Words came in a steady flow, and he felt sure that he had found his
true calling in life. “No monarch when seated on a throne had more
sensible feelings of prosperity than what I experienced at this time.”
The neighboring town of Pelham being without a minister, Burroughs
presented himself as a candidate, and was enthusiastically accepted. He
made a specialty of funeral sermons, and was soon in demand in all the
surrounding country. It was at this time also that he became acquainted
with the coiner who showed him how he might surreptitiously increase
the amount of cash in circulation. All went well till an enemy appeared
who called him by name and revealed his antecedents. All Pelham was
in an uproar, for the Pelhamites were “a people generally possessing
violent passions, which, once disturbed, raged uncontrolled by the
dictates of reason, unpolished in their manners, possessing a jealous
disposition, and either very friendly or very inimical, not knowing a
medium between these extremes.”
In this case they suddenly became very inimical, and Burroughs was
again compelled to depart under cover of darkness. His night thoughts
were always among his very best.
“Journeying on, I had time for reflection. At the dead of night--all
alone--reflection would have its operation. A very singular scene have
I now passed through, said I, and to what does it amount? Have I acted
with propriety as a man, or have I deviated from the path of rectitude?
I have had an unheard-of, disagreeable part to act; I do not feel
entirely satisfied with myself in this business, and yet I do not know
how I could have done otherwise, and have made the matter better. My
situation has been such that I have violated the principle of veracity
which we implicitly pledge ourselves to maintain towards each other, as
a general thing, in society. Whether my peculiar circumstances would
warrant such a line of procedure is the question. I know many things
will be said in favor of it as well as against it.”
From this difficult question of casuistry he found relief in reverting
to the one instance in which he had been clearly wrong, viz., joining
the young men in Hanover in their raid on the farmer’s beehive. “My
giving countenance to an open breach of the laws of the land in the
case of the bees was a matter in which I was justly reprehensible; but
that matter is now past. I must take things as they are, and under
these circumstances do the best I can. I know the world will blame me,
but I wish to justify my conduct to myself, let the world think what it
may.”
In this endeavor he was highly successful; and as he walked on, his
spirits rose. He contrasted his own clear views with the muddled
ideas of his late parishioners. “They understand the matter in the
gross, that I have preached under a fictitious name and character,
and consequently have roused many ideas in the minds of the people
not founded on fact. Therefore they concluded from this general view
the whole to be founded on wrong. The name impostor is therefore
easily fixed on my character. An impostor, we generally conceive,
puts on feigned appearances in order to enrich or aggrandize himself
to the damage of others. That this is not the case with me in this
transaction, I think is clear. That I have aimed at nothing but the
bare necessaries of life, is a fact.”
Having thus cleared himself of the charge of imposture, he determined
to rest his case on the broad ground of religious liberty. “That I have
a good and equitable right to preach, if I choose and others choose to
hear me, is a truth of which I entertain no doubt.”
When he was pursued into the borders of the town of Rutland, it was
too much for his patience. “I turned and ran about twenty rods down
a small hill, and the Pelhamites all after me, hallooing with all
their might, ‘Stop him! stop him!’ To be pursued like a thief, an
object of universal speculation to the inhabitants of Rutland, gave
me very disagreeable sensations, which I determined not to bear. I
therefore stopped, took up a stone, and declared that the first who
should approach me I would kill on the spot. To hear such language
and to see such a state of determined defiance in one whom they had
lately reverenced as a clergyman struck even the people of Pelham with
astonishment and fear.”
By the way, there follows a scene which makes us suspect that parts of
Massachusetts in the good old days may have had a touch of “the wild
West.” The two deacons who were leaders of the mob drew attention
to the fact that besides having come to them under false pretenses
Burroughs had absconded with five dollars that had been advanced on
his salary. He owed them one sermon which was theirs of right. In the
present excited state of public opinion it was obviously impossible for
Burroughs to deliver the sermon, but it was suggested that he might
give an equivalent. A peacemaker intervened, saying, “Wood keeps an
excellent tavern hard by; I propose for all to move up there.” This
proposal was accepted by all. “I therefore came down, and we all went
up towards the tavern. I called for drink, according to the orator’s
advice, to the satisfaction of all.”
After that the career of Burroughs went on from bad to worse, but never
was he without the inner consolations that belong to those who are
misunderstood by the world. Even when he unsuccessfully sought to set
fire to the jail he was full of fine sentiments borrowed from Young’s
“Night Thoughts.” He quotes the whole passage beginning
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne.
This he seems to consider to be in some way a justification for his
action. He is ever of the opinion that a man’s heart can not be wrong
so long as he is able to quote poetry.
The various incarcerations to which he was subjected might only
have imbittered a less magnanimous mind. They rather instilled into
Burroughs a missionary spirit. He felt that he ought to take more pains
to enlighten the ignorance of the world in regard to his excellent
qualities. “I have many times lamented my want of patient perseverance
in endeavoring to convince my persecutors of their wrong by the
cool dictates of reason. Error once seen ought to be corrected. The
pruning hook should never be laid aside; then we should live up to
the condition of our nature, which requires a state of improving and
progressing in knowledge till time shall cease.”
But even Burroughs was human. It is easier to bear great misfortunes
than to meet the petty annoyances of every-day life. To one who plans
his life in such a way as to depend largely on the casual gifts of
strangers, their dilatoriness is often a cause of real anxiety.
Here is a painful incident which happened to him in Philadelphia.
He applied to a member of Congress for a small sum of money. The
gentleman was not all that he should have been. “The most striking
features of his character were his great fondness for close
metaphysical reasoning and a habit of great economy in his domestic
concerns, and he had so long practiced upon this system that any
variation from it in a person’s conduct or any want of success in a
person’s undertakings were, in his view, perfectly wrong. This was the
man to whom I applied as my ultimatum.”
We can see at a glance that such a man was likely to be disappointing.
“I described my circumstances to him in as clear terms as possible, and
afterwards told him of the request I wished to make. Without giving me
an answer either in the affirmative or the negative, he went on with a
lengthy discourse to prove that my system of economy had been wrong,
drawing a comparison between his prosperity and my adversity, and then
pointed out a certain line of conduct that I ought then to take up
and observe, and offered to assist me in prosecuting such; but as his
plan had many things in it which I could not reconcile my mind to, I
took the liberty of reasoning with him upon a better plan which I had
marked out in my own mind.”
Upon this, the congressman became obstinate and would do nothing. His
depravity came to Burroughs as a sudden shock.
“When I took a view of the world, of the pomp and splendor which
surrounded crowds which perpetually passed before my eyes, to see them
roll in affluence and luxury, inhabiting lofty houses, with superb
equipages, and feasting upon all the delicacies of life, under these
affluent circumstances withholding from me what would never have been
missed from their superfluity, this brought to my mind a train of ideas
that were desperate and horrid.... My eyes lighted up with indignation,
my countenance was fortified with despair, my heart was swollen to that
bigness which was almost too large for my breast to contain. Under
this situation I arose with a tranquil horror, composedly took my hat,
and politely bid Mr. Niles farewell. I believe the desperate emotions
of my heart were apparently manifested to his view by my countenance;
his apparent immovability relaxed, he put his hand in his pocket, and
handed me three dollars. This act of kindness in a moment melted
the ferocious feelings of my heart, all those desperate sensations
vanished, and I found myself a man.”
Dear reader, have you not often taken a part in such a scene? When
instead of handing out your dollars at once you conditioned them upon
adherence to some “line of conduct,”--your conscience accuses you that
you might have pointed even to the buck-saw,--do you realize what a
pitiful spectacle you made of yourself?
* * * * *
Stephen Burroughs does not at all fulfill our preconceived notion of an
habitual criminal. He did not love evil for its own sake. His crimes
were incidental, and he mentions them only as the unfortunate results
of circumstances beyond his own control. His life was rather spent in
the contemplation of virtue. There were some virtues which came easy
to him, and he made the most of them. Like an expert prestidigitator,
he kept the attention fixed on what was irrelevant, so that what
was really going on passed unnoticed. He had eliminated personal
responsibility from his scheme of things, and then proceeded as if
nothing were lacking. He had one invariable measure for right and
wrong. That was right which ministered to his own peace of body and of
mind; that was wrong which did otherwise.
We are coming to see that that imperturbable egotism is the
characteristic of the “criminal mind” that is least susceptible to
treatment. Sins of passion are often repented of as soon as they are
committed. Sins of ignorance are cured by letting in the light. Sins
of weakness yield to an improved environment. But what are you going
to do with the man who is incapable of seeing that he is in the wrong?
Treat him with compassion, and he accepts the kindness as a tribute to
his own merits; attempt to punish him, and he is a martyr; reason with
him, and his controversial ardor is aroused in defense of his favorite
thesis.
Sometimes the lover of humanity, after he has tried everything which
he can think of to make an impression on such a character and to bring
him to a realizing sense of social responsibility, becomes utterly
discouraged. He feels tempted to give up trying any longer. In this he
is wrong. He should not allow himself to be discouraged. Something must
be done, even though nobody knows what it is.
But if the lover of humanity _should_ give up for a time and take a
rest by turning his attention to a more hopeful case, I should not be
too hard on him. My Pardoner, I am sure, must have some indulgence for
such a weakness.
A MAN UNDER ENCHANTMENT
[Illustration]
I sat down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment.” So
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his own visionary youth, and, truth to
tell, the spell lasted through life.
The wayside itself was not conducive to dreams. It was a busy
thoroughfare. Eager traffickers jostled one another, and there was
much crying up of new wares. Many important personages went noisily
along. There was a fresh interest in all sorts of good works and many
improvements on the roadway. There were not many priests or Levites
passing by on the other side, for ecclesiasticism was not in fashion,
but there were multitudes of Good Samaritans, each one intent on his
own brand-new device for universal helpfulness. There were so many of
them that the poor man who fell among philanthropists often sighed for
the tender mercies of the thieves. The thieves, at least, when they had
done their work would let him alone. From time to time there would
come groups of eager reformers, advance agents of the millennium. At
last there came down the road troops hurrying to the front, and there
was the distant sound of battle.
It was a stirring time, the noon of the nineteenth century; and the
stir was nowhere more felt than in New England. It was a ferment of
speculation, a whirl of passion, a time of great aspiration and of no
mean achievement.
But if you would get a sense of all this, do not turn to the pages of
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ardor of Transcendentalism, the new spirit of
reform, the war between the States,--these were noted, but they made no
very vivid impression on the man who sat under enchantment. There was
an interval between these happenings and his consciousness that made
them seem scarcely contemporaneous.
It is a fashion in literary criticism to explain an author by his
environment. With Hawthorne this method is not successful. It is not
that his environment was not interesting in itself. His genius was
essentially aloof. It was a plant that drew its nourishment from
the air rather than from the soil. There are some men who have the
happy faculty of making themselves at home wherever they happen to
be. Hawthorne, wherever he had been born, would have looked upon the
scene with something of a stranger’s eye. Indeed, when we think about
it, the wonder is that most of us are able to take the world in such
a matter-of-fact way. One would suppose that we had always been here,
instead of being transient guests who cannot even engage our rooms a
day in advance.
It is perhaps a happy limitation which makes us to forget our slight
tenure, and to feel an absolute ownership in the present moment. We
are satisfied with the passing experience because it appears to us as
permanent.
To the man who sat by the wayside the present moment did not stand
in the sunshine sufficient unto itself. It did not appear, as it did
to the man of affairs, an ultimate and satisfying reality. He was
not unobservant. He saw the persons passing by. But each one, in the
present moment, seemed but a fugitive escaping from the past into the
future. Futile flight! unavailing freedom! for in the Future the Past
stands waiting for it. As he looked at each successive action it was as
one who watches the moving shadow of an old deed, which now for some
creature has become doom.
Did I say that Hawthorne was little influenced by his environment? It
would be truer to say that the environment to which he responded was
that to which most men are so strangely oblivious. He felt what another
Salem mystic has expressed:
Around us ever lies the enchanted land
In marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
The true-born Yankee has always persisted, in spite of the purists, in
using “I guess” as equivalent to “I think.” To his shrewd good-humored
curiosity, all thinking resolves itself into a kind of guesswork; and
one man has as good a right to his guess as another.
It is a far cry from the talk of the village store to Emerson and
Hawthorne, but to these New Englanders thinking was still a kind of
guessing. The observer looks at the outward show of things, which has
such an air of finality, and says, “I guess there’s something behind
all this. I guess it’s worth while to look into it.”
Such a mind is not deterred by the warnings of formal logic that there
is “no thoroughfare.” When it leaves the public road and sees the sign
“Private way, dangerous passing,” it says, “that looks interesting. I
guess I’ll take that.”
And from our streets and shops and newspapers, from our laboratories
and lecture rooms and bureaus of statistics, it is, after all, such a
little way to the border-land of mystery, where all minds are on an
equality and where the wisest can but dimly guess the riddles that are
propounded.
Hawthorne belonged to no school or party. To the men of his generation
he was like the minister of whom he writes who preached with a veil
over his face.
Nor is his relation in thought to his ancestry more intimate than that
to his contemporaries. Born to the family of New England Puritanism, we
think we recognize the family likeness--and yet we are not quite sure.
There are traits that suggest a spiritual changeling.
When we enter into the realm of Hawthorne’s imagination we are
conscious of sombre realities.
Is not this a survival of the puritanic spirit, with its brooding
mysticism, its retributive predestination, its sense of the judgment
to come? It was said of Carlyle that he was a Calvinist who had lost
his creed. May not the same be said of Hawthorne? The old New England
theology had in him become attenuated to a mere film, but through it
all may we not see the old New England conscience?
Doubtless there is much of this transmitted influence. Hawthorne
himself insisted upon it. Speaking of “the stern and black-browed
Puritan ancestors,” he said, “Let them scorn me as they will, strong
traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.”
But it is possible to exaggerate such likenesses. In Hawthorne’s case
there is danger of argument in a circle. We say that there is something
in Hawthorne’s imagination, in its sombre mysticism, in its brooding
sense of destiny, which is like that of the spirit of the inhabitants
of Salem and Boston in the old days when they walked through the narrow
streets and through the shadowy woodland ways pondering the fatal
sequences of life.
But how do we see these old Puritans? We see them through Hawthorne’s
eyes. His imagination peoples for us the old houses. Was Hawthorne’s
genius tinged with Puritanism, or are our conceptions of the Puritan
character largely Hawthornesque? It is not necessary to argue this
matter; it might be better to answer “Yes” to both questions.
It is the privilege of a creative genius to imprint his own features
upon his forbears. It is difficult here to determine which is cause
and which is effect. How marvelously Rembrandt gets the spirit
of the Dutch Burgomeisters! It was fortunate for him that he had
such subjects,--stalwart men with faces that caught the light so
marvelously. Yes, but had it not been for Rembrandt, who would have
told us that these Dutch gentlemen were so picturesque?
The subject of a good artist is accurately figured; the subject of a
great artist is transfigured. We cannot separate the historic reality
from the transfiguring light.
But however Hawthorne may have been influenced by his Puritan
inheritance, it would be hard to find one whose habitual point of
view was further removed from what we are accustomed to call the
“New England conscience.” It is the characteristic of that type of
conscience that it has an ever-present and sometimes oppressive sense
of personal responsibility. It is militant and practical rather than
mystical. To it evil is not something to be endured but something to be
resisted. If there is a wrong it must be righted, and with as little
delay as possible.
The highest praise a Puritan could give his pastor was that he was “a
painful preacher.” Jonathan Mitchell, writing of the beginnings of
the church in Cambridge, says that the people of Cambridge “were a
gracious, savory-spirited people, principled by Mr. Sheperd, liking an
humbling, heart-breaking ministry and spirit.”
The Puritan theology was based on predestination, but the Puritan
temper was not fatalistic. When that latter-day Puritan, Lyman Beecher,
was expounding the doctrines of the divine decrees, one of his sons
asked him, “Father, what if we are decreed to be lost?” The answer was,
“Fight the decrees, my boy!”
The Calvinistic spirit was exactly opposite to the fatalistic
acquiescence which shifts the responsibility from the creature to the
Creator. To be sure the fall of man took place a long time ago, but we
cannot say that it was none of our business. It was not an hereditary
misfortune to be borne with fortitude; it was to be assumed as our
personal guilt. “Original sin” means real sin. Adam sinned as the
typical and representative man, and every man became a sinner. No
individual could plead an _alibi_. The “conviction of sin” was not the
acquiescence in a penalty,--it was the heartbreaking consciousness of
the “exceeding sinfulness of sin.”
“In Adam’s fall _we_ sinned all.” When they said that, they were
thinking not of Adam, but of themselves. _They_ did it; it was the
guilt that was imputed to them. Sensitive consciences were tortured in
the attempt fully to realize their guilt.
The real inheritors of this type of conscience were to be found among
many of the radical reformers and agitators who were Hawthorne’s
contemporaries and with whom he had little in common. When their formal
creed had fallen off, there remained the sense of personal guilt for
original sin. The sin of the nation and of the whole social order
weighed heavily upon them and tortured them, and they found relief only
in action.
All this was foreign to Hawthorne’s mind. In his treatment of sin there
is always a sense of moral detachment. We are not made to see, as
George Eliot makes us see, the struggle with temptation,--the soul,
like a wild thing, seeing the tempting bait and drawing nearer to the
trap. Hawthorne begins after the deed is done. He shows us the
wild thing taken in a trap
Which sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
Of what is the trap made? It is made of a deed already done. Whence
comes the ghostly trapper? He is no stranger in the wood. There is no
staying his advance as he makes his fatal rounds.
In the preface to the “House of the Seven Gables” the author gives the
argument of the story,--“the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one
generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of
every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”
This is the theme of the Greek tragedy--Nemesis. The deed is done and
cannot be undone; the inevitable consequences must be endured.
In the “Scarlet Letter,” when Hester and Roger Chillingworth review the
past and peer into the future, Hester says, “I said but now that there
can be no good event for him or thee or me who are wandering together
in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt
wherewith we have strewn our path.”
But is the present stumbling guilt or is it merely misery? The old man
replies, “By the first slip awry thou didst plant the germ of evil, but
since that moment it has been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged
me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion, neither am I
fiend-like who have snatched a fiend’s office from his hands. It is our
fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may.”
Strange words to come from one who had sat in a Puritan meeting-house!
It is such comment as the Greek Chorus might make watching the
unfolding of the doom of the house of Agamemnon. And when the tale of
the “Scarlet Letter” has been told, how does the author himself look
upon it? How does he distribute praise and blame?
“To all these shadowy beings so long our near acquaintances--as well
Roger Chillingworth as his companions--we would fain be merciful.
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry whether love and
hatred be not the same thing at bottom. Each in its utmost development
supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders
one individual dependent for his spiritual life on another; each leaves
the passionate lover or the no less passionate hater forlorn and
desolate by the withdrawal of its subject. Philosophically considered,
therefore, the passions seem essentially the same except that one
happens to be seen in celestial radiance and the other in a dusky lurid
glow.” This is not the Puritan Conscience uttering itself. It is an
illusive and questioning spirit.