Plays and Puritans | Page 5

readers feel about them what men who
witnessed them felt, he would be accused of a 'morbid love of horrors.'
If any one, in order to show how the French Revolution of 1793 was
really God's judgment on the profligacy of the ancien regirne, were to
paint that profligacy as the men of the ancien regime unblushingly
painted it themselves, respectability would have a right to demand,
'How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts from their merited
oblivion?' Those, again, who are really acquainted with the history of
Henry the Eighth's marriages, are well aware of facts which prove him
to have been, not a man of violent and lawless passions, but of a cold
temperament and a scrupulous conscience; but which cannot be stated
in print, save in the most delicate and passing hints, to be taken only by
those who at once understand such matters, and really wish to know the
truth; while young ladies in general will still look on Henry as a
monster in human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, to
undeceive them by anything beyond bare assertion without proof.
'But what does it matter,' some one may say, 'what young ladies think
about history?' This it matters; that these young ladies will some day be
mothers, and as such will teach their children their own notions of
modern history; and that, as long as men confine themselves to the
teaching of Roman and Greek history, and leave the history of their
own country to be handled exclusively by their unmarried sisters, so
long will slanders, superstitions, and false political principles be
perpetuated in the minds of our boys and girls.
But a still worse evil arises from the fact that the historian's case is
often too strong to be stated. There is always a reactionary party, or one
at least which lingers sentimentally over the dream of past golden ages,
such as that of which Cowley says, with a sort of naive blasphemy, at
which one knows not whether to smile or sigh -
'When God, the cause to me and men unknown, Forsook the royal
houses, and his own.'
These have full liberty to say all they can in praise of the defeated
system; but the historian has no such liberty to state the case against it.
If he even asserts that he has counter-facts, but dare not state them, he
is at once met with a praejudicium. The mere fact of his having
ascertained the truth is imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of prudish
cant. 'What a very improper person he must be to like to dabble in such

improper books that they must not even be quoted.' If in self-defence he
desperately gives his facts, he only increases the feeling against him,
whilst the reactionists, hiding their blushing faces, find in their modesty
an excuse for avoiding the truth; if, on the other hand, he content
himself with bare assertion, and with indicating the sources from
whence his conclusions are drawn, what care the reactionists? They
know well that the public will not take the trouble to consult
manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but will content
themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on
unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after she
has been painfully haled up to the well's mouth, to tumble miserably to
the bottom of it again.
In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of
the great cause, Puritans v. Players, before our readers, trusting to find
some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common
notions on the point to form a fair decision.
What those notions are is well known. Very many of her Majesty's
subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth century (if
the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the most beautiful
period of the English nation's life; that in it the chivalry and ardent
piety of the Middle Age were happily combined with modern art and
civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the Court, of stage-plays, of the
fashions of the time, was only 'a scrupulous and fantastical niceness';
barbaric and tasteless, if sincere; if insincere, the basest hypocrisy; that
the stage-plays, though coarse, were no worse than Shakspeare, whom
everybody reads; and that if the Stuarts patronised the stage they also
raised it, and exercised a purifying censorship. And many more who do
not go all these lengths with the reactionists, and cannot make up their
mind to look to the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen or model
courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan 'preciseness,' and to
say lazily, that though, of course, something may have been wrong, yet
there