The lated from custom into eccentricity, a sanctioned rule into a culpable exception.11 Chastity became a salient virtue. Man prepared himself for the Kingdom of God on Earth. The dreams of the Millennarians promised realization. Milton postponed the composition of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in order to expedite the arrival of this kingdom. God became the avatar of liberation in the historical process. existence of things carnal was relegated to a nether consciousness, unconversant with one's finer personality. Sexual intercourse was regarded only as a procreative function, a clandestine episode taboo to the tongue. In puritan art, as a consequence, sex expression is seldom discovered. Whenever themes pertaining to sex were approached description became restricted, evasive and covert. Spiritual pleasures replaced sensual. Religious realities supplanted material. Scenes of sexual conflict could have no fascination for a people firm in the faith that the Fifth Monarchy, the triumphant coming of Christ on earth, was at hand. In place of the rich and effulgent poetry of the Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, crept in the serious and somber verse of the metaphysical poets, the infantile regrets of Crashaw and 11 In the army blasphemy was punished by brutality that was genuinely bestial at its root. One soldier had his tongue bored with a red hot iron and his sword broken over his head, because of an ungodly oath in a moment of emergency. Vaughn, the sober odes of Cowley, the cold beauty and the strained lyricism of the poetry of Marvell and Herbert. The chill mystery and magic of the verse of Donne, the religious firmamental imagery of Milton, superseded the free-swinging, glowing poetry of the Elizabethan era with its insurpassable spontaneity of impulse and its loose, wide-flying sympathies and predilections. In the words of Taine, in the days of Milton, "we are a thousand miles from Shakespeare; and in this Protestant eulogy (Paradise Lost) of the family tie, of lawful love, of domestic sweets, of orderly piety and of home, we perceive a new literature and an altered time." Taine was correct. Unfortunately, however, Taine did not realize that the transformation was economic at basis, and that the puritan revolt marked the rise of the bourgeoisie in England and the decline of feudal politics and economy. It is this social transformation that caused the transformation in esthetics that we have described in these first two chapters of this book. It was a revolution in economic forces that provoked the moral and esthetic changes of the period. The ideology of the Puritan sprang from his bourgeois origins. Puritanism, an expression of the bourgeois attitude before the Industrial Revolution, revealed an emphatic phase of this new psychology with its sweep ing aims and revolutionary implications. The theology and esthetics that this class developed were rationalizations of its type of economic life. Puritan ethics and religion, we must recall, classified "money-making" as the most "God-given" of occupations. Like the preacher Steele, Richard Baxter argued that any man who did not endeavor to derive the utmost pecuniary profit from his enterprise failed to be "God's steward." Even in reference to the puritan attitude toward the theater, Farley complained of the expenditure of money on the stage more because it lessened the contributions for the repair of Paul's steeple than for any more pious reason. The contrast in sex expression that we have noted was inevitable. The social milieu of the aristocracy encouraged freedom of sex impulse; the economic life of the bourgeoisie encouraged repression, or at least rigid restriction, of the sex impulse. In the literature and art of the aristocracy, therefore, we discover in matters of sex description a candour and oftimes an extravagance of expression; in the literature and art of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, we find a denial of things sexual, an avoidance of sex description and a condemnation of episode or diction, of statue or painting, suggestive of sex-reality. This sex attitude of the bourgeoisie, in this instance of the Puritans, is but an outgrowth of the social econ omy of its life. It is but a rationalization of the economics of its existence. It is but a defense mechanism unconsciously designed to protect the private-property concept upon which it has thrived. CHAPTER III SEX EXPRESSION IN RESTORATION HE Restoration marked a revolutionary change THE in English social life. The return of Charles II in 1660 was more a social than a political revolution. It meant the temporary collapse of one social class and the precarious rehabilitation of another. The feudal aristocracy was again enthroned in English dominions. The bourgeoisie had receded from control. Feudalism, at that time deriving its power from the slow momentum which it had gathered in the past, was to continue for another generation. Dryden, who had apostrophized Oliver Cromwell, welcomed the exiled aristocracy with his poem Astrea Redux-A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second: "For his long absence Church and State did groan; Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne. |