Chapter VI: Part 6

He welcomed the suggestion, and, now that the matter of business had been postponed, he was at his ease. In a friendly way he made me acquainted with the general theory of forging and check-raising,--at least so far as it is intelligible to the lay mind. His criticism of prison management was acute, and he pointed out the seamy side of the plans of the reformers. I listened with docility to his story of the under world. He was a well-educated man with an appreciation of good literature, which was a characteristic, he informed me, of most forgers. He was especially interested in sociology, and had all its best phrases at his tongue’s end. He attributed all his misfortunes to Society. For one thing I listened in vain,--the admission that in some respects he might himself have been remiss. The idea of reciprocal obligation did not seem to have any place in his philosophy. As delicately as I could I tried to turn the conversation from the sin of Society, which I readily acknowledged, to the less obvious point of personal responsibility. Granting that Society was imperfectly organized, that juries were ignorant, and judges lacking in the quality of mercy, and prison wardens harsh, and chaplains too simple-minded, were there not faults on the other side that it might be profitable to correct? It was of no use to try to induce such currents of thought; they were quickly short-circuited.

At last I said, “You have told me what you did before you concluded to reform. I am curious to know how, in those days, you looked at things. Was there anything which you wouldn’t have done, not because you were afraid of the law, but because you felt it would be wrong?”

“Yes,” he said, “there is one thing I never would do, because it always seemed low down. I never would steal.”

It was evident that further discussion would be unprofitable without definition of terms. I found that by stealing he meant petty larceny, which he abhorred. In our condemnation of the sneak thief and the pickpocket we were on common ground. His feeling of reprobation was, if anything, more intense than that which I felt at the time. He alluded to the umbrellas and other portable articles he had noticed in the hallway. Any one who would take advantage of an unsuspecting householder by purloining such things was a degenerate. He had no dealings with such moral imbeciles.

It seemed to me that I might press the analogy which instantly occurred to me between “stealing” and forgery.

“Do they not,” I said, “seem to you to amount to very much the same thing?”

I had struck a wrong note. Analogies are ticklish things to handle, for things which are alike in certain respects are apt to be quite different in other respects. His mind was intent on the differences. The sneak thief, he told me, is a vulgar fellow of no education. The forger and the check-raiser are experts. They are playing a game. Their wits are pitted against the wits of the men who are paid high salaries for detecting them. They belong to quite different spheres. If we are looking for analogies we should look up and not down.

“You wanted to know,” he said, “what was the difference between stealing and check-raising. Now, let me ask you a question. What’s the difference between check-raising and some of those big financial operations we’ve all been reading about? Suppose I have a check for five dollars, and I put my brains into it and I manipulate it so that I can pass it off for five hundred. I shove it in to the cashier and he takes it. Before he finds out his mistake, I have made myself scarce. What’s the difference between that transaction and what the ‘big fellows’ on the street are doing?” He mentioned several names that I had not thought of in that connection.

“The difference,” said I, “is--” Then it occurred to me that it was a subject to which I should give further thought. So we postponed the conversation till he should call again--which he never did.

* * * * *

I may be doing injustice to my friend the forger, but he gave me the impression that he considered himself to be, on the whole, a rather admirable character. His proposed change of business seemed to be rather a concession to the prejudices of the legal profession than the result of any personal scruple. As he saw himself he was a man of idealistic temper whose ideals conflicted with social usage. Society was all the time getting into his way, and in the inevitable collisions he had usually the worst of it. He regretted this, but he bore no malice. By the time a man has reached middle life and accumulated a good deal of experience he takes the world as he finds it.

He had encased himself in a moral system which was self-consistent and which explained to his own satisfaction all that had happened to him. One thing fitted into another, and there was no room for self-reproach.

* * * * *

Many attempts have been made to depict the character of an accomplished scamp. But Gil Blas and Roderick Random and Jonathan Wild the Great are after all seen from the outside. The author may attempt to do them justice, but there is a vein of irony that reveals a judgment of his own. They lack the essential element of incorrigibility, which is that the scamp does not suspect himself, has not found himself out.

No novelist has ever been able to give such a portraiture of a complacent criminal as was given a century ago in the autobiography of Stephen Burroughs.

Burroughs was the son of a worthy clergyman of Hanover, New Hampshire, and from the outset was looked upon as a black sheep. As a mere boy he ran away from home and joined the army, and then with equal irresponsibility deserted. He became a ship’s surgeon, a privateersman, then a self-ordained minister, a counterfeiter, a teacher of youth, a founder of libraries, and a miscellaneous philanthropist. He was a patriot and an optimist and an enthusiastic worker in the cause of general education. He was chock-full of fine sentiment and had a gift for its expression. He enjoyed doing good, though in his own way, and never neglected any opportunity to rebuke those who he felt were in the wrong. He had a desire to reform the world, and had no doubt of the plans which he elaborated. He was capable on occasions of acts of magnanimity, which, while not appreciated by the public, gave him great pleasure in the retrospect. The intervals between his various enterprises were spent in New England jails. These experiences only deepened his love of liberty, which was one of the passions of his life.

Burroughs had a happy disposition that enabled him to get a measure of satisfaction out of all the vicissitudes of his life. He had learned neither to worry nor to repine. He was not troubled by the harsh judgments of his fellow men, for he had learned to find his happiness in the approbation of his own conscience.

He writes: “I possess an uncommon share of sensibility, and at the same time maintain an equality of mind that is uncommon, particularly in the midst of those occurrences which are calculated to wound the feelings. I have learned fortitude in the school of adversity. In draining the cup of bitterness to its dregs, I have been taught to despise the occurrences of misfortune. This one thing I fully believe, that our happiness is more in our power than is generally thought, or at least we have the ability of preventing that misery which is so common to unfortunate situations. No state or condition in life, but from which we may (if we exercise that reason which the God of Nature has given us) draw comfort and happiness. We are too apt to be governed by the opinions of others, and if they think our circumstances unhappy, to consider them so ourselves, and of course make them so. The state of mind is the only criterion of happiness or misery.”

It was from this lofty point of view that Stephen Burroughs wrote the history of his own life. His tendency to didacticism interferes with the limpid flow of the narrative. Sometimes a whole chapter will be given over to moralizings, but the observations are never painful. They all reveal the author’s cheerful acquiescence in the inevitability of his own actions. Along with this there is the air of chastened surprise over the fact that he was made the object of persecution.

At the very beginning of the narrative one recognizes an independence which would do credit to a better man. In New England, clergymen have always been looked upon as making good ancestors, and Burroughs might have been pardoned if he had shown some family pride. From this weakness he was free. “I am,” he says, “the only son of a clergyman, living in Hanover, in the State of New Hampshire; and were any to expect merit from their parentage, I might justly look for that merit. But I am so far a Republican that I consider a man’s merit to rest entirely with himself, without any regard to family, blood, or connection.”

The accounts of the escapades of his boyhood are intermingled with dissertations on the education of youth. “I have been in the habit of educating youth for seven years, constantly; in the course of my business I have endeavored to study the operations of the human heart, that I might be able to afford that instruction which would be salutary; and in this I find one truth clearly established, viz.: a child will endeavor to be what you make him think mankind in general are.”

The neglect of this truth on the part of his parents and teachers was the cause of much annoyance to Burroughs. Throughout his life he was the innocent victim of an educational mistake. Though after a while he learned to forgive the early injustice, one can see that it rankled. He endeavored to think well of mankind in general, but it was more difficult than if he had been habituated to the exercise in infancy.

At Dartmouth young Burroughs was peculiarly unfortunate; he fell into bad company. As an unkind fate would have it, his room-mate was an exemplary young man who was studying for the ministry. It appears that this misguided youth attempted to entice him into what he describes as “a sour, morose, and misanthropic line of conduct.” Nothing could have been more disastrous. “To be an inmate with such a character, you will readily conceive, no way comported with a disposition like mine, and consequently we never enjoyed that union and harmony of feeling in our intercourse as room-mates which was necessary for the enjoyment of social life.”

To the malign influence of his priggish room-mate several misfortunes were attributed. In endeavoring to restore the moral equilibrium which had been disturbed by the too great scrupulosity of his chum, he exerted too much strength in the other direction. The result was that “a powerful triumvirate” was formed against him in the Faculty. The triumvirate triumphed and his connection with Dartmouth ended suddenly.

This gave occasion to a chapter on the failure of the institutions of learning to prepare for real life. The author declares “more than one half of the time spent in the universities, according to their present establishment on this continent, is thrown away, and that my position is founded in fact I will endeavor to prove.”

I do not see how his argument is affected by the fact to which the editor calls attention in a carping footnote. “It is not strange that the author should reason in this manner. He was expelled from college in the second quarter of his second year, and in fact he studied but little while he was a member.” The editor, I fear, had a narrow mind and judged according to an academic standard which Burroughs would have despised.

From the uncongenial limitations of a college town it was a satisfaction to escape to sea. Here Burroughs’s versatility stood him in good stead. “Having no doctor engaged, I undertook to act in that capacity; and after obtaining the assistance, advice, and direction of an old practitioner, together with marks set on each parcel of medicine, I thought myself tolerably well qualified to perform the office of a physician on board the ship.”

From his seafaring life Burroughs returned with his reputation under a cloud. There were ugly rumors afloat which were readily believed by a censorious world. For once he confesses that his philosophy failed him. “I returned to my father’s house sunken and discouraged; the world appeared a gloomy chaos; the sun arose to cast a sickly glimmer on surrounding objects; the flowers of the field insulted my feelings with their gayety and splendor; the frolicsome lamb, the playful kitten, and the antic colt were beheld with those painful emotions which are beyond description. Shall all nature, shall the brute creation break out into irregular transports, by the overflowing of pleasing sensations, whilst I am shut out from even the dim rays of hope?”

Certainly not. To a mind constituted as was his there was an absurdity in the very suggestion. The brute creation should not have any monopoly of comfortable sensations, so he cheered up immediately and spent the next year loafing around his father’s house.

He had been on the coast of Africa and had taken part in some strange scenes, but his moral sense had not been blunted to such an extent that he could not grieve over some infractions of the moral law which he observed in peaceful Hanover. He regretted that he had been led inadvertently by a young man named Huntington to join a party which robbed a farmer’s beehive.

“For some unaccountable reason or other, youth are carried away with false notions of right and wrong. I know, for instance, that Huntington possessed those principles of integrity that no consideration would have induced him to deprive another of any species of property, except fruit, bees, pigs, and poultry. And why it is considered by youth that depriving another of these articles is less criminal than stealing any other kind of property, I cannot tell.”

Burroughs himself was inclined to take a harsher view of these transgressions than he did of some others; for example, of counterfeiting, in which he was afterwards for a time engaged during one of his brief pastorates.

The argument by which his scruples in this particular were overcome are worth repeating. The law was indeed violated in its letter, but might not a justification be found by one who interpreted it in a large spirit of charity?

“Money is of itself of consequence only as we annex to it a nominal value as the representation of property. Therefore we find the only thing necessary to make a matter valuable is to induce the world to deem it so; and let that esteem be raised by any means whatever, yet the value is the same, and no one becomes injured by receiving it at the valuation.”

The principle of fiat money having been established, the only question that remained was whether the circumstances of the times were such as to justify him in issuing the fiat. The answer was in the affirmative. “That an undue scarcity of cash now prevails is a truth too obvious for me to attempt to prove. Hence whoever contributes to increase the quantity of cash does not only himself but likewise the community an essential benefit.”

It was in his attempt to benefit the community in this way that he first experienced the ingratitude of republics, being landed in the Northampton jail.

But to see Burroughs at his best one must enter into his thoughts at that crisis in his life when he determined that his true vocation was preaching. He lingers fondly on his emotions at that period. It was at a time when he had been driven out of Hanover for conduct which had outraged the feelings of that long-suffering community.

“One pistareen was all the ready cash I had on hand, and the suddenness with which I departed deprived me of the chance to raise more. Traveling on leisurely I had time for reflection.”

As was usually the case when he reflected, he grew more serene and enjoyed a frame of mind that bordered on the heroic.

“I began to look about me to see what was to be done in my present situation and to what business I could turn my attention. The practice of law, which would have been most to my mind, I could not undertake until I had spent some time in the study, which would have been attended with expense far beyond my abilities; therefore this object must be laid aside. Physic was under the same embarrassments; business in the mercantile line I could not pursue for want of capital. ... What can be done? There is one thing, said contrivance, that you can do, and it will answer your purpose--preach.”

The idea came to him as an inspiration, but immediately there was suggested an objection which to a less resourceful mind would have seemed insuperable. “What an appearance should I make in my present dress? which consisted of a light gray coat, with silver-plated buttons, green vest, and red velvet breeches.”

Down the Connecticut valley he trudged, calling to mind his father’s old sermons and gradually working himself into a state of pious rapture. The heart of no young pulpiteer beat with more appropriate emotions than his, when on the next Sunday, under an assumed name, he preached his first sermon in the village of Ludlow. “I awoke with anxious palpitation for the issue of the day. I considered this as the most important scene of my life--that, in a great measure, my future happiness or wretchedness depended on my conduct this day. The time for assembling approached! I saw the people come together. My feelings were up in arms against me, my heart would almost leap into my mouth. What a strange thing, said I, is man! Why am I thus perturbated by these whimsical feelings!”

The moment he began the service these perturbations came to an end. 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

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.

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.

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