Part 14

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.

If in his attitude toward human destiny Hawthorne was in some essential respects un-Puritan, so also was he un-modern. There is a characteristic difference between antique and modern symbols for those necessary processes, beyond the sphere of our own wills, by which our lives are determined. The ancients pictured it with austere simplicity. Life is a simple thread. The Fates spin it. It is drawn out on the distaff and cut off by the fatal shears.

Compare this with the phrase Carlyle loved to quote, “the roaring loom of Time.” Life is not a spinning-wheel, but a loom. A million shuttles fly; a million threads are inextricably interwoven. You cannot long trace the single thread; you can discern only the growing pattern. There is inevitable causation, but it is not simple but complex. The situation at the present moment is the result not of one cause but of innumerable causes, and it is in turn the cause of results that are equally incalculable. We are a part of

the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and air and sea.

Men of science show us how the whole acts upon each part and each part acts upon the whole. Modern novelists attempt, not always successfully, to give the impression of the amazing complexity of actual life, where all sorts of things are going on at the same time.

Whether we look upon it as his limitation or as his good fortune, Hawthorne adhered to the spinning-wheel rather than the loom. We see the antique Fates drawing out the thread. A long series of events follow one another from a single cause.

A part of the power of Hawthorne over our imagination lies in his singleness of purpose. In “The Marble Faun” we are told, “The stream of Miriam’s trouble kept its way through this flood of human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside.”

We are made to see the dark streams that do not mingle nor turn aside, and we watch their fatal flow.

But is this real, normal life? In such life do not the streams mingle? Are not evil influences quickly neutralized, as noxious germs die in the sunshine? No one would more readily acknowledge this than Hawthorne. He says: “It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under the microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him clumsily together again. What wonder, then, that we be frightened at such a monster, which, after all--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.”

The critic of Hawthorne could not describe better the limitation of his stories as pictures of real life. His characters, however clearly conceived, are insulated from many of their real relations, and their peculiarities are magnified.

In the preface to “The Scarlet Letter” he says that the tale “wears to my eye a stern and sombre aspect, too much ungladdened by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of Nature and real life, and which undoubtedly should soften every picture of them.”

One who would defend Hawthorne the Author against Hawthorne the Critic must point out the kind of literature to which his work belongs. When we judge it by the rule of the romance or of the realistic novel, we fail to do justice to its essential quality. The romancer, the story-teller pure and simple, is attracted by the swift sequence of events. His nimble fancy follows a plot as a kitten follows a string. Now it happens that in a world constituted as ours is the sequence of events follows a moral order. A good story has always in it an element of poetic justice. But the romancer does not tell his story for the sake of the moral. He professes to be as much surprised when it is discovered as is the most innocent reader. In like manner the realistic novel, in proportion as it is a faithful portrayal of life, has an ethical lesson. But the writer disclaims any purpose of teaching it. His business is to tell what the world is like. He leaves the rest to your intelligence.

But there is another kind of literature; it is essentially allegory. The allegorist takes a naked truth and clothes it with the garments of the imagination. Frequently the clothes do not fit and the poor truth wanders about awkwardly, self-conscious to the last degree. But if the artist be a genius the abstract thought becomes a person.

Hawthorne’s work is something more than allegory, but his mind worked allegorically. His characters were abstract before they became concrete. He was not a realist aiming to give a comprehensive survey of the actual world. He consciously selected the incidents and scenes which would illustrate his theme.

In his conclusion of “The Marble Faun,” when the actors have withdrawn, the Author comes before the curtain and says that he designed “the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere that some laws and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged. The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it and becomes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity if we bring it into the actual light of day.” This is not realism.

It is a mood in which the bounds between romance and allegory fade away; persons become symbols and symbols have breathed into them the breath of life. The story and the truth it shadows are one.

The mood is common in poetry. Poets like Dante and Spenser and Shelley from it have given us

Wise and lovely songs Of fate and God and chance and chaos old, And love.

There is a point where “dreams begin to feel the truth and stir of day,” where the incidents of existence assume a dream-like character, and where dreams become transparent symbols of reality. There are moods in which our familiar world seems strange to us, and we walk in it as on some bewildered shore.

In such moods to meet Hawthorne is a great experience. He is no longer shy and aloof, but he opens to us his heart, and with friendly zeal points out each object of interest--for in this border-land he is at home.

THE CRUELTY OF GOOD PEOPLE

The cruelty of bad people is easily explained. They are cruel because they enjoy watching the pain of others. There are also the ignorant and half-formed, to whom the word “inhumanity” applies literally. They have not yet been really humanized. Before they can habitually yield to feelings of compassion there is much to be done in developing their higher natures. They must be urged to

Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.

The beast has a long start, and the ape and tiger die hard.

But this is only half the story. We are continually surprised at the cruelty that is possible in those in whom there seems to be no tigerish survival. It is intimately associated with the higher rather than with the lower part of the nature. It is spiritual, rational, and moral. The cruelty of women and priests is proverbial--and they are good women and good priests.

Listen to the talk in a drawing-room when some question involving the fate of thousands is introduced. There is a strike or lock-out. It means that the hostile parties are struggling on a narrow ledge between two precipices. The workmen are trying to push the employers into the abyss of bankruptcy; the employers are exerting every means in their power to hurl their antagonists into the abyss of starvation. It is a battle to the death, and in many a home pale-faced women are watching it with despairing eyes. But what says my lady who likes to talk about current events? It is evident when she begins to speak that she is not touched by the tragedy of it all. Nero watching the burning of Rome could not assume an air of more complete detachment. She talks as if it were nothing to her. Or the talk turns to the affairs of state. Issues that involve the fate of nations awake in her only a languid curiosity. The diplomacy of prudent statesmen who are endeavoring to keep the peace strikes her as mere dilly-dallying. She wants to see something doing. She enjoys a romantic sensation, and urges on those who would give her this pleasure. Was there ever a useless war without fair faces looking down upon it approvingly--at least at the beginning?

I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death pale were they all; They cried, “La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall.”

Yet she who in regard to the great affairs which involve millions may appear as “La Belle Dame sans Merci” may be to all those whom she knows a minister of purest kindness. It is only towards those whom she does not know that she is pitiless.

* * * * *

Philosophers are usually cruel in their judgments of the persons and events of the passing day, and that is perhaps the reason why no nation has been willing to take the hint from Plato and allow the philosophers to rule. It would be too harsh a despotism. Flesh and blood could not endure it. For the philosopher is concerned with general laws and is intolerant of exceptions, while it is the quality of mercy to treat each person as in some degree an exception. Fancy the misery that would be involved in the attempt to level us all up to the cold heights of abstract virtue on which Spinoza dwelt. One shudders to think of the calamity that would ensue were all our lawmakers to be suddenly Hegelianized. All the attempts to alleviate the hard conditions under which people are living would cease. The energy that is now spent in trying to abolish abuses would then be directed toward explaining them. What wailings would go up from earth’s millions on the proclamation of the rule of unlimited Spencerianism! We should look back with envy to the good old times of Nero and Tamerlane.

As the Inquisition handed its victims over to the secular arm and disclaimed all further responsibility, so this new tyrant would hand over all the unfit to the unobstructed working of natural law. No attention would be paid to our sentimental preferences for particular persons. Those merciful interferences which have been the contrivance of mankind for the protection of weakness must be swept aside. The unfit must take the full penalty justly visited on their unfitness. The moment we begin to particularize we rebel. Pity revolts against a too cold philosophy.

It is needless to say that the theologians have often attained refinements of cruelty unknown even to the most severely logical of the secular philosophers. They have been able to distill out of the purest religious affections a poison capable of producing in the sensitive soul unutterable agony. Then they have watched the writhing of the victim with a cold benevolence. The worst of it was that the benevolence was real in spite of the fact that it froze all the fountains of natural pity.

Jonathan Edwards was not merely a good man in the ordinary sense. His goodness rose into ideal heights. He had a genius for ethics as well as for religion. He is still a teacher of teachers. But this wonderful man, who must ever have a high place among the leaders and inspirers of mankind, has an equally high place among the torturers of the spirit. To understand the kind of pain which he inflicted we must not be content with the threatenings of torment in sermons like that on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The pictorial imagery which now startles us was common enough in his day. The torments of sinners was an ordinary theme; Edwards added appreciably to the torments of the saints. His vivisection of the human soul was without compunction. In the hearts and desires of the innocent he discovered guilt for which there was no pardon. Every resting-place for natural human affection was torn away, and when at last from the clear heaven the love of God shone down in dazzling splendor, it shone upon a desert.

The cruelty of it all is seen in its effects on minds naturally prone to melancholy. Read the journal of a disciple of Edwards, David Brainerd, and remember that for several generations that journal was esteemed a proper book to put into the hands of youth. The editor of the Journal says, “As an example of a mind tremulously apprehensive of sin, loathing it in every form and for its own sake, avoiding even the appearance of evil, rising above all terrestrial considerations, advancing rapidly in holiness, and finding its only enjoyment in the glory of God, probably no similar work in any language can furnish a parallel.” Poor Brainerd! Every step along the heavenly way cost him a pang. He never could forget for more than a few hours at a time that he was human, and to be human was to be vile. The groans follow one another with monotonous iteration. He loved God, but he felt his guilt in not loving him more. He was not only afraid of hell, but of a heaven of which he was unworthy.

“I seem to be declining with respect to my life and warmth in divine things. I deserve hell every day for not loving my Lord more.... I saw myself very mean and vile, and wondered at those who showed me respect.”

We all feel that way sometimes, but to have the feelings set down day by day for years at a time seems hardly profitable. We are relieved when occasionally the editor summarizes the spiritual conflicts of a week or two without going into details, as in the latter part of December, 1744. “The next twelve days he was for the most part extremely dejected, discouraged and distressed, and was evidently much under the power of melancholy. There are from day to day most bitter complaints of exceeding vileness, ignorance, and corruption; an amazing load of guilt, unworthiness even to creep on God’s earth, everlasting uselessness, fitness for nothing, etc., and sometimes expressions even of horror at the thoughts of ever preaching again. But yet in this time of dejection he speaks of several intervals of divine help and comfort.”

The pitiful thing about it all was that Brainerd’s distress arose not from the consciousness of any particular shortcoming of his own, which after all was finite. He was endeavoring to realize the meaning of that infinite guilt which was his as a child of Adam. That guilt must be infinite because it was a sin against infinite purity and power. When he had repented to the very utmost of his ability, he was conscious that he had not repented enough.

When he went to New Jersey as a missionary to the Indians, it was this abnormal spiritual sensitiveness which he endeavored to impart to the aboriginal mind.

He found it difficult to bring the Indians to that degree of spiritual anguish which, in his view, was necessary to their salvation. He could make them understand the meaning of actual transgression, but they were dull of comprehension when he urged them to repent of original sin.

“Another difficulty,” he says, “which I am now upon, is that it is next to impossible to bring them to a rational conviction that they are sinners by nature, and that their hearts are corrupt and sinful, unless one can charge them with some gross act of immorality such as the _light of nature_ condemns.”

One would suppose that the missionary might have found among his untutored Indians enough actual transgressions to have brought to them a conviction of sin and a desire for a better life. But no, that was not enough, it would have fallen far short of what he had in mind. It would have only convinced them that they were sinners individually considered, and would not have overwhelmed them with the guilt of the race. So he hit upon a device to turn their minds from the incidental trangressions of mature life to the central fact that depravity was innate and universal.

“The method which I take to convince them that we are sinners by nature is to lead them to an observation of their little children: how they will appear in a rage, fight and strike their mothers before they are able to speak or walk, while they are so young that they are incapable of learning such practices.... As children have never learned these things, they must have been in their natures; and consequently they must be allowed to be by nature the children of wrath.”

It did not seem to occur to Brainerd that in thus setting the child in the midst of them as an illustration of the kingdom of wrath he was not imitating the method of Jesus. Even in his treatment of the sins of later life there is something illustrative of the cruel system which dominated him.

“I then mention all the vices I know the Indians to be guilty of, and so make use of these sinful _streams_ to convince them that the _fountain_ is corrupt. This is the end for which I mention their wicked practices to them; not because I expect to bring them to an effectual reformation merely by inveighing against their immoralities, but hoping that they may hereby be convinced of the corruption of their hearts, and awakened to a sense of the depravity and misery of their fallen state.”

Brainerd had in mind a profound truth; every great moral awakening is accompanied by pain. But he was not content with that which comes naturally. All specific reformation in morals and manners was subordinated to that which he conceived to be the essential thing,--that they should feel to its full extent the misery of being human.

* * * * *

In every readjustment of thought or advance in the manner of life there is involved a vast amount of unescapable pain. There is also a great deal of pain that is gratuitously inflicted. In the contest between the forces of conservatism and progress it is difficult to say which side is more open to the charge of cruelty.

In reading history our sympathies are usually with the bold innovator. He stands alone against the world and proclaims an unpopular truth. He is misunderstood, reviled, persecuted for righteousness’ sake. The defenders of the old order are hard-hearted persecutors who hound him to death.

But this is only half the story. A glimpse of the other side is given in the very term we use. We speak of the _defenders_ of the old order. We only understand their feelings when we remember that they were really on the defensive. The things they held most sacred were attacked by a ruthless power which they could not understand. They flew to the rescue of sanctuaries about to be violated. They often fought as those in mortal agony, using blindly such weapons as came to their hands.

In “The Faerie Queene” Una, the fair symbol of Truth, wanders through the forest protected by her lion. He is a good lion and faithful to his lady.

The lyon would not leave her desolate, But with her went along, as a strong gard Of her chast person, and a faythfull mate Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard: Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward; And when she wakt, he wayted diligent With humble service to her will prepard; From her fayre eyes he took commandëment And ever by her lookes conceived her intent.

That is the picture that comes to the adherent of the old order. The pure virgin Truth walked unharmed, with her strong protector by her side. At length a proud Paynim attacked the gentle lady. Then it was that