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 recklessness and
horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts
also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a
nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it
something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the
type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of
politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in
little things.
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