Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Winter XX-XXI. Hypocracy
It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism [“The Puritans were a group of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, including, but not limited to, English Calvinists. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England.“ -Wiki The Puritans provoked the English Civil War (1642–1651) vs the Stuart dynasty Royalists; settled the Massachusetts Colony and the Ulster Plantation; ruled England as the Commonwealth (1649-1660); and closed the London theaters after 1642]. In the heyday of release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was natural to look back on that period of our history with eyes that saw in it nothing but fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque phrase which showed the English mind going into prison and having the key turned upon it. Now, when the peril of emancipation becomes as manifest as was the hardship of restraint, we shall do well to remember all the good that lay in that stern Puritan discipline, how it renewed the spiritual vitality of our race, and made for civic freedom which is our highest national privilege. An age of intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the general decline of that which follows. Imagine England under Stuart rule, with no faith but the Protestantism of the Tutor. Imagine (not to think of worse) English literature represented by Cowley [Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)], and the name of Milton unknown [John Milton (1608–1674)]. The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his tonic at the moment when lassitude and supineness would naturally have followed upon a supreme display of racial vitality. Regret, if you will, that England turned for her religion to the books of Israel; this suddenly revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce Oriental theocracy is perhaps not difficult to explain, but one cannot help wish that its piety had taken another form; later, there had to come the “exodus from Houndsditch,” [“Houndsditch was a Jew's quarter, and old clothesmarket in London, and was to Carlyle the symbol of the alarming traffic at the time in spiritualities fallen extinct.” -Source] with how much conflict and misery! Such, however, was the price of the soul’s health; we must accept the fact, and be content to see its better meaning. Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is always a relative term. From the point of view of a conceivable civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must always ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much worse. Of all theological systems, the most convincing is Manicheism [but see also here and especially at the bottom here], which, of course, under another name, was held by the Puritans themselves. What we call Restoration morality -- the morality, that is to say, of a king and court -- might well have become that of the nation at large under a Stuart dynasty safe from religious revolution.
The political services of Puritanism were estimable... To it we owe the characteristic which, in some other countries, is expressed by the term English prudery... It is said by observers among ourselves that the prudish habit of mind is dying out, and this is looked upon as a satisfactory thing, as a sign of healthy emancipation. If by prude be meant a secretly vicious person who affects an excessive decorum, by all means let the prude disappear, even at the cost of some shamelessness. If, on the other hand, a prude is one who, living a decent life, cultivates, either by bent or principle, a somewhat extreme delicacy of thought and speech with regard to elementary facts of human nature, then I say that this is most emphatically a fault in the right direction, and I have no desire to see its prevalence diminish... An English woman who typifies the bégueule [prude] may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow’s other quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature... Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism... it is a refinement of civilization following upon absorption into the national life of all the best things which Puritanism had to teach. We who know English women by the experience of a lifetime are well aware that their careful choice of language betokens, far more often than not, a corresponding delicacy of mind... It is very good to be mealy-mouthed with respect to everything that reminds us of the animal in man. Verbal delicacy in itself will not prove an advanced civilization, but civilization, as it advances, assuredly tends that way.
Alpha.
How Victorian. And how in keeping with the notion that women are an Other, separate from the real body politic. As I read all these books from the 19th and prior centuries, I am constantly disappointed by the lack of female perspective. And by "English women" I have a feeling H.R. does not have Gissing's Nell or even his Edith Alice in mind.
Manichaeism
Catholic orthodoxy struggled against the Manichaean Heresy from before 296 CE, yet with less than total success, obviously. I have mixed feelings about this: On the one hand much vicious stupidity, especially in the centuries after Luther, are a consequence of a belief in the Devil -- the Bad to God’s Good. On the other hand, what the Catholic Church was attempting was the equivalent of trying to keep the sea out of the streets of Venice. It’s futile and the water will eventually find a way in. A Hindu conception of the world that embraces both the dark and the light, is one thing, but trying to build a moral structure on Light alone is doomed. The Problem of Evil is fatal for any belief system based on a single, entirely Good, god. The People will, naturally, try to introduce balance to this deluded mono-culture of Good by celebrating a co-god, a Devil, to do the nasty work for a deity who has much in common with Ryecroft’s Victorian conception of the feminine ideal. Women and God must remain unsullied by the infernal forces that contaminate men and nature.
Viewed from this perspective, the slippery definition of a witch, in those Puritan centuries, perhaps makes more sense. A witch was a woman who sinned by being fully human -- or call it “animal” if you prefer. And perhaps the underlying fear was that God was actually no better.
Antisemitism
Am I imagining it, or is there here (and also on the part of the most Tory Christopher Tiejens, in Parade's End) the hint of a polite variety of antisemitism? It would not be strange if there were, given what Braudel tells us of the role Jews played in the history of capitalism.
Viewed from this perspective, you can erase Mephistopheles and insert Shylock as the cause of the right and proper Tory world going to hell in a hand-basket. Without credit, there would be no Industrial Revolution. There would be no bourgeoisie. There would be nothing but subsistence agriculture, the gentry, the church, and the most primitive industry. From this perspective, the Jews are not just people of trade, but they are the Typhoid Marys who infected the Western World with the bourgeois cancer we no longer even fight.
And who needed that initial credit? Farmers. If only they had had access to derivatives (the ability to sell contracts to buy their crops in the future at an established price) it all could have been avoided. And would that have been better? When reading Ryecroft (or Austen) you have to wonder. But the world view of the gentry, or of a recent beneficiary of a handsome bequest, may not be the most revealing view of the times.
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