there have been intermittent rebellions against the prevailing
pecksniffery and sentimentality ever since the days of Irving and
Hawthorne. Poe led one of them--as critic more than as creative artist.
His scathing attacks upon the Gerald Stanley Lees, the Hamilton Wright
Mabies and the George E. Woodberrys of his time keep a liveliness and
appositeness that the years have not staled; his criticism deserves to
be better remembered. Poe sensed the Philistine pull of a Puritan
civilization as none had before him, and combated it with his whole
artillery of rhetoric. Another rebel, of course, was Whitman; how he
came to grief is too well known to need recalling. What is less familiar
is the fact that both the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _Century_ (first
called _Scribner's_) were set up by men in revolt against the reign of
mush, as _Putnam's_ and the _Dial_ had been before them. The salutatory
of the _Dial_, dated 1840, stated the case against the national
mugginess clearly. The aim of the magazine, it said, was to oppose "that
rigour of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us
to stone" and to give expression to "new views and the dreams of youth."
Alas, for these brave _révoltés_! _Putnam's_ succumbed to the
circumambient rigours and duly turned to stone, and is now no more. The
_Atlantic_, once so heretical, has become as respectable as the New York
_Evening Post_. As for the _Dial_, it was until lately the very pope of
orthodoxy and jealously guarded the college professors who read it from
the pollution of ideas. Only the _Century_ has kept the faith
unbrokenly. It is, indeed, the one first-class American magazine that
has always welcomed newcomers, and that maintains an intelligent contact
with the literature that is in being, and that consistently tries to
make the best terms possible with the dominant Philistinism. It cannot
go the whole way without running into danger; let it be said to the
credit of its editors that they have more than once braved that danger.
The tale might be lengthened. Mark Twain, in his day, felt the stirrings
of revolt, and not all his Philistinism was sufficient to hold him
altogether in check. If you want to find out about the struggle that
went on within him, read the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, or,
better still, "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" Alive, he had
his position to consider; dead, he now speaks out. In the preface to
"What is Man?" dated 1905, there is a curious confession of his
incapacity for defying the taboos which surrounded him. The studies for
the book, he says, were begun "twenty-five or twenty-seven years
ago"--the period of "A Tramp Abroad" and "The Prince and the Pauper." It
was actually written "seven years ago"--that is, just after "Following
the Equator" and "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." And why did it
lie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealthily, under a
private imprint?[40] Simply because, as Mark frankly confesses, he
"dreaded (_and could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around"
him. He knew how hard his fight for recognition had been; he knew what
direful penalties outraged orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him the
somewhat pathetic discretion of a respectable family man. But, dead, he
is safely beyond reprisal, and so, after a prudent interval, the
faithful Paine begins printing books in which, writing knowingly behind
six feet of earth, he could set down his true ideas without fear. Some
day, perhaps, we shall have his microbe story, and maybe even his
picture of the court of Elizabeth.
A sneer in Prof. Pattee's history, before mentioned, recalls the fact
that Hamlin Garland was also a rebel in his day and bawled for the Truth
with a capital T. That was in 1893. Two years later the guardians of the
national rectitude fell afoul of "Rose of Dutchers' Coolly" and Garland
began to think it over; today he devotes himself to the safer enterprise
of chasing spooks; his name is conspicuously absent from the Dreiser
Protest. Nine years before his brief offending John Hay had set off a
discreet bomb in "The Bread-Winners"--anonymously because "my standing
would be seriously compromised" by an avowal. Six years later Frank
Norris shook up the Phelpses and Mores of the time with "McTeague."
Since then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long--by
Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by Fuller--by Mary MacLanes and by
Upton Sinclairs--by ploughboy poets from the Middle West and by jitney
geniuses in Greenwich Village--assaults gradually tapering off to a mere
sophomoric brashness and deviltry. And all of them like snow-ballings of
Verdun. All of them petered out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical
American book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as the
normal book of Griswold's day. The whole atmosphere of our literature,
in William James' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery." Books are still
judged among us, not by their form and organization as works of art,
their accuracy and vividness as representations of life, their validity
and perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by their conformity to
the national prejudices, their accordance with set standards of niceness
and propriety. The thing irrevocably demanded is a "sane" book; the
ideal is a "clean," an "inspiring," a "glad" book.
§ 3
All this may be called the Puritan impulse from within. It is, indeed,
but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of a
religious and half-cultured people--the prejudice against beauty as a
form of debauchery and corruption--the distrust of all ideas that do not
fit readily into certain accepted axioms--the belief in the eternal
validity of moral concepts--in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of
the lower orders of men. But in addition to this internal resistance,
there has been laid upon American letters the heavy hand of a Puritan
authority from without, and no examination of the history and present
condition of our literature could be of any value which did not take it
constantly into account, and work out the means of its influence and
operation. That authority, as I shall show, transcends both in power and
in alertness the natural reactions of the national mind, and is
incomparably more potent in combating ideas. It is supported by a body
of law that is unmatched in any other country of Christendom, and it is
exercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance that make escape from
its operations well nigh impossible. Some of its effects, both direct
and indirect, I shall describe later, but before doing so it may be well
to trace its genesis and development.
At bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent Puritanism of the
people; it could not survive a year if they were opposed to the
principle visible in it. That deep-seated and uncorrupted Puritanism,
that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the supreme importance
of moral correctness, of the need of savage and inquisitorial laws, has
been a dominating force in American life since the very beginning. There
has never been any question before the nation, whether political or
economic, religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, which did
not resolve itself, soon or late, into a purely moral question. Nor has
there ever been any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay at the
bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession: the American has been,
from the very start, a man genuinely interested in the eternal
mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. The frank
theocracy of the New England colonies had scarcely succumbed to the
libertarianism of a godless Crown before there came the Great Awakening
of 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its restoration of talmudism
to the first place among polite sciences. The Revolution, of course,
brought a set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of unity in
politics that they declared a sort of _Treuga Dei_ in religion, and that
truce, armed though it was, left its imprint upon the First Amendment to
the Constitution. But immediately the young Republic emerged from the
stresses of adolescence, a missionary army took to the field again, and
before long the Asbury revival was paling that of Whitefield, Wesley and
Jonathan Edwards, not only in its hortatory violence but also in the
length of its lists of slain.
Thereafter, down to the outbreak of the Civil War, the country was
rocked again and again by furious attacks upon the devil. On the one
hand, this great campaign took a purely theological form, with a
hundred new and fantastic creeds as its fruits; on the other hand, it
crystallized into the hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and
40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress and put "dry" laws
upon the statute-books of ten States; and on the third hand, as it were,
it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet but
half delivered. Such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard"
disappeared from the American language; Bartlett tells us, indeed, in
his "Dictionary of Americanisms,"[41] that even "bull" was softened to
"male cow." This was the Golden Age of euphemism, as it was of euphuism;
the worst inventions of the English mid-Victorians were adopted and
improved. The word "woman" became a term of opprobrium, verging close
upon downright libel; legs became the inimitable "limbs"; the stomach
began to run from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons faded into
"unmentionables"; the newspapers spun their parts of speech into such
gossamer webs as "a statutory offence," "a house of questionable repute"
and "an interesting condition." And meanwhile the Good Templars and Sons
of Temperance swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial locusts.
There was not a hamlet without its uniformed phalanx, its affecting
exhibit of reformed drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed to a
travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of the members signed the
pledge. The National House of Representatives took recess after recess
to hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and more than a dozen of
its members forsook their duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic
heathen--the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the innumerable
Chautauquan caravan of later years.
Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of course, ran the deep and
swift undercurrent of anti-slavery feeling--a tide of passion which
historians now attempt to account for on economic grounds, but which
showed no trace of economic origin while it lasted. Its true quality was
moral, devout, ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a
supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fatal to the nation. The
crack of that great spark emptied the jar; the American people forgot
all about their pledges and pruderies during the four years of Civil
War. The Good Templars, indeed, were never heard of again, and with them
into memory went many other singular virtuosi of virtue--for example,
the Millerites. But almost before the last smoke of battle cleared away,
a renaissance of Puritan ardour began, and by the middle of the 70's it
was in full flower. Its high points and flashing lighthouses halt the
backward-looking eye; the Moody and Sankey uproar, the triumphal entry
of the Salvation Army, the recrudescence of the temperance agitation and
its culmination in prohibition, the rise of the Young Men's Christian
Association and of the Sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth of
the Christian Endeavour movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade,
the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics
(the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the
invention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon the
Mormons, the hysteria over the Breckenridge-Pollard case and other like
causes, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations,
the spread of zoöphilia, the attack upon Mammon, the dawn of the uplift,
and last but far from least, comstockery.
In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritanism gave a sign of its
formal departure from the old, and moral endeavour suffered a general
overhauling and tightening of the screws. The difference between the two
forms is very well represented by the difference between the program of
the half-forgotten Good Templars and the program set forth in the Webb
Law of 1913, or by that between the somewhat diffident prudery of the
40's and the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading of
today. In brief, a difference between the _re_nunciation and
_de_nunciation, asceticism and Mohammedanism, the hair shirt and the
flaming sword. The distinguishing mark of the elder Puritanism, at least
after it had attained to the stature of a national philosophy, was its
appeal to the individual conscience, its exclusive concern with the
elect, its strong flavour of self-accusing. Even the rage against
slavery was, in large measure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. The
thing that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists was their sneaking
sense of responsibility, the fear that they themselves were flouting the
fire by letting slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concrete
slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear until opposition had
added exasperation to fervour. In most of the earlier harangues against
his practice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to grant that
slave-owner's good faith, and even to compensate him for his property.
But the new Puritanism--or, perhaps more accurately, considering the
shades of prefixes, the neo-Puritanism--is a frank harking back to the
primitive spirit. The original Puritan of the bleak New England coast
was not content to flay his own wayward carcass: full satisfaction did
not sit upon him until he had jailed a Quaker. That is to say, the
sinner who excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much himself
as his neighbour; to borrow a term from psychopathology, he was less the
masochist than the sadist. And it is that very peculiarity which sets
off his descendant of today from the ameliorated Puritan of the era
between the Revolution and the Civil War. The new Puritanism is not
ascetic, but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock
down sinners. Its supreme manifestation is the vice crusade, an armed
pursuit of helpless outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of
the Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Himself, with his pious boast
that the sinners he jailed during his astounding career, if gathered
into one penitential party, would have filled a train of sixty-one
coaches, allowing sixty to the coach.
So much for the general trend and tenor of the movement. At the bottom
of it, it is plain, there lies that insistent presentation of the idea
of sin, that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which has engaged a
certain type of man, to the exclusion of all other notions, since the
dawn of history. The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines of
today are to be met with in the Old Testament and the New, and their
nearer grandfathers clamoured against the snares of the flesh in all
the councils of the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity has had
to reckon with them: they have brothers today among the Mohammedan Sufi
and in obscure Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers of the
Russian Raskol, or Reformation. "The Ironsides of Cromwell and the
Puritans of New England," says Heard, in his book on the Russian church,
"bear a strong resemblance to the Old Believers." But here, in the main,
we have asceticism more than Puritanism, as it is now visible; here the
sinner combated is chiefly the one within. How are we to account for the
wholesale transvaluation of values that came after the Civil War, the
transfer of ire from the Old Adam to the happy rascal across the street,
the sinister rise of a new Inquisition in the midst of a growing luxury
that even the Puritans themselves succumbed to? The answer is to be
sought, it seems to me, in the direction of the Golden Calf--in the
direction of the fat fields of our Midlands, the full nets of our lakes
and coasts, the factory smoke of our cities--even in the direction of
Wall Street, that devil's chasm. In brief, Puritanism has become
bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich. The will to power has been
aroused to a high flame by an increase in the available draught and
fuel, as militarism is engendered and nourished by the presence of men
and materials. Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its long
arms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down into
its deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has
created the Puritan _entrepreneur_, the daring and imaginative organizer
of Puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet of
new austerities. And, by the same token, it has issued its letters of
marque to the Puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, the
moral _Junker_, the Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there
has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of the
new Holy Office.
Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, not
excepting the spiritual, and even the original Puritans, for all their
fire, felt its throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who has
humorously pictured their arduous life: how they had to dig clams all
winter that they would have strength enough to plant corn, and how they
had to hoe corn all summer that they would have strength enough to dig
clams. That low ebb of fortune worked against the full satisfaction of
their zeal in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it kept them but
ill-prepared for the cost of offensive enterprise: even their occasional
missionarying raids upon the Indians took too much productive energy
from their business with the corn and the clams. And on the other hand,
it kept a certain restraining humility in their hearts, so that for
every Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty, of course, is no
discredit, but at all events, it is a subtle criticism. The man
oppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the more
ambitious forms of moral adventure. He not only lacks the means; he is
also deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, the
secure and lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by notions of the
sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of its worst
manifestations within himself, and that disquieting discovery will tend
to take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by no arbitrary fiat,
indeed, that the brothers of all the expiatory orders are vowed to
poverty. History teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come to them by
chance, has put an end to their soul-searching. The Puritans of the
elder generations, with few exceptions, were poor. Nearly all Americans,
down to the Civil War, were poor. And being poor, they subscribed to a
_Sklavenmoral_. That is to say, they were spiritually humble. Their eyes
were fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but upon the long and rocky
road ahead of them. Their moral passion spent most of its force in
self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. They began by howling
their sins from the mourners' bench; they came to their end, many of
them, in the supreme immolation of battle.
But out of the War came prosperity, and out of prosperity came a new
morality, to wit, the _Herrenmoral_. Many great fortunes were made in
the War itself; an uncountable number got started during the two decades
following. What is more, this material prosperity was generally
dispersed through all classes: it affected the common workman and the
remote farmer quite as much as the actual merchant and manufacturer. Its
first effect, as we all know, was a universal cockiness, a rise in
pretensions, a comforting feeling that the Republic was a success, and
with it, its every citizen. This change made itself quickly obvious, and
even odious, in all the secular relations of life. The American became a
sort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure of
himself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And on the
ghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the same
sure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently and
offensively. The religion of the American thus began to lose its inward
direction; it became less and less a scheme of personal salvation and
more and more a scheme of pious derring-do. The revivals of the 70's had
all the bounce and fervour of those of half a century before, but the
mourners' bench began to lose its standing as their symbol, and in its
place appeared the collection basket. Instead of accusing himself, the
convert volunteered to track down and bring in the other fellow. His
enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call
service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually
superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage
sprung a keen _Wille zur Macht_, a lusty will to power.[42] The American
Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he
felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and
multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free,
universal and compulsory. He had the men, he had the guns and he had the
money too. All that was needed was organization. The rescue of the
unsaved could be converted into a wholesale business, unsentimentally
and economically conducted, and with all the usual aids to efficiency,
from skilful sales management to seductive advertising, and from
rigorous accounting to the diligent shutting off of competition.
Out of that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futile
and harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. Piety was
cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner was
lured to grace with Turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free
instructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping.
Religion lost all its old contemplative and esoteric character, and
became a frankly worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets and
ponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely manned. There was
no longer any room for the spiritual type of leader, with his white
choker and his interminable fourthlies. He was displaced by a brisk
gentleman in a "business suit" who looked, talked and thought like a
seller of Mexican mine stock. Scheme after scheme for the swift
evangelization of the nation was launched, some of them of truly
astonishing sweep and daring. They kept pace, step by step, with the
mushroom growth of enterprise in the commercial field. The Y. M. C. A.
swelled to the proportions of a Standard Oil Company, a United States
Steel Corporation. Its huge buildings began to rise in every city; it
developed a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic moral and social
sciences; it enlisted the same gargantuan talent which managed the
railroads, the big banks and the larger national industries. And beside
it rose the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour, the
Sunday-school associations and a score of other such grandiose
organizations, each with its seductive baits for recruits and money.
Even the enterprises that had come down from an elder and less expansive
day were pumped up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American Bible
Society, for example, began to give away Bibles by the million instead
of by the thousand, and the venerable Tract Society took on the feverish
ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow journal. Down into our own
day this trustification of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men and
Religion Forward Movement proposed to convert the whole country by 12
o'clock noon of such and such a day; the Order of Gideons plans to make
every traveller read the Bible (American Revised Version!) whether he
will or not; in a score of cities there are committees of opulent
devotees who take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise the
Decalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were commodities of trade.