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Plays and Puritans By: Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) |
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PLAYS AND PURITANS {1} by Charles Kingsley
The British Isles have been ringing for the last few years with the
word 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,'
'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and
every well educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something
about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic'
treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares
very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation
of 'bad taste.' Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our
poetry is dying; our music, like our architecture, only reproduces
the past; our painting is only first rate when it handles landscapes
and animals, and seems likely so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody
cares. Some of the deepest and most earnest minds vote the question,
in general, a 'sham and a snare,' and whisper to each other
confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a 'bore,' and that
Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all; while the
middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a pretty
toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Paganism, and think,
apparently, that Art is very well when it means nothing, and is
merely used to beautify drawing rooms and shawl patterns; not to
mention that, if there were no painters, Mr. Smith could not hand
down to posterity likenesses of himself, Mrs. Smith, and family. But
when 'Art' dares to be in earnest, and to mean something, much more
to connect itself with religion, Smith's tone alters. He will teach
'Art' to keep in what he considers its place, and if it refuses, take
the law of it, and put it into the Ecclesiastical Court. So he says,
and what is more, he means what he says; and as all the world, from
Hindostan to Canada, knows by most practical proof, what he means, he
sooner or later does, perhaps not always in the wisest way, but still
he does it. Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward 'Art' is
simply that of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and widened, but
only enough so as to permit Art, not to encourage it. Some men's thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form
of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency
of the infinite to reveal itself in the finite,' and ending who can
tell where? But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any
skill in the scientia scientiarum, or say, 'The Lord possessed me in
the beginning of His way, before His works of old. When He prepared
the heavens, I was there, when He set a compass upon the face of the
deep;' we shall leave aesthetic science to those who think that they
comprehend it; we shall, as simple disciples of Bacon, deal with
facts and with history as 'the will of God revealed in facts.' We
will leave those who choose to settle what ought to be, and ourselves
look patiently at that which actually was once, and which may be
again; that so out of the conduct of our old Puritan forefathers
(right or wrong), and their long war against 'Art,' we may learn a
wholesome lesson; as we doubtless shall, if we believe firmly that
our history is neither more nor less than what the old Hebrew
prophets called 'God's gracious dealings with his people,' and not
say in our hearts, like some sentimental girl who sings Jacobite
ballads (written forty years ago by men who cared no more for the
Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off
George the Fourth's feet at his visit to Edinburgh) 'Victrix causa
Diis placuit, sed victa puellis.' The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and
invidious task. For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases,
arise not merely from the crimes of a few great men, but from a
general viciousness and decay of the whole, or the majority, of the
nation; and that viciousness is certain to be made up, in great part,
of a loosening of domestic ties, of breaches of the Seventh
Commandment, and of sins connected with them, which a writer is now
hardly permitted to mention... Continue reading book >>
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