Charles II - Page 2

name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that
some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the
saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in
these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and
the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat
more exhaustive study.

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood
when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is
insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the
good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire
of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint,
which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to be
quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that
the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that
they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that
they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans
fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life,
through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never
satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French
Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson
that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always
wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the
head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily
men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do
nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the
bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and
conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the
tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human
spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved
and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial,
madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were
fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which
means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in
that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a
little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality
of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a
pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed
parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be
left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely
account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty