Plays and Puritans

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.