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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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