PURITANISM IN DECAY
The Puritans of Massachusetts, having killed the Indians and fenced the
farms and built the towns, settled into the routine of getting one
another’s money. The more enterprising ones moved West, where there was
more money; the others sunk into slow decay. Puritanism came to mean,
not aggressive virtue, but negative avoidance. Before it passed away
entirely, it produced a man of genius who was of it enough to know it
thoroughly, yet sufficiently out of it to be able to embody it in art.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, a port which had once been
prosperous, but had lost in competition with the great cities. It was a
mournful place, living in the memory of its past, which included the
drowning and hanging of witches, a frenzy of religious terror in which
an ancestor of Hawthorne had been a persecuting judge. One of this
judge’s victims had put a curse upon him, and the novelist pictures
himself, playfully, as the last sad relic of this curse. He was a
solitary man, born to poverty, shy, aloof and obscure. Recognition did
not come until the middle forties, and meantime he lived in ancient,
lonely houses, staying indoors by day and wandering the streets by
night. He had no political sense, no social sense; events in the world
outside meant little--he lived in the past.
Yet, strangely enough, he did not accept the ideas of this past. He had
nothing of the robust Tory fervor of Sir Walter Scott; he was a modern
man, and a quiet, skeptical humor shines through his pages. What had
happened was that his faith had dried up, and nothing else had come to
take its place; so there he was, not knowing why, or how, or to what
end. He wrote elaborate diaries, full of minute details about the things
which happened hour by hour; things which only a child would consider
worth recording. He would produce and publish a sketch in which, with
really beautiful art, he would describe the sensations of walking about
the streets of Salem on a rainy night, and how the lights shone in the
puddles--yellow lights of the street-lamps and blue and green lights
from the drug-stores.
He gathered strange legends of old-time people, living terror-haunted
lives, driven to sin by the very desperation of their efforts to avoid
it. The pangs of conscience are Hawthorne’s “local color” and artistic
tradition; he knows them in every detail, but he himself is not under
their spell--they are like bric-à-brac and objects of art which he
collects. “Twice-Told Tales” was the title of his first volume, and
this, you see, prepares us for conscious literary artifice. Then we
have “Mosses from an Old Manse” which promises mournfulness and
moldiness, desolation and decay. Then “The House of the Seven Gables,”
the hiding place of an old and dying family haunted by a curse.
“The Scarlet Letter” brought its author instant recognition, and is
considered by many critics America’s most authentic masterpiece of
fiction. A young married woman in the old-time witch-hunting Salem has
yielded to adulterous love for a young clergyman. A child is born, and
the mother is publicly accused, and exhibited upon the scaffold, with
the letter “A” embroidered in scarlet cloth upon her dress. She will not
reveal the name of her lover, and so the young clergyman escapes
obloquy, but is haunted by that sense of guilt which is the principal
product of Puritanism in decay.
The “eternal triangle,” you see; but it differs from other triangles in
that it is not a story of passion, but of punishment. We do not see the
guilty love in the days of its happiness, but only in the days of its
remorse. As in all Hawthorne’s stories, we meet, not people who are
acting, but people who are looking back upon actions long since
committed. This is one kind of art, and I admit the greatness of “The
Scarlet Letter” as a piece of technique. But we are here discussing art
works as human and social products; and I point out, as in the case of
so many other tragedies, how temporary and unsubstantial is the ground
upon which it rests.
The ethical basis of “The Scarlet Letter” is the conviction that
marriage is indissoluble, and that a young woman who has been given in
marriage to an elderly man, and finds herself unhappy, is bound by the
laws of God to remain in the bonds of that unhappy marriage. But
suppose, for the sake of argument, that the ideas of mankind should
undergo a change; suppose we should come to the conviction that a young
woman who finds herself married to an elderly man whom she does not
love, and who conceives an intense and enduring passion for a younger
man, and desires to have children by that younger man--suppose we should
decide that this woman, in remaining with the older and unloved man, and
denying life to children by the younger man, is committing a crime
against posterity, violating a fundamental law upon which race progress
depends? You can see that in that case “The Scarlet Letter” would become
entirely archaic, an object of curiosity mingled with repugnance.
The American government honored this eminently respectable novelist by
making him, first a gauger of customs, and then its consul to Liverpool.
He was a prematurely old man then, and fled from the cold fogs of
England to Rome--which he liked no better. But he patiently collected
information concerning Roman antiquities, and composed a novel called
“The Marble Faun,” which is dutifully read as a guide book by all
school-marms visiting the Eternal City. How well adapted this Puritan
genius was to interpret the Latin world, you may judge from the fact
that he was shocked by nude statues, and could not see why sculptors
continued to overlook the necessity for marble clothing. That skin was
made before clothing, and may continue to be worn after clothing is
forgotten, is a fact which did not occur to this traveler from Salem.
He came back to pass his last days in an America torn by the agonies of
the Civil War. He was a Democrat by force of inertia, and had written a
campaign biography of the genial and bibulous President Pierce. He had
no understanding of the war, nor of the new America which was to be born
from it. In these last pathetic days he reminds us of the poor old Tory,
Sir Walter Scott, facing the Reform Bill and the Chartist riots and “the
country mined below our feet.” I plead with artists to step ahead of the
procession in their youth, so that in their old age. they may not be
left so pitifully far behind.