseness of language is, to
+say the least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong to do
+certain things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of
+them; that even certain things which are right and blessed and
+holy lose their sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light
+of day, instead of being left in the mystery in which God has
+wisely shrouded them.&nbsp; On the whole, one is inclined to
+suspect the defence of coarseness as insincere.&nbsp; Certainly,
+in our day, it will not hold.&nbsp; If any one wishes to hear
+coarse language in &lsquo;good society&rsquo; he can hear it, I
+am told, in Paris: but one questions whether Parisian society be
+now &lsquo;under the sway of a more energetic principle of
+virtue&rsquo; than our own.&nbsp; The sum total of the matter
+seems to be, that England has found out that on this point again
+the old Puritans were right.&nbsp; And quaintly enough, the party
+in the English Church who hold the Puritans most in abhorrence
+are the most scrupulous now upon this very point; and, in their
+dread of contaminating the minds of youth, are carrying
+education, at school and college, to such a more than Puritan
+precision that with the most virtuous and benevolent intentions
+they are in danger of giving lads merely a conventional
+education,&mdash;a hot-house training which will render them
+incapable hereafter of facing either the temptations or the
+labour of the world.&nbsp; They themselves republished
+Massinger&rsquo;s &lsquo;Virgin Martyr,&rsquo; because it was a
+pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist&mdash;for there
+is every reason to believe that Massinger was one&mdash;setting
+forth how the heroine was attended all through by an angel in the
+form of a page, and how&mdash;not to mention the really beautiful
+ancient fiction about the fruits which Dorothea sends back from
+Paradise&mdash;Theophilus overcomes the devil by means of a cross
+composed of flowers.&nbsp; Massinger&rsquo;s account of
+Theophilus&rsquo; conversation will, we fear, make those who know
+anything of that great crisis of the human spirit suspect that
+Massinger&rsquo;s experience thereof was but small: but the fact
+which is most noteworthy is this&mdash;that the &lsquo;Virgin
+Martyr&rsquo; is actually one of the foulest plays known.&nbsp;
+Every pains has been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in
+the play were not written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what
+grounds we know not.&nbsp; If Dekker assisted Massinger in the
+play, as he is said to have done, we are aware of no canons of
+internal criticism which will enable us to decide, as boldly as
+Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is Dekker&rsquo;s, and
+all the poetry Massinger&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He confesses&mdash;as
+indeed he is forced to do&mdash;that &lsquo;Massinger himself is
+not free from dialogues of low wit and buffoonery&rsquo;; and
+then, after calling the scenes in question &lsquo;detestable
+ribaldry, &lsquo;a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of filth and
+dulness,&rsquo; recommends them to the reader&rsquo;s supreme
+scorn and contempt,&mdash;with which feelings the reader will
+doubtless regard them: but he will also, if he be a thinking man,
+draw from them the following conclusions: that even if they be
+Dekker&rsquo;s&mdash;of which there is no proof&mdash;Massinger
+was forced, in order to the success of his play, to pander to the
+public taste by allowing Dekker to interpolate these villanies;
+that the play which, above all others of the seventeenth century,
+contains the most supralunar rosepink of piety, devotion, and
+purity, also contains the stupidest abominations of any extant
+play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it as a sample of the
+Christianity of that past golden age of High-churchmanship, had
+to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of becoming amenable
+to the laws against abominable publications.</p>
+<p>No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we
+have quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there
+is hardly a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the
+immoralities of which we complain do not exist,&mdash;few of
+which they do not form an integral part; and now, if this is the
+judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater
+poets, what must the lesser ones be like?</p>
+<p>Look, then, at Webster&rsquo;s two masterpieces,
+&lsquo;Vittoria Corrombona&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Duchess of
+Malfi.&rsquo;&nbsp; A few words spent on them will surely not be
+wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best
+tragedies written since Shakspeare&rsquo;s time.</p>
+<p>The whole story of &lsquo;Vittoria Corrombona&rsquo; is one of
+sin and horror.&nbsp; The subject-matter of the play is
+altogether made up of the fiercest and the basest passions.&nbsp;
+But the play is not a study of those passions from which we may
+gain a great insight into human nature.&nbsp; There is no
+trace&mdash;nor is there, again, in the &lsquo;Duchess of
+Malfi&rsquo;&mdash;of that development of human souls for good or
+evil which is Shakspeare&rsquo;s especial power&mdash;the power
+which, far more than any accidental &lsquo;beauties,&rsquo; makes
+his plays, to this day, the delight alike of the simple and the
+wise, while his contemporaries are all but forgotten.&nbsp; The
+highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the development of the
+human soul; to construct dramas in which the conclusion shall
+depend, not on the events, but on the characters; and in which
+the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a certain
+passion, or a certain &lsquo;humour&rsquo;: but persons, each
+unlike all others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of
+his own peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding
+toward that destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to,
+circumstances; unfolding his own strength and weakness before the
+eyes of the audience; and that in such a way that, after his
+first introduction, they should be able (in proportion to their
+knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct under those
+circumstances.&nbsp; This is indeed &lsquo;high art&rsquo;: but
+we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest.&nbsp; His
+characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made,
+full grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are
+not characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human
+form.&nbsp; Now and then he essays to draw a character: but it is
+analytically, by description, not synthetically and dramatically,
+by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the
+&lsquo;Duchess of Mall&rsquo; he falls into the great mistake of
+telling, by Antonio&rsquo;s mouth, more about the Duke and the
+Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act.&nbsp; Very different
+is Shakspeare&rsquo;s method of giving, at the outset, some
+single delicate hint about his personages which will serve as a
+clue to their whole future conduct; thus &lsquo;showing the whole
+in each part,&rsquo; and stamping each man with a personality, to
+a degree which no other dramatist has ever approached.</p>
+<p>But the truth is, the study of human nature is not
+Webster&rsquo;s aim.&nbsp; He has to arouse terror and pity, not
+thought, and he does it in his own way, by blood and fury, madmen
+and screech-owls, not without a rugged power.&nbsp; There are
+scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria&rsquo;s trial,
+which have been praised for their delineation of character: but
+it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so
+handled in &lsquo;Lear,&rsquo; &lsquo;Othello,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Richard the Third,&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Given a mixed
+character, to show how he may become criminal,&rsquo; and to
+solve Webster&rsquo;s &lsquo;Given a ready-made criminal, to show
+how he commits his crimes.&rsquo;&nbsp; To us the knowledge of
+character shown in Vittoria&rsquo;s trial scene is not an insight
+into Vittoria&rsquo;s essential heart and brain, but a general
+acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women when brought
+to bay.&nbsp; Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and human
+nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of
+Vittoria&rsquo;s &lsquo;innocence&mdash;resembling
+boldness&rsquo; <a name="citation53"></a><a href="#footnote53"
+class="citation">[53]</a>&mdash;and &lsquo;seeming to see that
+matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence
+in her,&rsquo; and so forth.</p>
+<p>Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the
+average of bad young women in the presence of a police
+magistrate: yet amounting in all merely to this, that the
+strength of Webster&rsquo;s confest master-scene lies simply in
+intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general.&nbsp; We
+will say no more on this matter, save to ask, <i>Cui
+bono</i>?&nbsp; Was the art of which this was the highest
+manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able
+to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious
+accompaniments?</p>
+<p>The &lsquo;Duchess of Malfi&rsquo; is certainly in a purer and
+loftier strain: but in spite of the praise which has been
+lavished on her, we must take the liberty to doubt whether the
+poor Duchess is a &lsquo;person&rsquo; at all.&nbsp; General
+goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man
+below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all
+hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of
+other women: but Webster has no such purpose.&nbsp; What he was
+thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the
+Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not
+Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad
+fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the
+brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical
+moment of the play) merely forward.&nbsp; That curious scene, in
+which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him
+marry her, is, on the whole, painful.&nbsp; Webster himself seems
+to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too
+far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her
+break down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has
+utterly forgotten to explain or justify her love by giving to
+Antonio (as Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong
+specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse,
+his mistress&rsquo;s affection.&nbsp; He has plenty of time to do
+this in the first scenes,&mdash;time which he wastes on
+irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that
+Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person.&nbsp; If he gives
+promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise
+afterwards.&nbsp; In the scene in which the Duchess tells her
+love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio of
+the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive.&nbsp; He
+hears his mistress&rsquo;s declaration just as any other
+respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and a good
+deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one
+naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess&rsquo;s part into
+something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good
+opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so
+busy is Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love,
+that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we
+are to believe in only from the Duchess&rsquo;s assurance to him
+that he is the perfection of all that a man should be; which, as
+all lovers are of the same opinion the day before the wedding, is
+not of much importance.</p>
+<p>Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the
+least struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress&rsquo;s
+affection.&nbsp; He is very resigned and loving, and so
+forth.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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,&mdash;&lsquo;<i>ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour
+lui</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and
+there&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;<i>Cariola</i>.&nbsp; Hence, villains,
+tyrants, murderers!&nbsp; Alas<br />
+What will you do with my lady?&nbsp; Call for help!<br />
+<i>Duchess</i>.&nbsp; To whom? to our next neighbours? they are
+mad folk.<br />
+Farewell, Cariola.<br />
+I pray thee look thou giv&rsquo;st my little boy<br />
+Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl<br />
+Say her prayers ere she sleep.&mdash;Now, what you please;<br />
+What death?&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And so the play ends, as does &lsquo;Vittoria
+Corrombona,&rsquo; with half a dozen murders <i>coram populo</i>,
+howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader
+marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era,
+&lsquo;Reynolds&rsquo;s God&rsquo;s Revenge,&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James
+Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those days
+saw.&nbsp; He appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War,
+to have been the Queen&rsquo;s favourite poet; and, according to
+Laugbaine, he was &lsquo;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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>We must entreat the reader&rsquo;s attention while we examine
+Shirley&rsquo;s &lsquo;Gamester.&rsquo;&nbsp; Whether the
+examination be a pleasant business or not, it is somewhat
+important; &lsquo;for,&rsquo; says Mr. Dyce, &lsquo;the following
+memorandum respecting it occurs in the office-book of the Master
+of the Records:&mdash;&ldquo;On Thursday night, 6th of February,
+1633, &lsquo;The Gamester&rsquo; was acted at Court, made by
+Sherley out of a plot of the king&rsquo;s, given him by mee, and
+well likte.&nbsp; The king sayd it was the best play he had seen
+for seven years.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>This is indeed important.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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 &lsquo;Ducento Novelle&rsquo; of Celio
+Malespini; and what it is we shall see forthwith.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; She
+refuses him, but civilly enough; and on her departure Mrs.
+Wilding enters, who, it seems, is the object of her
+husband&rsquo;s loathing, though young, handsome, and in all
+respects charming enough.&nbsp; 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,&mdash;a personage without a character, in any sense of
+the word.&nbsp; There is next some talk against duelling,
+sensible enough, which arises out of a bye-plot,&mdash;one
+Delamere having been wounded in a duel by one Beaumont, mortally
+as is supposed.&nbsp; This bye-plot runs through the play, giving
+an opportunity for bringing in a father of the usual play-house
+type,&mdash;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,&mdash;Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her
+husband&rsquo;s affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant
+his suit; while Mrs. Wilding herself is in reality to supply her
+niece&rsquo;s place, and shame her husband into virtue.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A few hours before Penelope and Hazard have met
+for the first time, and Penelope considers him, as she says to
+herself aside, &lsquo;a handsome gentleman.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; If the cavaliers and
+damsels of Charles the First&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The rest of the story is equally bad.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Now comes the crisis of
+the plot, the conception which so delighted the taste of the
+Royal Martyr.&nbsp; Wilding finds himself, as he expresses it,
+&lsquo;fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s case)
+that of patience under injury.&nbsp; Hazard &lsquo;The
+Gamester&rsquo; 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,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;A man careless<br />
+Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck<br />
+To kill so many as another, dares<br />
+Fight with all them that have.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp; With the exception of some little
+humour in these scenes with young Barnacle, the whole play is
+thoroughly stupid.&nbsp; We look in vain for anything like a
+reflection, a sentiment, even a novel image.&nbsp; Its language,
+like its morality, is all but on a level with the laboured
+vulgarities of the &lsquo;Relapse&rsquo; or the &lsquo;Provoked
+Wife,&rsquo; 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&rsquo; men.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s
+only doubt is, whether they were not too wondrous, too
+precociously complete for future development.&nbsp; We find Dr.
+Fell, some time Bishop of Oxford, saying that &lsquo;Cartwright
+was the utmost man could come to&rsquo;; 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 &OElig;schron the poet, that &lsquo;he could
+not tell what &OElig;schron could not do.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+opinion, that</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;In thee Ben Jonson still held
+Shakspeare&rsquo;s style&rsquo;;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>or that he possest</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Lucan&rsquo;s bold heights match&rsquo;d to
+staid Virgil&rsquo;s care,<br />
+Martial&rsquo;s quick salt, joined to Mus&aelig;us&rsquo;
+tongue.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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, &lsquo;My son Cartwright writes all like a
+man.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is impossible to open a page of &lsquo;The
+Lady Errant,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Royal Slave,&rsquo; &lsquo;The
+Ordinary,&rsquo; or &lsquo;Love&rsquo;s Convert,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; If he imitates, he generally
+equals.&nbsp; The table of fare in &lsquo;The Ordinary&rsquo;
+smacks of Rabelais or Aristophanes: but then it is worthy of
+either; and if one cannot help suspecting that &lsquo;The
+Ordinary&rsquo; never would have been written had not Ben Jonson
+written &lsquo;The Alchemist,&rsquo; one confesses that Ben
+Jonson need not have been ashamed to have written the play
+himself: although the plot, as all Cartwright&rsquo;s are, is
+somewhat confused and inconsequent.&nbsp; If he be Platonically
+sentimental in &lsquo;Love&rsquo;s Convert,&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;&rsquo;Tis the good
+man&rsquo;s office<br />
+To serve and reverence woman, as it is<br />
+The fire&rsquo;s to burn; for as our souls consist<br />
+Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble,<br />
+Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm<br />
+All your desires, as reason quiets ours. . . .<br />
+Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth<br />
+In us; here only lies the difference,&mdash;<br />
+Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time;<br />
+But the woman&rsquo;s soul is ripe when it is young;<br />
+So that in us what we call learning, is<br />
+Divinity in you, whose operations,<br />
+Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The &lsquo;Royal
+Slave,&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when
+necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The Ordinary&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>The &lsquo;Royal Slave&rsquo; seems to have been considered,
+both by the Court and by his contemporaries, his
+masterpiece.&nbsp; And justly so; yet our pleasure at
+Charles&rsquo;s having shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat
+marred by Langbaine&rsquo;s story, that the good acting of the
+Oxford scholars, &lsquo;stately scenes, and richness of the
+Persian habits,&rsquo; had as much to do with the success of the
+play as its &lsquo;stately style,&rsquo; and &lsquo;the
+excellency of the songs, which were set by that admirable
+composer, Mr. Henry James.&rsquo;&nbsp; True it is, that the
+songs are excellent, as are all Cartwright&rsquo;s; for grace,
+simplicity, and sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare&rsquo;s)
+which the seventeenth century produced: but curiously enough, his
+lyric faculty seems to have exhausted itself in these half-dozen
+songs.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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?&nbsp; We
+know not; for surely in Jonson and Shakspeare&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Shakspeare however, as we have seen, he
+looked down on; as did the rest of his generation.</p>
+<p>Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of
+Charles, and a hater of Puritans.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; He was
+somewhat mistaken when, on the birth of the Duke of York, he
+informed the world that</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The state is now past fear; and all that
+we<br />
+Need wish besides is perpetuity&rsquo;;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and after indulging in various explanations of the reason why
+&lsquo;Nature&rsquo; 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</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;A son of Mirth,<br />
+Of Peace and Friendship; &rsquo;tis a quiet birth.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of
+human affairs, can Mr. Cartwright be now altogether satisfied
+with his rogue&rsquo;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&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;They are good silly people; souls that
+will<br />
+Be cheated without trouble: one eye is<br />
+Put out with zeal, th&rsquo; other with ignorance,<br />
+And yet they think they&rsquo;re eagles.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Whatsoever were the faults of the Pilgrim Fathers (and they
+were many), silliness was certainly not among them.&nbsp; But
+such was the court fashion.&nbsp; Any insult, however shallow,
+ribald, and doggrel (and all these terms are just of the
+mock-Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher sings in &lsquo;The
+Ordinary,&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; But so it
+was fated to be.&nbsp; A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow
+breath of parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy
+court in blind security, till &lsquo;the breaking was as the
+swelling out of a high wall, which cometh suddenly in an
+instant.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>But, after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day,
+good or bad, all belonged to the Royalists.</p>
+<p>All?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On this question, and
+on the real worth of the seventeenth century lyrists, a great
+deal has to be said hereafter.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s cartoons and Andrea
+Mantegna&rsquo;s triumph when Charles&rsquo;s pictures were
+sold.&nbsp; But Milton had steeped his whole soul in
+romance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He felt to his
+heart&rsquo;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.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Of gorgeous tragedy,<br />
+Presenting Thebes&rsquo; or Pelops&rsquo; line,<br />
+Or the Tale of Troy divine,<br />
+Or what, though rare, of later age,<br />
+Ennobled hath the buskin&rsquo;d stage.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s Word and his own
+soul in the face, and determined to act on that which he had
+found.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The hemisphere of earth, in clearest
+ken,<br />
+Stretched to the amplest reach of prospect, lies.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Take any&mdash;the most hackneyed passage of
+&lsquo;Comus,&rsquo; the &lsquo;Allegro,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Penseroso,&rsquo; the &lsquo;Paradise Lost,&rsquo; 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 <i>experimentum crucis</i>, when
+he trenches upon ground heathen and questionable, and tries the
+court poets at their own weapons&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Or whether (as some sager sing),<br />
+The frolic wind that breathes the spring,<br />
+Zephyr, with Aurora playing,<br />
+As he met her once a-Maying,<br />
+There on beds of violets blue,<br />
+And fresh-blown roses washed in dew&mdash;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>but why quote what all the world knows?&mdash;where shall we
+find such real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in
+anything written for five and twenty years before him?&nbsp;
+True, he was no great dramatist.&nbsp; He never tried to be one;
+but there was no one in his generation who could have written
+either &lsquo;Comus&rsquo; or &lsquo;Samson
+Agonistes.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is good to represent heroical action in
+verse, and on the stage: it is good to &lsquo;purify,&rsquo; as
+old Aristotle has it, &lsquo;the affections by pity and
+terror.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is an ideal tragedy, and an ideal
+comedy also, which one can imagine as an integral part of the
+highest Christian civilisation.&nbsp; But when
+&lsquo;Christian&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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,&mdash;to find excuses for the popular frailties which it
+pretends to expose,&mdash;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 &lsquo;Art&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; The
+whole theory of &lsquo;Art, its dignity and vocation,&rsquo;
+seems to us at times questionable, if coarse facts are to be
+allowed to weigh (as we suppose they are) against delicate
+theories.&nbsp; If we are to judge by the example of Italy, the
+country which has been most of all devoted to the practice of
+&lsquo;Art,&rsquo; then a nation is not necessarily free, strong,
+moral, or happy because it can &lsquo;represent&rsquo; facts, or
+can understand how other people have represented them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>For surely these Puritans were dramatic enough, poetic enough,
+picturesque enough.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We
+speak of the average Puritan nobleman, gentleman, merchant, or
+farmer; and hold him to have been a picturesque and poetical
+man,&mdash;a man of higher imagination and deeper feeling than
+the average of court poets; and a man of sound taste also.&nbsp;
+What is to be said for his opinions about the stage has been seen
+already: but it seems to have escaped most persons&rsquo; notice,
+that either all England is grown very foolish, or the Puritan
+opinions on several matters have been justified by time.</p>
+<p>On the matter of the stage, the world has certainly come over
+to their way of thinking.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>But in the matter of dress and of manners, the Puritan triumph
+has been complete.&nbsp; Even their worst enemies have come over
+to their side, and the &lsquo;whirligig of time has brought about
+its revenge.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Most of their canons of taste have become those of all
+England.&nbsp; High Churchmen, who still call them Roundheads and
+Cropped-ears, go about rounder-headed and closer cropt than they
+ever went.&nbsp; They held it more rational to cut the hair to a
+comfortable length than to wear effeminate curls down the
+back.&nbsp; We cut ours much shorter than they ever did.&nbsp;
+They held (with the Spaniards, then the finest gentlemen in the
+world) that sad, <i>i.e.</i> dark colours, above all black, were
+the fittest for all stately and earnest gentlemen.&nbsp; We all,
+from the Tractarian to the Anythingarian, are exactly of the same
+opinion.&nbsp; They held that lace, perfumes, and jewellery on a
+man were marks of unmanly foppishness and vanity.&nbsp; So hold
+the finest gentlemen in England now.&nbsp; 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 d&aelig;dalian
+ruffs, built up on iron and timber, which have more arches in
+them for pride than London Bridge for use.&nbsp; We, if we met
+such a ruffed and ruffled worthy as used to swagger by dozens up
+and down Paul&rsquo;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&rsquo;s duplicates
+in the other; that his thoughts were altogether of
+citizens&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;snob triumphant,&rsquo; glorying
+in his shame.&nbsp; The picture is not ours, nor even the
+Puritan&rsquo;s.&nbsp; It is Bishop Hall&rsquo;s, Bishop
+Earle&rsquo;s, it is Beaumont&rsquo;s, Fletcher&rsquo;s,
+Jonson&rsquo;s, Shakspeare&rsquo;s,&mdash;the picture which every
+dramatist, as well as satirist, has drawn of the
+&lsquo;gallant&rsquo; of the seventeenth century.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>In applying the same canon to the dress of women they were
+wrong.&nbsp; As in other matters, they had hold of one pole of a
+double truth, and erred in applying it exclusively to all
+cases.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>We have just said that the Puritans held too exclusively to
+one pole of a double truth.&nbsp; They did so, no doubt, in their
+hatred of the drama.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s, who
+is said to have punished the woman who should kiss her infant on
+the Sabbath day.&nbsp; Yet their extravagances on this point were
+but the honest revulsion from other extravagances on the opposite
+side.&nbsp; 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 Manich&aelig;ism of monkery: then the
+severity and exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and
+necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality; a protest
+for man&rsquo;s God-given superiority over nature, against that
+Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer animalism.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; If they
+went too far in their contempt for humanity, certainly no one
+interfered to set them right.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>But as for these Puritans having been merely the sour, narrow,
+inhuman persons they are vulgarly supposed to have been,
+<i>credat Jud&aelig;us</i>.&nbsp; There were sour and narrow men
+among them; so there were in the opposite party.&nbsp; No Puritan
+could have had less poetry in him, less taste, less feeling, than
+Laud himself.&nbsp; But is there no poetry save words?&nbsp; No
+drama save that which is presented on the stage?&nbsp; Is this
+glorious earth, and the souls of living men, mere prose, as long
+as &lsquo;<i>carent vate sacro</i>,&rsquo; 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?&nbsp; Was there no poetry in these
+Puritans because they wrote no poetry?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Did his name prevent his being six feet
+high?&nbsp; Were his shoulders the less broad for it, his cheeks
+the less ruddy for it?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s son, bold-hearted as
+his sea-roving ancestors who won the Danelagh by Canute&rsquo;s
+side, and settled there on Thoresby Rise, to grow wheat and breed
+horses, generation succeeding generation, in the old moated
+grange?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+great black horse as gracefully and firmly as any long-locked and
+essenced cavalier in front of him?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp;
+Was he the worse for the thought?&nbsp; He was certainly not the
+worse for checking it the next instant, with manly shame for
+letting such &lsquo;carnal vanities&rsquo; rise in his heart
+while he was &lsquo;doing the Lord&rsquo;s work&rsquo; in the
+teeth of death and hell: but was there no poetry in him
+then?&nbsp; No poetry in him, five minutes later, as the long
+rapier swung round his head, redder and redder at every
+sweep?&nbsp; We are befooled by names.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;storied
+windows richly dight.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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?</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s door?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; There is the
+dyke where he and his brothers snared the great pike which stole
+the ducklings&mdash;how many years ago?&mdash;while pretty little
+Patience stood by trembling, and shrieked at each snap of the
+brute&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s,
+to the dear old home among the poplar-trees.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Was there no poetry in his heart at that thought?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Did not the
+sweet clamour of the wild-fowl, gathering for one rich p&aelig;an
+ere they sank into rest, seem to him as God&rsquo;s bells chiming
+him home in triumph, with peels sweeter and bolder than those of
+Lincoln or Peterborough steeple-house?&nbsp; 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?</p>
+<p>Fair Patience, too, though she was a Puritan; yet did not her
+cheek flush, her eye grow dim, like any other girl&rsquo;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?&nbsp; Was there no happy storm of human tears and
+human laughter when he entered the courtyard gate?&nbsp; Did not
+the old dog lick his Puritan hand as lovingly as if it had been a
+Cavalier&rsquo;s?&nbsp; Did not lads and lasses run out
+shouting?&nbsp; Did not the old yeoman father hug him, weep over
+him, hold him at arm&rsquo;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?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s good
+time?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s Dianemes, Waller&rsquo;s
+Saccharissas, flames, darts, posies, love-knots, anagrams, and
+the rest of the insincere cant of the court?&nbsp; What if
+Zeal-for-Truth had never strung two rhymes together in his
+life?&nbsp; Did not his heart go for inspiration to a loftier
+Helicon when it whispered to itself, &lsquo;My love, my dove, my
+undefiled, is but one,&rsquo; than if he had filled pages with
+sonnets about Venuses and Cupids, lovesick shepherds and cruel
+nymphs?</p>
+<p>And was there no poetry, true idyllic poetry, as of
+Longfellow&rsquo;s &lsquo;Evangeline&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;The Lord&rsquo;s
+great dealings&rsquo; by General Cromwell, the pride of all
+honest fen-men, and the price of troop-horses at the next
+Horncastle fair?</p>
+<p>Poetry in those old Puritans?&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; They were
+men of like passions with ourselves.&nbsp; They loved, they
+married, they brought up children; they feared, they sinned, they
+sorrowed, they fought&mdash;they conquered.&nbsp; There was
+poetry enough in them, be sure, though they acted it like men,
+instead of singing it like birds.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3"
+class="footnote">[3]</a>&nbsp; <i>The North British Review</i>,
+No. XLIX.&mdash;1. &lsquo;Works of Beaumont and
+Fletcher.&rsquo;&nbsp; London, 1679.&mdash;2. &lsquo;Works of Ben
+Jonson.&rsquo;&nbsp; London, 1692&mdash;3.
+&lsquo;Massinger&rsquo;s Plays.&rsquo;&nbsp; Edited by William
+Gifford, Esq.&nbsp; London, 1813.&mdash;4. &lsquo;Works of John
+Webster.&rsquo;&nbsp; Edited, etc., by Rev. Alexander Dyce.&nbsp;
+Pickering, London, 1830.&nbsp; 5. &lsquo;Works of James
+Shirley.&rsquo;&nbsp; Edited by Rev. A. Dyce.&nbsp; Murray,
+1833.&mdash;6. &lsquo;Works of T. Middleton.&rsquo;&nbsp; Edited
+by the Rev. A. Dyce.&nbsp; Lumley, 1840.&mdash;7.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Comedies,&rsquo; etc.&nbsp; By Mr. William
+Cartwright.&nbsp; London, 1651.&mdash;8.&nbsp; &lsquo;Specimens
+of English Dramatic Poets.&rsquo;&nbsp; By Charles Lamb.&nbsp;
+Longmans and Co., 1808&mdash;9.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Histriomastix.&rsquo;&nbsp; By W. Prynne, Utter-Barrister
+of Lincoln&rsquo;s Inn.&nbsp; London, 1633.&mdash;10.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Northbrooke&rsquo;s Treatise against Plays,&rsquo;
+etc.&nbsp; (Shakspeare Soc.), 1843.&mdash;11. &lsquo;The Works of
+Bishop Hall.&rsquo;&nbsp; Oxford, 1839.&mdash;12.
+&lsquo;Marston&rsquo;s Satires.&rsquo;&nbsp; London, 1600.&nbsp;
+13. &lsquo;Jeremy Collier&rsquo;s Short View of the Profaneness,
+etc., of the English Stage.&rsquo;&nbsp; London, 1730.&mdash;14.
+&lsquo;Langbaine&rsquo;s English Dramatists.&rsquo;&nbsp; Oxford,
+1691.&mdash;15. &lsquo;Companion to the Playhouse.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+London, 1764.&mdash;16.&nbsp; &lsquo;Riccoboni&rsquo;s Account of
+the Theatres in Europe.&nbsp; 1741.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote27a"></a><a href="#citation27a"
+class="footnote">[27a]</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;The Third Blast of
+Retreat from Plays and Theatres.&rsquo;&nbsp; Penned by a
+Play-poet.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote27b"></a><a href="#citation27b"
+class="footnote">[27b]</a>&nbsp; This was written sixteen years
+ago.&nbsp; We have become since then more amenable to the
+influences of French civilisation.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote46"></a><a href="#citation46"
+class="footnote">[46]</a>&nbsp; What canon of cleanliness, now
+lost, did Cartwright possess, which enabled him to pronounce
+Fletcher, or indeed himself, purer than Shakspeare, and his times
+&lsquo;nicer&rsquo; than those of James?&nbsp; To our generation,
+less experienced in the quantitative analysis of moral dirt, they
+will appear all equally foul.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote53"></a><a href="#citation53"
+class="footnote">[53]</a>&nbsp; C. Lamb, &lsquo;Specimens of
+English Dramatic Poets,&rsquo; p. 229.&nbsp; 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.</p>
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+Title: Plays and Puritans
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+This etext was produced from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. "Plays and
+Puritans and Other Historical Essays" edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+PLAYS AND PURITANS {1}
+
+by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+
+The British Isles have been ringing for the last few years with the
+word 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,'
+'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and
+every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something
+about Art.  Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic'
+treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares
+very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation
+of 'bad taste.'  Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our
+poetry is dying; our music, like our architecture, only reproduces
+the past; our painting is only first-rate when it handles landscapes
+and animals, and seems likely so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody
+cares.  Some of the deepest and most earnest minds vote the question,
+in general, a 'sham and a snare,' and whisper to each other
+confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a 'bore,' and that
+Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all; while the
+middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a pretty
+toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think,
+apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is
+merely used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to
+mention that, if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand
+down to posterity likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family.  But
+when 'Art' dares to be in earnest, and to mean something, much more
+to connect itself with religion, Smith's tone alters.  He will teach
+'Art' to keep in what he considers its place, and if it refuses, take
+the law of it, and put it into the Ecclesiastical Court.  So he says,
+and what is more, he means what he says; and as all the world, from
+Hindostan to Canada, knows by most practical proof, what he means, he
+sooner or later does, perhaps not always in the wisest way, but still
+he does it.
+
+Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward 'Art' is
+simply that of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and widened, but
+only enough so as to permit Art, not to encourage it.
+
+Some men's thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form
+of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency
+of the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,' and ending--who can
+tell where?  But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any
+skill in the scientia scientiarum, or say, 'The Lord possessed me in
+the beginning of His way, before His works of old.  When He prepared
+the heavens, I was there, when He set a compass upon the face of the
+deep;' we shall leave aesthetic science to those who think that they
+comprehend it; we shall, as simple disciples of Bacon, deal with
+facts and with history as 'the will of God revealed in facts.'  We
+will leave those who choose to settle what ought to be, and ourselves
+look patiently at that which actually was once, and which may be
+again; that so out of the conduct of our old Puritan forefathers
+(right or wrong), and their long war against 'Art,' we may learn a
+wholesome lesson; as we doubtless shall, if we believe firmly that
+our history is neither more nor less than what the old Hebrew
+prophets called 'God's gracious dealings with his people,' and not
+say in our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings Jacobite
+ballads (written forty years ago by men who cared no more for the
+Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off
+George the Fourth's feet at his visit to Edinburgh)--'Victrix causa
+Diis placuit, sed victa puellis.'
+
+The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and
+invidious task.  For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases,
+arise not merely from the crimes of a few great men, but from a
+general viciousness and decay of the whole, or the majority, of the
+nation; and that viciousness is certain to be made up, in great part,
+of a loosening of domestic ties, of breaches of the Seventh
+Commandment, and of sins connected with them, which a writer is now
+hardly permitted to mention.  An 'evil and adulterous generation' has
+been in all ages and countries the one marked out for intestine and
+internecine strife.  That description is always applicable to a
+revolutionary generation; whether or not it also comes under the
+class of a superstitious one, 'seeking after a sign from heaven,'
+only half believing its own creed, and, therefore, on tiptoe for
+miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely
+persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems
+about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from
+sinking into the abyss.  In describing such an age, the historian
+lies under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually
+too strong for him to state it.  If he tells the whole truth, the
+easy-going and respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable
+days like these, will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful
+facts, or reject them as incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find
+similar horrors and abominations among people of their own rank, of
+whom they are naturally inclined to judge by their own standard of
+civilisation.  Thus if any one, in justification of the Reformation
+and the British hatred of Popery during the sixteenth century, should
+dare to detail the undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and to comment
+on them dramatically enough to make his readers feel about them what
+men who witnessed them felt, he would be accused of a 'morbid love of
+horrors.'  If any one, in order to show how the French Revolution of
+1793 was really God's judgment on the profligacy of the ancien
+regirne, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the ancien
+regime unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would have
+a right to demand, 'How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts
+from their merited oblivion?'  Those, again, who are really
+acquainted with the history of Henry the Eighth's marriages, are well
+aware of facts which prove him to have been, not a man of violent and
+lawless passions, but of a cold temperament and a scrupulous
+conscience; but which cannot be stated in print, save in the most
+delicate and passing hints, to be taken only by those who at once
+understand such matters, and really wish to know the truth; while
+young ladies in general will still look on Henry as a monster in
+human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, to undeceive them
+by anything beyond bare assertion without proof.
+
+'But what does it matter,' some one may say, 'what young ladies think
+about history?'  This it matters; that these young ladies will some
+day be mothers, and as such will teach their children their own
+notions of modern history; and that, as long as men confine
+themselves to the teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the
+history of their own country to be handled exclusively by their
+unmarried sisters, so long will slanders, superstitions, and false
+political principles be perpetuated in the minds of our boys and
+girls.
+
+But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the historian's case
+is often too strong to be stated.  There is always a reactionary
+party, or one at least which lingers sentimentally over the dream of
+past golden ages, such as that of which Cowley says, with a sort of
+naive blasphemy, at which one knows not whether to smile or sigh -
+
+
+'When God, the cause to me and men unknown,
+Forsook the royal houses, and his own.'
+
+
+These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the defeated
+system; but the historian has no such liberty to state the case
+against it.  If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare
+not state them, he is at once met with a praejudicium.  The mere fact
+of his having ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in
+a sort of prudish cant.  'What a very improper person he must be to
+like to dabble in such improper books that they must not even be
+quoted.'  If in self-defence he desperately gives his facts, he only
+increases the feeling against him, whilst the reactionists, hiding
+their blushing faces, find in their modesty an excuse for avoiding
+the truth; if, on the other hand, he content himself with bare
+assertion, and with indicating the sources from whence his
+conclusions are drawn, what care the reactionists?  They know well
+that the public will not take the trouble to consult manuscripts,
+State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but will content
+themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on
+unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after
+she has been painfully haled up to the well's mouth, to tumble
+miserably to the bottom of it again.
+
+
+In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of
+the great cause, Puritans v. Players, before our readers, trusting to
+find some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common
+notions on the point to form a fair decision.
+
+
+What those notions are is well known.  Very many of her Majesty's
+subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth
+century (if the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the
+most beautiful period of the English nation's life; that in it the
+chivalry and ardent piety of the Middle Age were happily combined
+with modern art and civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the
+Court, of stage-plays, of the fashions of the time, was only 'a
+scrupulous and fantastical niceness'; barbaric and tasteless, if
+sincere; if insincere, the basest hypocrisy; that the stage-plays,
+though coarse, were no worse than Shakspeare, whom everybody reads;
+and that if the Stuarts patronised the stage they also raised it, and
+exercised a purifying censorship.  And many more who do not go all
+these lengths with the reactionists, and cannot make up their mind to
+look to the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen or model
+courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan 'preciseness,'
+and to say lazily, that though, of course, something may have been
+wrong, yet there was no need to make such a fuss about the matter;
+and that at all events the Puritans were men of very bad taste.
+
+Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger's plays (1813), was
+probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a great
+part of this generation also, when he informs us, that 'with
+Massinger terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry; indeed, the
+stage itself survived him but a short time.  The nation was convulsed
+to its centre by contending factions, and a set of austere and gloomy
+fanatics, enemies to every elegant amusement and every social
+relaxation, rose upon the ruins of the State.  Exasperated by the
+ridicule with which they had long been covered by the stage, they
+persecuted the actors with unrelenting severity, and consigned them,
+together with the writers, to hopeless obscurity and wretchedness.
+Taylor died in the extreme of poverty, Shirley opened a little school
+at Brentford, and Downe, the boast of the stage, kept an ale-house at
+Brentford.  Others, and those the far greater number, joined the
+royal standard, and exerted themselves with more gallantry than good
+fortune in the service of their old and indulgent master.'
+
+'We have not yet, perhaps, fully estimated, and certainly not yet
+fully recovered, what was lost in that unfortunate struggle.  The
+arts were rapidly advancing to perfection under the fostering wing of
+a monarch who united in himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake,
+and munificence to reward.  Architecture, painting, and poetry were
+by turns the objects of his paternal care.  Shakspeare was his
+"closet companion," Jonson his poet, and in conjunction with Inigo
+Jones, his favoured architect, produced those magnificent
+entertainments,' etc.
+
+* * *
+
+He then goes on to account for the supposed sudden fall of dramatic
+art at the Restoration, by the somewhat far-fetched theory that -
+
+
+'Such was the horror created in the general mind by the perverse and
+unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, that
+the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and, with
+Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and "his
+fellows."  Instead, therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it
+abruptly ceased in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it
+were, a manner of their own, or fetched it from the heavy monotony of
+their continental neighbours.'
+
+
+So is history written, and, what is more, believed.  The amount of
+misrepresentation in this passage (which would probably pass current
+with most readers in the present day) is quite ludicrous.  In the
+first place, it will hardly be believed that these words occur in an
+essay which, after extolling Massinger as one of the greatest poets
+of his age, second, indeed, only to Shakspeare, also informs us (and,
+it seems, quite truly) that, so far from having been really
+appreciated or patronised, he maintained a constant struggle with
+adversity,--'that even the bounty of his particular friends, on which
+he chiefly relied, left him in a state of absolute dependence,'--that
+while 'other writers for the stage had their periods of good fortune,
+Massinger seems to have enjoyed no gleam of sunshine; his life was
+all one misty day, and "shadows, clouds, and darkness rested on it."'
+
+So much for Charles's patronage of a really great poet.  What sort of
+men he did patronise, practically and in earnest, we shall see
+hereafter, when we come to speak of Mr. Shirley.
+
+But Mr. Gifford must needs give an instance to prove that Charles was
+'not inattentive to the success of Massinger,' and a curious one it
+is; of the same class, unfortunately, as that with the man in the old
+story, who recorded with pride that the King had spoken to him, and--
+had told him to get out of the way.
+
+Massinger in his 'King and the Subject' had introduced Don Pedro of
+Spain thus speaking -
+
+
+'Monies!  We'll raise supplies which way we please,
+And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which
+We'll mulct you as we shall think fit.  The Caesars
+In Rome were wise, acknowledging no law
+But what their swords did ratify, the wives
+And daughters of the senators bowing to
+Their will, as deities,' etc.
+
+
+Against which passage Charles, reading over the play before he
+allowed of it, had written, 'This is too insolent, and not to be
+printed.'  Too insolent it certainly was, considering the state of
+public matters in the year 1638.  It would be interesting enough to
+analyse the reasons which made Charles dislike in the mouth of Pedro
+sentiments so very like his own; but we must proceed, only pointing
+out the way in which men, determined to repeat the traditional clap-
+trap about the Stuarts, are actually blind to the meaning of the very
+facts which they themselves quote.
+
+Where, then, do the facts of history contradict Mr. Gifford?
+
+We believe that, so far from the triumph of dramatic poetry
+terminating with Massinger, dramatic art had been steadily growing
+worse from the first years of James; that instead of the arts
+advancing to perfection under Charles the First, they steadily
+deteriorated in quality, though the supply became more abundant; that
+so far from there having been a sudden change for the worse in the
+drama after the Restoration, the taste of the courts of Charles the
+First and of Charles the Second are indistinguishable; that the court
+poets, and probably the actors also, of the early part of Charles the
+Second's reign had many of them belonged to the court of Charles the
+First, as did Davenant, the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, Fanshaw,
+and Shirley himself; that the common notion of a 'new manner' having
+been introduced from France after the Restoration, or indeed having
+come in at all, is not founded on fact, the only change being that
+the plays of Charles the Second's time were somewhat more stupid, and
+that while five of the seven deadly sins had always had free licence
+on the stage, blasphemy and profane swearing were now enfranchised to
+fill up the seven.  As for the assertion that the new manner
+(supposing it to have existed) was imported from France, there is far
+more reason to believe that the French copied us than we them, and
+that if they did not learn from Charles the First's poets the
+superstition of 'the three unities,' they at least learnt to make
+ancient kings and heroes talk and act like seventeenth century
+courtiers, and to exchange their old clumsy masques and translations
+of Italian and Spanish farces for a comedy depicting native
+scoundrelism.  Probably enough, indeed, the great and sudden
+development of the French stage, which took place in the middle of
+the seventeenth century under Corneille and Moliere, was excited by
+the English cavalier playwrights who took refuge in France.
+
+No doubt, as Mr. Gifford says, the Puritans were exasperated against
+the stage-players by the insults heaped on them; but the cause of
+quarrel lay far deeper than any such personal soreness.  The Puritans
+had attacked the players before the players meddled with them, and
+that on principle; with what justification must be considered
+hereafter.  But the fact is (and this seems to have been, like many
+other facts, conveniently forgotten), that the Puritans were by no
+means alone in their protest against the stage, and that the war was
+not begun exclusively by them.  As early as the latter half of the
+sixteenth century, not merely Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and
+Reynolds had lifted up their voices against them, but Archbishop
+Parker, Bishop Babington, Bishop Hall, and the author of the Mirror
+for Magistrates.  The University of Oxford, in 1584, had passed a
+statute forbidding common plays and players in the university, on the
+very same moral grounds on which the Puritans objected to them.  The
+city of London, in 1580, had obtained from the Queen the suppression
+of plays on Sundays; and not long after, 'considering that play-
+houses and dicing-houses were traps for young gentlemen and others,'
+obtained leave from the Queen and Privy Council to thrust the players
+out of the city, and to pull down the play-houses, five in number;
+and, paradoxical as it may seem, there is little doubt that, by the
+letter of the law, 'stage plays and enterludes' were, even to the end
+of Charles the First's reign, 'unlawful pastime,' being forbidden by
+14 Eliz., 39 Eliz., 1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1 Caroli, and the players
+subject to severe punishment as 'rogues and vagabonds.'  The Act of 1
+Jacobi seems even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which,
+in Elizabeth's reign, had allowed companies of players the protection
+of a 'baron or honourable person of greater degree,' who might
+'authorise them to play under his hand and seal of arms.'  So that
+the Puritans were only demanding of the sovereigns that they should
+enforce the very laws which they themselves had made, and which they
+and their nobles were setting at defiance.  Whether the plays ought
+to have been put down, and whether the laws were necessary, is a
+different question; but certainly the court and the aristocracy stood
+in the questionable, though too common, position of men who made laws
+which prohibited to the poor amusements in which they themselves
+indulged without restraint.
+
+But were these plays objectionable?  As far as the comedies are
+concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays
+objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery?  Now, we
+cannot but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject
+for comedy at all.  It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never.  It
+is a sin; not merely theologically, but socially, one of the very
+worst sins, the parent of seven other sins,--of falsehood, suspicion,
+hate, murder, and a whole bevy of devils.  The prevalence of adultery
+in any country has always been a sign and a cause of social
+insincerity, division, and revolution; where a people has learnt to
+connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light thing, that
+people has been always careless, base, selfish, cowardly,--ripe for
+slavery.  And we must say that either the courtiers and Londoners of
+James and Charles the First were in that state, or that the poets
+were doing their best to make them so.
+
+We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall
+only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century,
+with the exception of Shakspeare's, in which adultery is not
+introduced as a subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the
+whole plot.  The seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to
+pass as a 'handsome gentleman'; the injured husband is, as in that
+Italian literature of which we shall speak shortly, the object of
+every kind of scorn and ridicule.  In this latter habit (common to
+most European nations) there is a sort of justice.  A man can
+generally retain his wife's affections if he will behave himself like
+a man; and 'injured husbands' have for the most part no one to blame
+but themselves.  But the matter is not a subject for comedy; not even
+in that case which has been always too common in France, Italy, and
+the Romish countries, and which seems to have been painfully common
+in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a mariage de
+convenance, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a decrepit
+old man.  Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects for
+pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry.  Therefore the men who
+look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked are not
+good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when they
+erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure
+in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause,
+and consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity,
+pointing 'Eastward Ho!' i.e. to the city of London, as the quarter
+where court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions
+amid the fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens.  If the citizens
+drove the players out of London, the playwrights took good care to
+have their revenge.  The citizen is their standard butt.  These
+shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken
+a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them.
+Sad it is to see in Shirley's 'Gamester,' Charles the First's
+favourite play, a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old
+Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow-
+merchants.  Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of
+his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage
+with that same city of London, of having given those base words his
+royal warrant and approbation.
+
+The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as
+questionable as the comedies.  That there are noble plays among them
+here and there, no one denies--any more than that there are
+exquisitely amusing plays among the comedies; but as the staple
+interest of the comedies is dirt, so the staple interest of the
+tragedies is crime.  Revenge, hatred, villany, incest, and murder
+upon murder are their constant themes, and (with the exception of
+Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger)
+they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that
+of exciting and amusing the audience, and of displaying their own
+power of delineation in a way which makes one but too ready to
+believe the accusations of the Puritans (supported as they are by
+many ugly anecdotes) that the play-writers and actors were mostly men
+of fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an
+acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch.  This is
+notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern
+'Literature of Horror,' and the two literatures are morally
+identical.  We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought
+against the School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply
+to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars.
+
+This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so greedily,
+tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon them (and not
+undeservedly) heavy odium.
+
+One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as against
+Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from Italy.  We must
+fairly put ourselves into the position of an honest Englishman of the
+seventeenth century before we can appreciate the huge praejudicium
+which must needs have arisen in his mind against anything which could
+claim a Transalpine parentage.  Italy was then not merely the
+stronghold of Popery.  That in itself would have been a fair reason
+for others beside Puritans saying, 'If the root be corrupt, the fruit
+will be also:  any expression of Italian thought and feeling must be
+probably unwholesome while her vitals are being eaten out by an
+abominable falsehood, only half believed by the masses, and not
+believed at all by the higher classes, even those of the priesthood;
+but only kept up for their private aggrandisement.'  But there was
+more than hypothesis in favour of the men who might say this; there
+was universal, notorious, shocking fact.  It was a fact that Italy
+was the centre where sins were invented worthy of the doom of the
+Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all nations who
+had connection with her.  We dare give no proof of this assertion.
+
+The Italian morals and the Italian lighter literature of the
+sixteenth and of the beginning of the seventeenth century were such,
+that one is almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them,
+although the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes
+to understand either the European society of the time or the Puritan
+hatred of the drama.  Non ragionam di lor:  ma guarda e passa.
+
+It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into England by
+the young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish,
+travelled to Italy.  From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford,
+about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, this foul tide had begun to
+set toward England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in
+passing through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its
+course hitherward; till, to judge by Marston's 'Satires,' certain
+members of the higher classes had, by the beginning of James's reign,
+learnt nearly all which the Italians had to teach them.  Marston
+writes in a rage, it is true; foaming, stamping, and vapouring too
+much to escape the suspicion of exaggeration; yet he dared not have
+published the things which he does, had he not fair ground for some
+at least of his assertions.  And Marston, be it remembered, was no
+Puritan, but a playwright, and Ben Jonson's friend.
+
+Bishop Hall, in his 'Satires,' describes things bad enough, though
+not so bad as Marston does; but what is even more to the purpose, he
+wrote, and dedicated to James, a long dissuasive against the fashion
+of running abroad.  Whatever may be thought of the arguments of 'Quo
+vadis?--a Censure of Travel,' its main drift is clear enough.  Young
+gentlemen, by going to Italy, learnt to be fops and profligates, and
+probably Papists into the bargain.  These assertions there is no
+denying.  Since the days of Lord Oxford, most of the ridiculous and
+expensive fashions in dress had come from Italy, as well as the
+newest modes of sin; and the playwrights themselves make no secret of
+the fact.  There is no need to quote instances; they are innumerable;
+and the most serious are not fit to be quoted, scarcely the titles of
+the plays in which they occur; but they justify almost every line of
+Bishop Hall's questions (of which some of the strongest expressions
+have necessarily been omitted):-
+
+
+'What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed?
+
+'To begin at our skin:  who knows not whence we had the variety of
+our vain disguises?  As if we had not wit enough to be foolish unless
+we were taught it.  These dresses, being constant in their
+mutability, show us our masters.  What is it that we have not learned
+of our neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap? whom would it
+not vex to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks
+and monsters of themselves?  Whence come their (absurd fashions); but
+the one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from the
+worse-minded courtesans of Italy?  Whence else learned they to daub
+these mud-walls with apothecaries' mortar; and those high washes,
+which are so cunningly licked on that the wet napkin of Phryne should
+he deceived?  Whence the frizzled and powdered bushes of their
+borrowed hair?  As if they were ashamed of the head of God's making,
+and proud of the tire-woman's.  Where learned we that devilish art
+and practice of duel, wherein men seek honour in blood, and are
+taught the ambition of being glorious butchers of men?  Where had we
+that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in which the nose is no less
+pleased than the palate, and the eye no less than either? wherein the
+piles of dishes make barricadoes against the appetite, and with a
+pleasing encumbrance trouble a hungry guest.  Where those forms of
+ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned to make gods of
+others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason while they
+pretend to do reason?  Where the lawlessness (miscalled freedom) of a
+wild tongue, that runs, with reins on the neck, through the
+bedchambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and
+spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred
+out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness?  Where the
+change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some
+few butterflies?  Where the art of dishonesty in practical
+Machiavelism, in false equivocations?  Where the slight account of
+that filthiness which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as
+not unnecessary?  Where the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy
+in those formal compliments which do neither expect belief from
+others nor carry any from ourselves?  Where' (and here Bishop Hall
+begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of
+matters notorious and undeniable.)  'Where that close Atheism, which
+secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe,
+wisdom to profess any religion?  Where the bloody and tragical
+science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and
+rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation
+hath endangered the infection of our peace?'--Bishop Hall's 'Quo
+Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,' vol xii. sect. 22.
+
+
+Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of
+the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since
+the beginning of the sixteenth century.  However much truth there may
+be in the common assertion that the old 'miracle plays' and
+'mysteries' were the parents of the English drama (as they certainly
+were of the Spanish and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much
+our stage owed, from its first rise under Elizabeth, to direct
+importations from Italy.  This is merely thrown out as a suggestion;
+to establish the fact would require a wide acquaintance with the
+early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due
+weight.  The names of the characters in most of our early regular
+comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes, are the
+manners, at least they profess to be so.  Next, the plots of many of
+the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if
+Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where
+others found poison) went to Cinthio for 'Othello' and 'Measure for
+Measure,' to Bandello for 'Romeo and Juliet,' and to Boccaccio for
+'Cymbeline,' there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to
+the same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these
+profligate writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts
+adultery into a virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a
+duty; which revels in the horrible as freely as any French novelist
+of the romantic school; and whose only value is its pitiless exposure
+of the profligacy of the Romish priesthood:  if an exposure can be
+valuable which makes a mock equally of things truly and falsely
+sacred, and leaves on the reader's mind the fear that the writer saw
+nothing in heaven or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self-
+sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.
+
+Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to judge from
+their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to assert, were
+drawn from life, and for which they give names, places, and all
+details which might amuse the noble gentlemen and ladies to whom
+these stories are dedicated), this had been the morality of Italy for
+some centuries past.  This, also, is the general morality of the
+English stage in the seventeenth century.  Can we wonder that
+thinking men should have seen a connection between Italy and the
+stage?  Certainly the playwrights put themselves between the horns of
+an ugly dilemma.  Either the vices which they depicted were those of
+general English society, and of themselves also (for they lived in
+the very heart of town and court foppery); or else they were the
+vices of a foreign country, with which the English were comparatively
+unacquainted.  In the first case, we can only say that the Stuart age
+in England was one which deserved purgation of the most terrible
+kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal measures
+would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the experience
+of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never have
+been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines.
+In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds
+of the people, and, instead of 'holding up a mirror to vice,'
+instructing frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and
+fully justifying old Prynne's indignant complaint -
+
+
+'The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies
+on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the
+spectators' minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them,
+till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed
+no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill
+spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce
+them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill-
+serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic interlude.'
+
+
+That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police
+reports will sufficiently prove.  It is notorious that the
+representation in our own days of 'Tom and Jerry' and of 'Jack
+Sheppard' did excite dozens of young lads to imitate the heroes of
+those dramas; and such must have been the effect of similar and worse
+representations in the Stuart age.  No rational man will need the
+authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor Leighton, Archbishop Parker,
+Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any one else, Churchman or
+Puritan, prelate or 'penitent reclaimed play-poet,' like Stephen
+Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert, citizens' wives (who
+are generally represented as the proper subjects for seduction)
+'have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they have
+received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned
+their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women,
+light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt,
+their children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault
+of a dangerous state;' or that 'The devices of carrying and re-
+carrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport
+their tokens by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other
+kinds of policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of
+their wives, guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants,
+were aptly taught in these schools of abuse.' {2}
+
+The matter is simple enough.  We should not allow these plays to be
+acted in our own day, because we know that they would produce their
+effects.  We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or
+his servants to see such representations. {3}  Why, in all fairness,
+were the Puritans wrong in condemning that which we now have
+absolutely forbidden?
+
+We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the
+old play-houses.  Gosson and his colleague the anonymous Penitent
+assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but
+antechambers to houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned
+in the pit were only not practised also in the pit.  What reason have
+we to doubt it, who know that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical
+reformation of this abuse, for which his name will be ever respected,
+our own comparatively purified stage was just the same?  Let any one
+who remembers the saloons of Drury Lane and Covent Garden thirty
+years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the Globe or the
+Fortune must have been, in days when players were allowed to talk
+inside as freely as the public behaved outside.
+
+Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of
+demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting
+them.  We will lay on them the blame of no special malus animus:
+but, at the same time, we must treat their fine words about 'holding
+a mirror up to vice,' and 'showing the age its own deformity,' as
+mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek.
+It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two
+generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth
+of Congreve.  If the poets had really intended to show vice its own
+deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does)
+as punished, and not as triumphant.  It is ridiculous to talk of
+moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice.  The only
+condition which can excuse the representation of evil is omitted.
+The simple fact is that the poets wanted to draw a house; that this
+could most easily be done by the coarsest and most violent means; and
+that not being often able to find stories exciting enough in the past
+records of sober English society, they went to Italy and Spain for
+the violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments,
+excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough
+to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control, its victims.
+Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange
+mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the
+immoral playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward
+savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation
+brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of
+themselves in their worst moments, such as no 'Mystery of Cain' or
+'Tragedy of Prometheus' can give.
+
+Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama
+for its lessons in human nature?  On that special point something
+must be said hereafter.  Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century
+poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism;
+one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who
+so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only
+to Shakspeare.  Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to
+'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the
+average morality of his contemporary playwrights:-
+
+
+'For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices
+and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the
+impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a
+good man.  He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good
+discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in
+their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood,
+recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the
+interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less
+than human, a master in manners and can alone (or with a few) effect
+the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride
+and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon.  But it will
+here be hastily answered that the writers of these days are other
+things, that not only their manners but their natures are inverted,
+and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of poet but the abused
+name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick,
+or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation,
+blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised.
+I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not),
+because in some men's abortive features (and would God they had never
+seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold
+adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a
+more malicious slander.  For every particular I can (and from a most
+clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward
+the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of such foul and
+unwashed . . . [his expression is too strong for quotation] as is now
+made the food of the scene.'
+
+
+It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty
+ideal of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints
+against the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger sentence
+occurs:-
+
+
+'The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present
+trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal
+soul doth not abhor?  Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered,
+and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms,
+such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with
+(indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn
+the blood of a Christian to water.'
+
+
+So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a
+peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company.
+After him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant
+matter ought to be necessary.  He may have been morose, fanatical,
+exaggerative; but his bitter words suggest at least this dilemma.
+Either they are true, and the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says
+it was) that of Gehenna:  or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of
+spite and envy against more successful poets.  And what does that
+latter prove, but that the greatest poet of his age (after Shakspeare
+has gone) was not as much esteemed as some poets whom we know to have
+been more filthy and more horrible than he? which, indeed, is the
+main complaint of Jonson himself.  It will be rejoined, of course,
+that he was an altogether envious man; that he envied Shakspeare,
+girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at 'The Winter's Tale' and
+'The Tempest,' in the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour'; and,
+indeed, Jonson's writings, and those of many other playwrights, leave
+little doubt that stage rivalry called out the bitterest hatred and
+the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare's great soul was
+giving way to the pettiest passions, when in 'Hamlet' he had his
+fling at the 'aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the
+top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for 't.'  It may
+be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that
+'their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own
+succession,' i.e. against themselves, when 'grown to common players.'
+Be that as it may.  Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only
+less great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare:  but Jonson certainly
+is not so in all his charges.  Some of the faults which he attributes
+to Shakspeare are really faults.
+
+At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his
+contemporaries, by the evidence of the men's own plays.  We know that
+the decadence of the stage of which he complains went on
+uninterruptedly after his time, and in the very direction which he
+pointed out.
+
+On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of poetry 'made
+a wall in our father's house, and the bricks are alive to testify
+unto this day.'  So that we cannot do better than give a few samples
+thereof, at least samples decent enough for modern readers, and let
+us begin, not with a hodman, but with Jonson himself.
+
+Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was a very
+great genius, immaculate or not; 'Rare Ben,' with all his faults.
+One can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of
+that rich free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance
+and pride which brood upon the lip and eyebrow,
+
+
+'Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
+The love of love.'
+
+
+A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one
+fancies, never could.  One ought to have, too, a sort of delicacy
+about saying much against him; for he is dead, and can make, for the
+time being at least, no rejoinder.  There are dead men whom one is
+not much ashamed to 'upset' after their death, because one would not
+have been much afraid of doing so when they were alive.  But 'Rare
+Ben' had terrible teeth, and used them too.  A man would have thought
+twice ere he snapt at him living, and therefore it seems somewhat a
+cowardly trick to bark securely at his ghost.  Nevertheless it is no
+unfair question to ask--Do not his own words justify the Puritan
+complaints?  But if so, why does he rail at the Puritans for making
+their complaints?  His answer would have been that they railed in
+ignorance, not merely at low art, as we call it now, but at high art
+and all art.  Be it so.  Here was their fault, if fault it was in
+those days.  For to discriminate between high art and low art they
+must have seen both.  And for Jonson's wrath to be fair and just he
+must have shown them both.  Let us see what the pure drama is like
+which he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his
+contemporaries; and, to bring the matter nearer home, let us take one
+of the plays in which he hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely
+the 'Alchemist,' said to have been first acted in 1610 'by the king's
+majesty's servants.'  Look, then, at this well-known play, and take
+Jonson at his word.  Allow that Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome
+are, as they very probably are, fair portraits of a class among the
+sectaries of the day:  but bear in mind, too, that if this be
+allowed, the other characters shall be held as fair portraits also.
+Otherwise, all must he held to be caricature; and then the onslaught
+on the Puritans vanishes into nothing, or worse.  Now in either case,
+Ananias and Tribulation are the best men in the play.  They palter
+with their consciences, no doubt:  but they have consciences, which
+no one else in the play has, except poor Surly; and he, be it
+remembered, comes to shame, is made a laughing-stock, and 'cheats
+himself,' as he complains at last, 'by that same foolish vice of
+honesty':  while in all the rest what have we but every form of human
+baseness?  Lovell, the master, if he is to be considered a negative
+character as doing no wrong, has, at all events, no more recorded of
+him than the noble act of marrying by deceit a young widow for the
+sake of her money, the philosopher's stone, by the bye, and highest
+object of most of the seventeenth century dramatists.  If most of the
+rascals meet with due disgrace, none of them is punished; and the
+greatest rascal of all, who, when escape is impossible, turns
+traitor, and after deserving the cart and pillory a dozen times for
+his last and most utter baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the
+honour of addressing the audience at the play's end in the most smug
+and self-satisfied tone, and of 'putting himself on you that are my
+country,' not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair
+majority who would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of all
+imitation.
+
+Now is this play a moral or an immoral one?  Of its coarseness we say
+nothing.  We should not endure it, of course, nowadays; and on that
+point something must be said hereafter:  but if we were to endure
+plain speaking as the only method of properly exposing vice, should
+we endure the moral which, instead of punishing vice, rewards it?
+
+And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among the
+Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch?  What but a background of
+profligacy and frivolity?
+
+A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the age may be
+found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself.  Howsoever pure and
+lofty the ideal which he laid down for himself (and no doubt
+honestly) in the Preface to 'Volpone,' he found it impossible to keep
+up to it.  Nine years afterwards we find him, in his 'Bartholomew
+Fair,' catering to the low tastes of James the First in ribaldry at
+which, if one must needs laugh--as who that was not more than man
+could help doing over that scene between Rabbi Busy and the puppets?-
+-shallow and untrue as the gist of the humour is, one feels the next
+moment as if one had been indulging in unholy mirth at the expense of
+some grand old Noah who has come to shame in his cups.
+
+But lower still does Jonson fall in that Masque of the 'Gipsies
+Metamorphosed,' presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson was forty-
+seven; old enough, one would have thought, to know better.  It is not
+merely the insincere and all but blasphemous adulation which is
+shocking,--that was but the fashion of the times:  but the treating
+these gipsies and beggars, and their 'thieves' Latin' dialect, their
+filthiness and cunning, ignorance and recklessness, merely as themes
+for immoral and inhuman laughter.  Jonson was by no means the only
+poet of that day to whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads
+which infested England were only a comical phase of humanity, instead
+of being, as they would be now, objects of national shame and sorrow,
+of pity and love, which would call out in the attempt to redeem them
+the talents and energies of good men.  But Jonson certainly sins more
+in this respect than any of his contemporaries.  He takes a low
+pleasure in parading his intimate acquaintance with these poor
+creatures' foul slang and barbaric laws; and is, we should say, the
+natural father of that lowest form of all literature, which has since
+amused the herd, though in a form greatly purified, in the form of
+'Beggars' Operas,' 'Dick Turpins,' and 'Jack Sheppards.'  Everything
+which is objectionable in such modern publications as these was
+exhibited, in far grosser forms, by one of the greatest poets who
+ever lived, for the amusement of a king of England; and yet the world
+still is at a loss to know why sober and God-fearing men detested
+both the poet and the king.
+
+And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the
+degradation of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur
+passages of the old sweetness and grandeur; disjecta membra poetae
+such as these, which, even although addressed to James, are perfect:-
+
+
+'3rd Gipsy.
+
+Look how the winds upon the waves grow tame,
+   Take up land sounds upon their purple wings,
+And, catching each from other, bear the same
+   To every angle of their sacred springs.
+So will we take his praise, and hurl his name
+   About the globe, in thousand airy rings.'
+
+* * * *
+
+Let us pass on.  Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit?
+
+There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here,
+and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible.
+The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy's expense, in 'Bartholomew
+Fair,' turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women's parts acted by
+boys.  Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of
+puppets instead of live human beings:  but the question is shirked
+nevertheless.  What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans
+is hard to conceive.  Prynne, in his 'Histriomastix,' may have pushed
+a little too far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the
+Mosaic law:  yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by
+Moses' law, not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which
+did harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that,
+therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day a
+similar practice would produce a similar evil.  Our firm conviction
+is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne was
+perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player was pretty
+certainly to send him to the devil.  Let any man of common sense
+imagine to himself the effect on a young boy's mind which would be
+produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience not
+merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in
+almost every play.  We appeal to common sense--would any father allow
+his own children to personate, even in private, the basest of
+mankind?  And yet we must beg pardon:  for common sense, it is to be
+supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons
+to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while
+grave and reverend prelates and divines look on approving.  The
+Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the minds of
+the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels; and we only ask,
+What must have been the effect of representing far fouler characters
+than Terence's on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes?
+Prynne and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere
+defilement of the conscience:  we shall say nothing of them, but
+that, from collateral evidence, we believe every word they say; and
+that when pretty little Cupid's mother, in Jonson's Christmas masque,
+tells how 'She could have had money enough for him, had she been
+tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king's players,' and
+how 'Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for him, and
+old Mr. Hemings too,' she had better have tied a stone round the
+child's neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him
+over to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation
+more money to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native
+town, on the fruits of others' sin.  Honour to old Prynne, bitter and
+narrow as he was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the
+humanity and Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor
+children whom not a bishop on the bench interfered to save; but,
+while they were writing and persecuting in behalf of baptismal
+regeneration, left those to perish whom they declared so stoutly to
+be regenerate in baptism.  Prynne used that argument too, and
+declared these stage-plays to be among the very 'pomps and vanities
+which Christians renounced at baptism.'  He may or may not have been
+wrong in identifying them with the old heathen pantomimes and games
+of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under a mountain of
+quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for Prynne's
+reading seems to have been quite enormous).  Those very prelates
+could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught
+in them which could be made to justify their own system, though
+perhaps it had really even less to do therewith than the Roman
+pantomimes had with the Globe Theatre:  but the Church of England had
+retained in her Catechism the old Roman word 'pomps,' as one of the
+things which were to be renounced; and as 'pomps' confessedly meant
+at first those very spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre,
+Prynne could not be very illogical in believing that, as it had been
+retained, it was retained to testify against something, and probably
+against the thing in England most like the 'pomps' of heathen Rome.
+Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide whether of the two was the better
+Churchman--Prynne, who tried to make the baptismal covenant mean
+something, or Laud, who allowed such a play as 'The Ordinary' to be
+written by his especial protege, Cartwright, the Oxford scholar, and
+acted before him probably by Oxford scholars, certainly by christened
+boys.  We do not pretend to pry into the counsels of the Most High;
+but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when combined with
+lofty professions and pretensions, does (as all history tells us that
+it does) draw down the vengeance of Almighty God, then we need look
+no further than this one neglect of the seventeenth century prelates
+(whether its cause was stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the
+monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered), to discover full reason why
+it pleased God to sweep them out awhile with the besom of
+destruction.
+
+There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century,
+new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and
+that is, the apotheosis of Rakes.  Let the faults of the Middle Age,
+or of the Tudors, have been what they may, that class of person was
+in their time simply an object of disgust.  The word which then
+signified a Rake is, in the 'Morte d'Arthur' (temp. Ed. IV.), the
+foulest term of disgrace which can be cast upon a knight; whilst even
+up to the latter years of Elizabeth the contempt of parents and
+elders seems to have been thought a grievous sin.  In Italy, even,
+fountain of all the abominations of the age, respect for the fifth
+commandment seems to have lingered after all the other nine had been
+forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his 'Corteggiano' (about 1520),
+regretting the modest and respectful training of the generation which
+had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan method of
+education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the method
+which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to
+Protestant, Puritan and Churchman.
+
+But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth's reign)
+fathers became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked
+of their money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the
+young gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and
+Charles, with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and
+roystering, beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking,
+duelling, and profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of
+gentle birth), set forth not merely as harmless amusements for young
+gentlemen, but (as in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of 'Monsieur
+Thomas') virtues without which a man is despicable.  On this point,
+as on many others, those who have, for ecclesiastical reasons, tried
+to represent the first half of the seventeenth century as a golden
+age have been altogether unfair.  There is no immorality of the court
+plays of Charles II.'s time which may not be found in those of
+Charles I.'s.  Sedley and Etherege are not a whit worse, but only
+more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur Thomas is the
+spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades, Bullies,
+Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who
+wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master's till to pay his losses
+at a betting-office.  True; we of this generation can hardly afford
+to throw stones.  The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high
+patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed
+lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian
+Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England.  Better days,
+however, have dawned; 'Tom and Jerry,' instead of running three
+hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as 'Monsieur
+Thomas' would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now
+consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while
+if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they
+would, instead of winning a good wife, be 'cut' by braver and finer
+gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself:  but what does this fact
+prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan
+opinion of this matter (as of some others) was the right one?
+
+There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage
+of profligate scapegraces on the stage.  They would not have been
+endured on the stage had they not been very common off it; and if
+there had not been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking
+excuse for them:  it requires no great penetration to see what that
+excuse must have been.  If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court
+were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been
+monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible.  But if it was
+(as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere,
+decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur
+Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity.  Take him as he
+stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and
+courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers.  He would
+have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age as a
+Hudson's Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a man-
+of-war--anything where he could find a purpose and a work.  Doubt it
+not.  How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years
+ago one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses
+and cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not
+only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing
+homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches
+at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful
+fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the
+crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life.  And even at such
+a youth's worst, reason and conscience alike forbid us to deal out to
+him the same measure as we do to the offences of the cool and hoary
+profligate, or to the darker and subtler spiritual sins of the false
+professor.  But if the wrath of God be not unmistakably and
+practically revealed from heaven against youthful profligacy and
+disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or other, against
+what sin is it revealed?  It was not left for our age to discover
+that the wages of sin is death:  but Charles, his players and his
+courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had
+to be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal
+lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them,
+sharp shot and cold steel did.
+
+'But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.'
+The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that
+this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse.  If it be
+said that Shakspeare's is the very highest art, the answer is, that
+what they hated in him was not his high art, but his low art, the
+foul and horrible elements which he had in common with his brother
+play-writers.  True, there is far less of these elements in
+Shakspeare than in any of his compeers:  but they are there.  And
+what the Puritans hated in him was exactly what we have to expunge
+before we can now represent his plays.  If it be said that they ought
+to have discerned and appreciated the higher elements in him, so
+ought the rest of their generation.  The Puritans were surely not
+bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and brother poets did not
+see.  And it is surely a matter of fact that the deep spiritual
+knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare's plays (and them
+alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all men
+and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who
+probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612,
+has assigned to him.
+
+
+'I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men's witty labours,
+especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the
+laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty
+composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr.
+Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right
+happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr.
+Heywood.'
+
+
+While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing
+in Shakspeare beyond the same 'happy and copious industry' which he
+sees in Dekker and Heywood,--while Cartwright, perhaps the only young
+poet of real genius in Charles the First's reign, places Fletcher's
+name ''Twixt Jonson's grave and Shakspeare's lighter sound,' and
+tells him that
+
+
+'Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
+I' th' ladies' questions, and the fool's replies.
+* * * * *
+Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.
+* * * * *
+Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
+As his, but without his scurrility;' {4}
+
+
+while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his
+soul, only remarks on Shakspeare's marvellous lyrical sweetness, 'his
+native wood-notes wild'; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did
+not discover the stork among the cranes?
+
+An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which
+deserves a few moments' consideration.  It is said, 'the grossness of
+the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime.  It was
+the fashion of the age.  It is not our fashion, certainly; but they
+meant no harm by it.  The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none
+the worse for that.'  Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster's
+plays, seems inclined to exalt this habit into a virtue.  After
+saying that the licentious and debauched are made 'as odious in
+representation as they would be if they were actually present'--an
+assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the case of
+Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to forget
+that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be,
+keeps stoutly on the side of virtue--Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that
+'perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our
+morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which
+we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway
+of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were
+careless of words, and only considerate of actions.'
+
+To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer that the
+fact is directly contrary; that there is a mass of unanimous evidence
+which cannot be controverted to prove that England, in the first half
+of the seventeenth century was far more immoral than in the
+nineteenth; that the proofs lie patent to any dispassionate reader:
+but that these pages will not be defiled by the details of them.
+
+Let it be said that coarseness was 'the fashion of the age.'  The
+simple question is, was it a good fashion or a bad?  It is said--with
+little or no proof--that in simple states of society much manly
+virtue and much female purity have often consisted with very broad
+language and very coarse manners.  But what of that?  Drunkards may
+very often be very honest and brave men.  Does that make drunkenness
+no sin?  Or will honesty and courage prevent a man's being the worse
+for hard drinking?  If so, why have we given up coarseness of
+language?  And why has it been the better rather than the worse part
+of the nation, the educated and religious rather than the ignorant
+and wicked, who have given it up?  Why?  Simply because this nation,
+and all other nations on the Continent, in proportion to their
+morality, have found out that coarseness of language is, to say the
+least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong to do certain
+things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of them; that
+even certain things which are right and blessed and holy lose their
+sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of
+being left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them.  On
+the whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as
+insincere.  Certainly, in our day, it will not hold.  If any one
+wishes to hear coarse language in 'good society' he can hear it, I am
+told, in Paris:  but one questions whether Parisian society be now
+'under the sway of a more energetic principle of virtue' than our
+own.  The sum total of the matter seems to be, that England has found
+out that on this point again the old Puritans were right.  And
+quaintly enough, the party in the English Church who hold the
+Puritans most in abhorrence are the most scrupulous now upon this
+very point; and, in their dread of contaminating the minds of youth,
+are carrying education, at school and college, to such a more than
+Puritan precision that with the most virtuous and benevolent
+intentions they are in danger of giving lads merely a conventional
+education,--a hot-house training which will render them incapable
+hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the
+world.  They themselves republished Massinger's 'Virgin Martyr,'
+because it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist--
+for there is every reason to believe that Massinger was one--setting
+forth how the heroine was attended all through by an angel in the
+form of a page, and how--not to mention the really beautiful ancient
+fiction about the fruits which Dorothea sends back from Paradise--
+Theophilus overcomes the devil by means of a cross composed of
+flowers.  Massinger's account of Theophilus' conversation will, we
+fear, make those who know anything of that great crisis of the human
+spirit suspect that Massinger's experience thereof was but small:
+but the fact which is most noteworthy is this--that the 'Virgin
+Martyr' is actually one of the foulest plays known.  Every pains has
+been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in the play were not
+written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what grounds we know not.  If
+Dekker assisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we
+are aware of no canons of internal criticism which will enable us to
+decide, as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is
+Dekker's, and all the poetry Massinger's.  He confesses--as indeed he
+is forced to do--that 'Massinger himself is not free from dialogues
+of low wit and buffoonery'; and then, after calling the scenes in
+question 'detestable ribaldry, 'a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of
+filth and dulness,' recommends them to the reader's supreme scorn and
+contempt,--with which feelings the reader will doubtless regard them:
+but he will also, if he be a thinking man, draw from them the
+following conclusions:  that even if they be Dekker's--of which there
+is no proof--Massinger was forced, in order to the success of his
+play, to pander to the public taste by allowing Dekker to interpolate
+these villanies; that the play which, above all others of the
+seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar rosepink of piety,
+devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest abominations of any
+extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it as a sample of
+the Christianity of that past golden age of High-churchmanship, had
+to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of becoming amenable to
+the laws against abominable publications.
+
+No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have
+quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly
+a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we
+complain do not exist,--few of which they do not form an integral
+part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the
+morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?
+
+Look, then, at Webster's two masterpieces, 'Vittoria Corrombona' and
+the 'Duchess of Malfi.'  A few words spent on them will surely not be
+wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best
+tragedies written since Shakspeare's time.
+
+The whole story of 'Vittoria Corrombona' is one of sin and horror.
+The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest
+and the basest passions.  But the play is not a study of those
+passions from which we may gain a great insight into human nature.
+There is no trace--nor is there, again, in the 'Duchess of Malfi'--of
+that development of human souls for good or evil which is
+Shakspeare's especial power--the power which, far more than any
+accidental 'beauties,' makes his plays, to this day, the delight
+alike of the simple and the wise, while his contemporaries are all
+but forgotten.  The highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the
+development of the human soul; to construct dramas in which the
+conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the characters;
+and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a
+certain passion, or a certain 'humour':  but persons, each unlike all
+others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own
+peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that
+destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding
+his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and
+that in such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be
+able (in proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict
+his conduct under those circumstances.  This is indeed 'high art':
+but we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest.  His
+characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made, full
+grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are not
+characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human form.  Now
+and then he essays to draw a character:  but it is analytically, by
+description, not synthetically and dramatically, by letting the man
+exhibit himself in action; and in the 'Duchess of Mall' he falls into
+the great mistake of telling, by Antonio's mouth, more about the Duke
+and the Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act.  Very different
+is Shakspeare's method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate
+hint about his personages which will serve as a clue to their whole
+future conduct; thus 'showing the whole in each part,' and stamping
+each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dramatist has
+ever approached.
+
+But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster's aim.  He
+has to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own
+way, by blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged
+power.  There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria's
+trial, which have been praised for their delineation of character:
+but it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so
+handled in 'Lear,' 'Othello,' and 'Richard the Third,'--'Given a
+mixed character, to show how he may become criminal,' and to solve
+Webster's 'Given a ready-made criminal, to show how he commits his
+crimes.'  To us the knowledge of character shown in Vittoria's trial
+scene is not an insight into Vittoria's essential heart and brain,
+but a general acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women
+when brought to bay.  Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and
+human nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks
+of Vittoria's 'innocence--resembling boldness' {5}--and 'seeming to
+see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay
+confidence in her,' and so forth.
+
+Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average
+of bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate:  yet
+amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster's
+confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with
+vicious nature in general.  We will say no more on this matter, save
+to ask, Cui bono?  Was the art of which this was the highest
+manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able to
+excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments?
+
+The 'Duchess of Malfi' is certainly in a purer and loftier strain:
+but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must
+take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a 'person' at
+all.  General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for
+a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all
+hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other
+women:  but Webster has no such purpose.  What he was thinking and
+writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story;
+not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and
+husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio
+merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in
+the critical moment of the play) merely forward.  That curious scene,
+in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him
+marry her, is, on the whole, painful.  Webster himself seems to have
+felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have
+tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in
+two exquisite lines of loving shame:  but he has utterly forgotten to
+explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would
+probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would
+compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress's affection.  He has
+plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,--time which he wastes
+on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that
+Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person.  If he gives promise of
+being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards.  In the
+scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather
+than greater, than the Antonio of the opening scene:  though (as
+there) altogether passive.  He hears his mistress's declaration just
+as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and
+a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one
+naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess's part into something
+like scorn or shame (which might have given a good opportunity for
+calling out sudden strength in Antonio):  but so busy is Webster with
+his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be
+a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the
+Duchess's assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that a
+man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day
+before the wedding, is not of much importance.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext Plays and Puritans, by Charles Kingsley
+
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