Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/47

Rh of Great Tew, and make it our business "to examine and refine those grosser proportions which laziness and consent make current in vulgar conversation." Undoubtedly there has been a result from the long travail which England has passed through between the times of the Renascence and our own. Something has come of it all; and that something is the England of to-day, with its seriousness, such as it is, with its undeniable political liberty. Let us be thankful for what we have, and to the Puritans for their share in producing it. But, in the first place, is it certain that the England of to-day is the best imaginable and possible result from the elements with which we started at the Renascence? Because, if not, then by some other shaping of events, and without the Puritan triumph, we might conceivably have stood even yet better than we stand now. In the second place, is it certain that of the good which we admittedly have in the England of to-day—the seriousness and the political liberty—the Puritans and the Puritan triumph are the authors? The assumption that they are so is plausible—it is current; it pervades, let me observe in passing, Mr. Green's fascinating history. But is the assumption sound? When one considers the strength, the boldness, the self-assertion, the instincts of resistance and independence in the English nature, it is surely hazardous to affirm that only by the particular means of the Puritan struggle and the Puritan triumph could we have become free in our persons and property. When we consider the character shown, the signal given, in the thinking of Thomas More and Shakespeare, of Bacon and Harvey, how shall we say that only at the price of Puritanism could England have had free thought? When we consider the seriousness of Spenser, that ideal Puritan before the fanatical Puritans and without their faults; when we consider Spenser's seriousness and pureness, in their revolt against the moral disorder of the Renascence, and remember the allies which they had in the native integrity and piety of the English race, shall we even venture to say that only at the price of Puritanism could we have had seriousness? Puritanism has been one element in our seriousness; but it is not the whole of our seriousness, nor the best in it.

Falkland was profoundly serious. He was "in his nature so severe a lover of justice and so precise a lover of truth, that he was superior to all possible temptations for the violation of either." Far from being a man flighty and unstable, he was a man, says Clarendon, constant and pertinacious; "constant and pertinacious, and not to be wearied with any pains." And he was, as I have said, a born constitionalist, a hater of "exorbitances" of all kinds, governmental or popular. He "thought no mischief so intolerable as the presumption of ministers of state to break positive rules for reasons of state, or judges to transgress known laws upon the title of conveniency or necessity; which made him so severe against the Earl of Strafford and the Lord Finch, contrary to his natural gentleness and temper." He had the historic sense in politics; an aversion to root-and-branch work, to what he called "great mutations." He was for using compromise and adjustment, for keeping what had long served and what was ready to hand, but amending it and turning it to better account. "I do not believe bishops to be jure divino," he said; "nay, I believe them not to be jure divino." Still, he was not disposed to "root up this ancient tree." He had no superstition about it. "He had in his own judgment," says Clarendon, "such a latitude in opinion, that he did not believe any part of the order or government of it to be so essentially necessary to religion, but that it might be parted with and altered for a notable public benefit or convenience." On the other hand: "He was never in the least degree swayed or moved by the objections which were made against that government (episcopacy) in the Church, holding them most ridiculous; or affected to the other which those men (the Puritans) fancied to themselves." And there episcopacy and the Church of England had been for ages, and it was the part of a statesman, Falkland thought, rather to use them than to destroy them. All this is in the very spirit of English political liberty, as we now conceive it, and as, by the Revolution of 1688, it triumphed. But it is not in the spirit of the Puritans. The truths assured of ultimate triumph were, then, so far as political liberty is concerned, rather with Falkland than with the Puritans.

It was his historic sense, again, which made him, when compromise was plainly impossible, side with the king. Things had come, and by no fault of Falkland, to that pass, when the contention, as Bolingbroke truly says, was "not for preserving the constitution but for the manner of destroying it." In such a juncture Falkland looked for the best power or purchase, to use Burke's excellent expression, that he