was dished, and hated Tess. As Jude in the end hated Sue: or should have
done. The women make fools of them, the spiritual men. And when, as men,
they've gone flop in their spirituality, they can't pick themselves up
whole any more. So they just crawl, and die detesting the female, or the
females, who made them fall.
The saintly minister gets a bit of his own back, at the last minute, by
making public confession from the very scaffold where she was exposed.
Then he dodges into death. But he's had a bit of his own back, on
everybody.
"'Shall we not meet again?' whispered she, bending her face down close
to him. 'Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely
we have ransomed one another with all this woe! Thou lookest far into
eternity with those bright dying eyes. Tell me what thou seest!'"
"'Hush, Hester--hush,' said he, with tremulous solemnity. 'The law we
broke!--the sin here so awfully revealed! Let these alone be in thy
thoughts. I fear! I fear!'"
So he dies, throwing the "sin" in her teeth, and escaping into death.
The law we broke, indeed. You bet!
Whose law?
But it is truly a law, that man must either stick to the belief he has
grounded himself on, and obey the laws of that belief. Or he must admit
the belief itself to be inadequate, and prepare himself for a new thing.
There was no change in belief, either in Hester or in Dimmesdale or in
Hawthorne or in America. The same old treacherous belief, which was
really cunning disbelief, in the Spirit, in Purity, in Selfless Love,
and in Pure Consciousness. They would go on following this belief, for
the sake of the sensationalism of it. But they would make a fool of it
all the time. Like Woodrow Wilson, and the rest of modern Believers. The
rest of modern Saviours.
If you meet a Saviour, to-day, be sure he is trying to make an innermost
fool of you. Especially if the saviour be an UNDERSTANDING WOMAN,
offering her love.
Hester lives on, pious as pie, being a public nurse. She becomes at last
an acknowledged saint, Abel of the Scarlet Letter.
She would, being a woman. She has had her triumph over the individual
man, so she quite loves subscribing to the whole spiritual life of
society. She will make herself as false as hell, for society's sake,
once she's had her real triumph over Saint Arthur.
Blossoms out into a Sister-of-Mercy Saint.
But it's a long time before she really takes anybody in. People kept on
thinking her a witch, which she was.
As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by man, safe within the
bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. She can't
help herself. A woman is almost always vulnerable to pity. She can't
bear to see anything _physically_ hurt. But let a woman loose from the
bounds and restraints of man's fierce belief, in his gods and in
himself, and she becomes a gentle devil. She becomes subtly diabolic.
The colossal evil of the united spirit of Woman. WOMAN, German woman or
American woman, or every other sort of woman, in the last war, was
something frightening. As every _man_ knows.
Woman becomes a helpless, would-be-loving demon. She is helpless. Her
very love is a subtle poison.
Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, _genuinely_: unless he
fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is
the nemesis of doubting man. She can't help it.
And with Hester, after Ligeia, woman becomes a nemesis to man. She
bolsters him up from the outside, she destroys him from the inside. And
he dies hating her, as Dimmesdale did.
Dimmesdale's spirituality had gone on too long, too far. It had become a
false thing. He found his nemesis in woman. And he was done for.
Woman is a strange and rather terrible phenomenon, to man. When the
subconscious soul of woman recoils from its creative union with man, it
becomes a destructive force. It exerts, willy-nilly, an invisible
destructive influence. The woman herself may be as nice as milk, to all
appearance, like Ligeia. But she is sending out waves of silent
destruction of the faltering spirit in men, all the same. She doesn't
know it. She can't even help it. But she does it. The devil is in her.
The very women who are most busy saving the bodies of men, and saving
the children: these women-doctors, these nurses, these educationalists,
these public-spirited women, these female saviours: they are all, from
the inside, sending out waves of destructive malevolence which eat out
the inner life of a man, like a cancer. It is so, it will be so, till
men realize it and react to save themselves.
God won't save us. The women are so devilish godly. Men must save
themselves in this strait, and by no sugary means either.
A woman can use her sex in sheer malevolence and poison, while she is
_behaving_ as meek and good as gold. Dear darling, she is really
snow-white in her blamelessness. And all the while she is using her sex
as a she-devil, for the endless hurt of her man. She doesn't know it.
She will never believe it if you tell her. And if you give her a slap in
the face for her fiendishness, she will rush to the first magistrate, in
indignation. She is so _absolutely_ blameless, the she-devil, the dear,
dutiful creature.
Give her the great slap, just the same, just when she is being most
angelic. Just when she is bearing her cross most meekly.
Oh, woman out of bounds is a devil. But it is man's fault. Woman never
_asked_ in the first place, to be cast out of her bit of an Eden of
belief and trust. It is man's business to bear the responsibility of
belief. If he becomes a spiritual fornicator and liar, like Ligeia's
husband and Arthur Dimmesdale, how _can_ a woman believe in him? Belief
doesn't go by choice. And if a woman doesn't believe in a _man_, she
believes, essentially, in nothing. She becomes, willy-nilly, a devil.
A devil she is, and a devil she will be. And most men will succumb to
her devilishness.
Hester Prynne was a devil. Even when she was so meekly going round as a
sick-nurse. Poor Hester. Part of her wanted to be saved from her own
devilishness. And another part wanted to go on and on in devilishness,
for revenge. Revenge! REVENGE! It is this that fibs the unconscious
spirit of woman to-day. Revenge against man, and against the spirit of
man, which has betrayed her into unbelief. Even when she is most sweet
and a Salvationist, she is her most devilish, is woman. She gives her
man the sugar-plum of her own submissive sweetness. And when he's taken
this sugar-plum in his mouth, a scorpion comes out of it. After he's
taken this Eve to his bosom, oh, so loving, she destroys him inch by
inch. Woman and her revenge! She will have it, and go on having it, for
decades and decades, unless she's stopped. And to stop her you've got to
believe in yourself and your gods, your own Holy Ghost, Sir Man; and
then you've got to fight her, and never give in. She's a devil. But in
the long run she is conquerable. And just a tiny bit of her wants to be
conquered. You've got to fight three-quarters of her, in absolute hell,
to get at the final quarter of her that wants a release, at last, from
the hell of her own revenge. But it's a long last. And not yet.
"She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, oriental characteristic--a
taste for the gorgeously beautiful." This is Hester. This is American.
But she repressed her nature in the above direction. She would not even
allow herself the luxury of labouring at fine, delicate stitching. Only
she dressed her little sin-child Pearl vividly, and the scarlet letter
was gorgeously embroidered. Her Hecate and Astarte insignia.
"A voluptuous, oriental characteristic--" That lies waiting in American
women. It is probable that the Mormons are the forerunners of the coming
real America. It is probable that men will have more than one wife, in
the coming America. That you will have again a half-oriental womanhood,
and a polygamy.
The grey nurse, Hester. The Hecate, the hell-cat. The slowly-evolving
voluptuous female of the new era, with a whole new submissiveness to the
dark, phallic principle.
But it takes time. Generation after generation of nurses and political
women and salvationists. And in the end, the dark erection of the images
of sex-worship once more, and the newly submissive women. That kind of
depth. Deep women in that respect. When we have at last broken this
insanity of mental-spiritual consciousness. And the women _choose_ to
experience again the great submission.
"The poor, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often
reviled the hand that was stretched to succour them."
Naturally. The poor hate a Salvationist. They smell the devil
underneath.
"She was patient--a martyr indeed--but she forbore to pray for her
enemies, lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the
blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse."
So much honesty, at least. No wonder the old witch-lady Mistress Hibbins
claimed her for another witch.
"She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed from their
parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman gliding
silently through the town, with never any companion but only one child."
"A vague idea!" Can't you see her "gliding silently?" It's not a
question of a vague idea imbibed, but a definite feeling directly
received.
"But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt
an eye--a human eye--upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a
momentary relief, as if half her agony were shared. The next instant,
back it all rushed again, with a still deeper throb of pain; for in that
brief interval she had sinned again. Had Hester sinned alone?"
Of course not. As for sinning again, she would go on all her life
silently, changelessly "sinning." She never repented. Not she. Why
should she? She had brought down Arthur Dimmesdale, that too-too
snow-white bird, and that was her life-work.
As for sinning again when she met two dark eyes in a crowd, why of
course. Somebody who understood as she understood.
I always remember meeting the eyes of a gypsy woman, for one moment, in
a crowd, in England. She knew, and I knew. What did we know? I was not
able to make out. But we knew.
Probably the same fathomless hate of this spiritual-conscious society in
which the outcast woman and I both roamed like meek-looking wolves. Tame
wolves waiting to shake off their tameness. Never able to.
And again, that "voluptuous, oriental" characteristic that knows the
mystery of the ithyphallic gods. She would not betray the ithyphallic
gods to this white, leprous-white society of "lovers." Neither will I,
if I can help it. These leprous-white, seducing, spiritual women, who
"understand" so much. One has been too often seduced, and "understood. I
can read him like a book," said my first lover of me. The book is in
several volumes, dear. And more and more comes back to me the gulf of
dark hate and _other_ understanding, in the eyes of the gypsy woman. So
different from the hateful white light of understanding which floats
like scum on the eyes of white, oh, so white English and American women,
with their understanding voices and their deep, sad words, and their
profound, _good_ spirits. Pfui!
Hester was scared only of one result of her sin: Pearl. Pearl, the
scarlet letter incarnate. The little girl. When women bear children,
they produce either devils or sons with gods in them. And it is an
evolutionary process. The devil in Hester produced a purer devil in
Pearl. And the devil in Pearl will produce--she married an Italian
Count--a piece of purer devilishness still.
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe.
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.
There was that in the child "which often impelled Hester to ask in
bitterness of heart, whether it were for good or ill that the poor
little creature had been born at all."
For ill, Hester. But don't worry. Ill is as necessary as good.
Malevolence is as necessary as benevolence. If you have brought forth,
spawned, a young malevolence, be sure there is a rampant falseness in
the world against which this malevolence must be turned. Falseness has
to be bitten and bitten, till it is bitten to death. Hence Pearl.
Pearl. Her own mother compares her to the demon of plague, or scarlet
fever, in her red dress. But then plague is necessary to destroy a
rotten, false humanity.
Pearl, the devilish girl-child, who can be so tender and loving and
_understanding_, and then, when she has understood, will give you a hit
across the mouth, and turn on you with a grin of sheer diabolic jeering.
Serves you right, you shouldn't be _understood._ That is your vice. You
shouldn't want to be loved, and then you'd not get hit across the mouth.
Pearl will love you: marvellously. And she'll hit you across the mouth:
oh, so neatly. And serves you right.
Pearl is perhaps the most modern child in all literature.
Old-fashioned Nathaniel, with his little-boy charm, he'll tell you
what's what. But he'll cover it with smarm.
Hester simply _hates_ her child, from one part of herself. And from
another, she cherishes her child as her one precious treasure. For Pearl
is the continuing of her female revenge on life. But female revenge hits
both ways. Hits back at its own mother. The female revenge in Pearl hits
back at Hester, the mother, and Hester is simply livid with fury and
"sadness," which is rather amusing.
"The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence
a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements
were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an
order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and
arrangement was difficult or impossible to discover."
Of course the order is peculiar to themselves. But the point of variety
is this: "Draw out the loving, sweet soul, draw it out with marvellous
understanding; and then spit in its eye."
Hester, of course, didn't at all like it when her sweet child drew out
her motherly soul, with yearning and deep understanding: and then spit
in the motherly eye, with a grin. But it was a process the mother had
started.
Pearl had a peculiar look in her eyes: "a look so intelligent, yet so
inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally
accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help
questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child."
A little demon! But her mother, and the saintly Dimmesdale, had borne
her. And Pearl, by the very openness of her perversity, was more
straightforward than her parents. She flatly refuses any Heavenly
Father, seeing the earthly one such a fraud. And she has the pietistic
Dimmesdale on toast, spits right in his eye: in both his eyes.
Poor, brave, tormented little soul, always in a state of recoil, she'll
be a devil to men when she grows up. But the men deserve it. If they'll
let themselves be "drawn," by her loving understanding, they deserve
that she shall slap them across the mouth the moment they _are_ drawn.
The chickens! Drawn and trussed.
Poor little phenomenon of a modern child, she'll grow up into the devil
of a modern woman. The nemesis of weak-kneed modern men, craving to be
love-drawn.
The third person in the diabolic trinity, or triangle, of the Scarlet
Letter, is Hester's first husband, Roger Chillingworth. He is an old
Elizabethan physician with a grey beard and a long-furred coat and a
twisted shoulder. Another healer. But something of an alchemist, a
magician. He is a magician on the verge of modern science, like Francis
Bacon.
Roger Chillingworth is of the old order of intellect, in direct line
from the mediæval Roger Bacon alchemists. He has an old, intellectual
belief in the dark sciences, the Hermetic philosophies. He is no
Christian, no selfless aspirer. He is not an aspirer. He is the old
authoritarian in man. The old male authority. But without passional
belief. Only intellectual belief in himself and his male authority.
Shakspeare's whole tragic wail is because of the downfall of the true
male authority, the ithyphallic authority and masterhood. It fell with
Elizabeth. It was trodden underfoot with Victoria.
But Chillingworth keeps on the _intellectual_ tradition. He hates the
new spiritual aspirers, like Dimmesdale, with a black, crippled hate. He
is the old male authority, in intellectual tradition.
You can't keep a wife by force of an intellectual tradition. So Hester
took to seducing Dimmesdale.
Yet her only marriage, and her last oath, is with the old Roger. He and
she are accomplices in pulling down the spiritual saint.
"Why dost thou smile so at me--" she says to her old, vengeful husband.
"Art thou not like the Black Man that haunts the forest around us? Hast
thou not enticed me into a bond which will prove the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul!" he answered with another smile. "No, not thy soul!"
It is the soul of the pure preacher, that false thing, which they are
after. And the crippled physician--this other healer--blackly vengeful
in his old, distorted male authority, and the "loving" woman, they bring
down the saint between them.
A black and complementary hatred, akin to love, is what Chillingworth
feels for the young, saintly parson. And Dimmesdale responds, in a
hideous kind of love. Slowly the saint's life is poisoned. But the black
old physician smiles, and tries to keep him alive. Dimmesdale goes in
for self-torture, self-lashing, lashing his own white, thin, spiritual
saviour's body. The dark old Chillingworth listens outside the door and
laughs, and prepares another medicine, so that the game can go on
longer. And the saint's very soul goes rotten. Which is the supreme
triumph. Yet he keeps up appearances still.
The black, vengeful soul of the crippled, masterful male, still dark in
his authority: and the white ghastliness of the fallen saint! The two
halves of manhood mutually destroying one another.
Dimmesdale has a "coup" in the very end. He gives the whole show away by
confessing publicly on the scaffold, and dodging into death, leaving
Hester dished, and Roger as it were, doubly cuckolded. It is a neat last
revenge.
Down comes the curtain, as in Ligeia's poem.
But the child Pearl will be on in the next act, with her Italian Count
and a new brood of vipers. And Hester greyly Abelling, in the shadows,
after her rebelling.
It is a marvellous allegory. It is to me one of the greatest allegories
in all literature, _The Scarlet Letter._ Its marvellous under-meaning!
And its perfect duplicity.
The absolute duplicity of that blue-eyed _Wunderkind_ of a Nathaniel.
The American wonder-child, with his magical allegorical insight.
But even wonder-children have to grow up in a generation or two.
And even SIN becomes stale.
VIII. HAWTHORNE'S "BLITHEDALE ROMANCE"
No other book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual, and so
complete as _The Scarlet Letter_: this great allegory of the triumph of
sin.
Sin is a queer thing. It isn't the breaking of divine commandments. It
is the breaking of one's own integrity.
For instance, the sin in Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale's case was a sin
because they did what they _thought_ it _wrong_ to do. If they had
really _wanted_ to be lovers, and if they had had the honest courage of
their own passion, there would have been no sin: even had the desire
been only momentary.
But if there had been no sin, they would have lost half the fun, or
more, of the game.
It was this very doing of the thing that _they themselves_ believed to
be wrong, that constituted the chief charm of the act. Man invents sin,
in order to enjoy the feeling of being naughty. Also, in order to shift
the responsibility for his own acts. A Divine Father tells him what to
do. And man is naughty and doesn't obey. And then shiveringly, ignoble
man lets down his pants for a flogging.
If the Divine Father doesn't bring on the flogging, in this life, then
Sinful Man shiveringly awaits his whipping in the afterlife.
Bah, the Divine Father, like so many other Crowned Heads, has abdicated
his authority. Man can sin as much as he likes.
There is only one penalty: the loss of his own integrity. Man should
_never_ do the thing he believes to be wrong. Because if he does, he
loses his own singleness, wholeness, natural honour.
If you want to do a thing, you've either got to believe, sincerely, that
it's your true nature to do this thing: or else you've got to let it
alone.
Believe in your own Holy Ghost. Or else, if you doubt, abstain.
A thing that you sincerely believe in, cannot be wrong. Because belief
does not come at will. It comes only from the Holy Ghost within.
Therefore a thing you truly believe in, cannot be wrong.
But there is such a thing as spurious belief. There is such a thing as
_evil_ belief: a belief that one _cannot do wrong._ There is also such a
thing as a half-spurious belief. And this is rottenest of all. The devil
lurking behind the cross.
So there you are. Between genuine belief, and spurious belief, and
half-genuine belief, you're as likely as not to be in a pickle. And the
half-genuine belief is much the dirtiest, and most deceptive thing in
life.
Hester and Dimmesdale believed in the Divine Father, and almost
gloatingly sinned against Him. The Allegory of Sin.
Pearl no longer believes in the Divine Father. She says so. She has no
Divine Father. Disowns Papa both big and little.
So she can't sin against him.
What will she do, then, if she's got no god to sin against? Why, of
course, she'll not be able to sin at all. She'll go her own way gaily,
and do as she likes, and she'll say, afterwards, when she's made a mess:
"Yes, I did it. But I acted for the best, and therefore I am blameless.
It's the other person's fault. Or else it's Its fault."
She will be blameless, will Pearl, come what may.
And the world is simply a string of Pearls to-day. And America is a
whole rope of these absolutely immaculate Pearls, who can't sin, let
them do what they may. Because they've no god to sin against. Mere men,
one after another. Men with no ghost to their name.
Pearls!
Oh, the irony, the bitter, bitter irony of the name! Oh, Nathaniel, you
great man! Oh, America, you Pearl, you Pearl without a blemish!
How _can_ Pearl have a blemish, when there's no one but herself to judge
Herself? Of course she'll be immaculate, even if, like Cleopatra, she
drowns a lover a night in her dirty Nile. The Nilus Flux of her love.
Candida!
By Hawthorne's day it was already Pearl. Before swine, of course. There
never yet was a Pearl that wasn't cast before swine.
It's part of her game, part of her pearl-dom.
Because when Circe lies with a man, _he's_ a swine after it, if he
wasn't one before. Not _she._ Circe is the great white impeccable Pearl.
And yet, oh. Pearl, there's a Nemesis even for you.
There's a Doom, Pearl.
Doom! What a beautiful northern word. Doom.
The Doom of the Pearl.
Who will write that Allegory?
Here's what the Doom is, anyhow.
When you don't have a Divine Father to sin against: and when you don't
sin against the Son; which the Pearls don't, because they all are very
strong on LOVE, stronger on LOVE than on anything: then there's nothing
left for you to sin against except the Holy Ghost.
Now, Pearl, come, let's drop you in the vinegar.
And it's a ticklish thing sinning against the Holy Ghost. "It shall not
be forgiven him."
Didn't I tell you there was Doom.
_It shall not be forgiven her._
The Father forgives: the Son forgives: but the Holy Ghost does _not_
forgive. So take that.
The Holy Ghost doesn't forgive because the Holy Ghost is within you. The
Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in your conceit of your ego,
you make a break in your own YOU, in your own integrity, how can you be
forgiven? You might as well make a rip in your own bowels. You _know_ if
you rip your own bowels they will go rotten and _you_ will go rotten.
And there's an end of you: in the body.
The same if you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost. You go
soul-rotten. Like the Pearls.
These dear Pearls, they do anything they like, and remain pure. Oh,
purity!
But they can't stop themselves from going rotten inside. Rotten Pearls,
fair outside. Their _souls_ smell, because their souls are putrefying
inside them.
The sin against the Holy Ghost.
And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form of dementia. A
thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche. Dementia.
_Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius._