Plays and Puritans | Page 4

in general, a 'sham and a snare,' and
whisper to each other confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a
'bore,' and that Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all;
while the middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as
with a pretty toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and
think, apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is
merely used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl patterns; not to
mention that, if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand down
to posterity likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family. But when
'Art' dares to be in earnest, and to mean something, much more to
connect itself with religion, Smith's tone alters. He will teach 'Art' to
keep in what he considers its place, and if it refuses, take the law of it,
and put it into the Ecclesiastical Court. So he says, and what is more,
he means what he says; and as all the world, from Hindostan to Canada,
knows by most practical proof, what he means, he sooner or later does,
perhaps not always in the wisest way, but still he does it.
Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward 'Art' is simply that
of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and widened, but only enough
so as to permit Art, not to encourage it.
Some men's thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form
of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency of
the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,' and ending--who can tell where?
But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any skill in the scientia
scientiarum, or say, 'The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His
way, before His works of old. When He prepared the heavens, I was
there, when He set a compass upon the face of the deep;' we shall leave
aesthetic science to those who think that they comprehend it; we shall,
as simple disciples of Bacon, deal with facts and with history as 'the
will of God revealed in facts.' We will leave those who choose to settle

what ought to be, and ourselves look patiently at that which actually
was once, and which may be again; that so out of the conduct of our old
Puritan forefathers (right or wrong), and their long war against 'Art,' we
may learn a wholesome lesson; as we doubtless shall, if we believe
firmly that our history is neither more nor less than what the old
Hebrew prophets called 'God's gracious dealings with his people,' and
not say in our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings Jacobite
ballads (written forty years ago by men who cared no more for the
Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off
George the Fourth's feet at his visit to Edinburgh)--'Victrix causa Diis
placuit, sed victa puellis.'
The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and invidious
task. For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases, arise not merely
from the crimes of a few great men, but from a general viciousness and
decay of the whole, or the majority, of the nation; and that viciousness
is certain to be made up, in great part, of a loosening of domestic ties,
of breaches of the Seventh Commandment, and of sins connected with
them, which a writer is now hardly permitted to mention. An 'evil and
adulterous generation' has been in all ages and countries the one
marked out for intestine and internecine strife. That description is
always applicable to a revolutionary generation; whether or not it also
comes under the class of a superstitious one, 'seeking after a sign from
heaven,' only half believing its own creed, and, therefore, on tiptoe for
miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely
persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems
about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from
sinking into the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian lies
under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong
for him to state it. If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and
respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these,
will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them as
incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find similar horrors and
abominations among people of their own rank, of whom they are
naturally inclined to judge by their own standard of civilisation. Thus if
any one, in justification of the Reformation and the British hatred of
Popery during the sixteenth century, should dare to detail the
undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and to comment on them

dramatically enough to make his