The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Return of Pageantry

The Puritans, in their hours of pride, seem actually to claim that our nation is fundamentally Puritan, was made by the Puritan spirit. They put Cromwell in the place of Alfred; they put him not only at the head of English patriotism, but at the beginning of English history. They make old England a sort of Puritan colony like New England. All this is, of course, a ludicrous delusion. The first facts or names that jump to the mind will remind any Englishman that his country had a splendid national literature and a very unmistakable type of national life before the hat of a single Puritan had been seen and hooted in England. Chaucer is even more English than Bunyan; Shakespeare is certainly more English than Milton. The Tabard and the Mermaid, Lady Godiva and St George, Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood, belong to a national tradition that has not even been touched by Puritanism; yet which is quite different from the tradition of Spain, of Scotland, or of France. Chaucer's Franklin, whose beard was white as a daisy, and in whose house `it snewed meate and drinke', was as certainly an Englishman as he most certainly was not a Puritan.

Puritanism was something put into the Englishman after he had grown to his full national stature. Some hated it as an alien poison; some praised it as a violent medicine. But nobody pretended that it was the natural bread and ale that had built up the countrymen of Colet or Ben Jonson. It might indeed be maintained that in all the three cases of nations thus raided by Puritanism, the Scotch, the English and the Dutch, this religion has been rather a sort of spell or possession than a true change of personality. It might be suggested that in each case a merrier and more medieval nation went alive into that land of bondage and is now coming alive out of it. Thus the Scotch romance and witchery which Scott and Stevenson have brought to life is only the return of a spirit most marked in the old Scottish ballads and chronicles, in the tales of Tamlane in the Forest, and Thomas the Rhymer among the fairies; and in that almost Arthurian romance of the roving court of Robert Bruce, which left, like a gypsy blood for generations, a tradition of wandering Scottish kings. Even in Scotland, I believe, Calvinism has only been an episode. The Scotch are taking off their `blacks' and appearing again in the purple of their ancient poetry. We may yet hear the twang of the last precentor before we really hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Even in the third case of Holland, of which I know far less, something of the same kind could be suggested. Before the coming of the Puritan, the people of the flat country had already shown that talent for a certain detail and domesticity in art which fills so many galleries with their quaint interiors and their convincing still life. It might well be maintained that the same note of half religious realism, of an almost mystical silence and solidity, is being sounded in much of the new literature of the Netherlands. It is marked in Maeterlinck's love of interiors and the unconscious shapes of things; in the way in which he writes of a window standing open or a passage leading to a door. He lives in a dumb fairyland of furniture. Nothing could be more like the almost conventual quietude and neatness of the pre-Reformation art among the Flemings. And nothing certainly could be more unlike the somewhat vulgar yet really demonic energy, the curious mixture of bourgeois smugness and visionary anarchy that marked the mighty days of the Puritan. Nothing could be further from the sensational art and literature of the Protestant extremists, as you may see it in old Bibles or illustrations of Bunyan; an atmosphere at once monstrous and prosaic, mixed of a mild view of this world, and a mad view of the other; the earth an endless Clapham and the sky a permanent apocalypse. It left on the mind a confused sense that angels had whiskers and saints had top hats; and certainly the dull energy in it was at the opposite extreme from the spirit of a small room either described by Maeterlinck or painted by Memlinc.

But the case of England at least admits of no mistake. Not only did England produce a most anti-Puritan literature before the Puritans existed, but it went on, under the Puritans and in spite of the Puritans, producing a literature that was quite anti-Puritan. There is as little that is Puritan about Fielding and Dickens as there is about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Dickens quite obviously existed to champion everything that the Puritans existed to destroy; when Mr Scrooge is converted to Christmas, the Puritan would have thought that Scrooge was relapsing and not repenting. When Scrooge and his clerk sit down to `a bowl of smoking Bishop', the Puritan would have been equally disgusted with the spirit and with the name. Nevertheless the Ironside element, though alien to England, was to a certain extent mixed with it; and I myself believe that it is to this partial mingling of a foreign and a native idea that we owe the curious attitude of the English, until lately, towards processions and pomps.

The Calvinist colour, mixing with each separate national colour, made in each case a different blend or tint. The Scotch had been restless, rebellious, fond of mystery, valiant, and sometimes cruel. The combinations of Calvinism with this produced a sort of sombre romanticism which one can feel very strongly in Burns and in the blacker tales of Stevenson. The Dutch, I imagine, were domestic and devout; the combination of Calvinism with this produced a slight dullness and a rage for keeping things clean. The English certainly were lusty, casual and fond of broad fun. The combination of Calvinism with this produced a curious kind of bourgeois embarrassment, part humour, part respectability and part good sense. Since the Englishman was not to wear crimson clothes carelessly, the next most English thing was to wear black clothes casually and unobtrusively. Where the Catholic Englishman had been modest enough to make a fool of himself, the Protestant Englishman had only that lower sort of modesty that will not make a show of itself. He objected to making a Pageant, because it is, literally speaking, `making a scene'. It is said that the Frenchman shrugs his shoulders; but the Victorian Englishman was born with his shoulders shrugged. His whole attitude until lately has been `What's the good of making a fuss?' It is a sensible and pleasant temper; it is the remains of the real Englishman who gave its patient Pickwickian cheerfulness to the Canterbury Pilgrimage. But it will be gain and not loss if this minor humility of drab and grey can give place to that higher, and much more humble humility, which can forget itself in flowers and fireworks and in the colours of Carnival.