A Study of Hawthorne | Page 9

now Wenham, he took as his text, "At Enon, near to Salim, because
there was much water there." This playing with names is a mere surface
indication of the ever-present scriptural analogy which these men were
constantly tracing in all their acts. Cut off by their intellectual
asceticism from any exertion of the imagination in literature, and
denying themselves all that side of life which at once develops and
rhythmically restrains the sense of earthly beauty, they compensated
themselves by running parallels between their own mission and that of
the apostles,--a likeness which was interchangeable at pleasure with the
fancied resemblance of their condition to that of the Israelites. When

one considers the remoteness of the field from their native shores, the
enormous energy needful to collect the proper elements for a
population, and to provide artificers with the means of work; the almost
impassable wildness of the woods; the repeated leagues of hostile
Indians; the depletions by sickness; and the internal dissensions with
which they had to struggle,--one cannot wonder that they invested their
own unsurpassed fortitude, and their genius for government and war,
with the quality of a special Providence. But their faith was inwoven in
the most singular way with a treacherous strand of credulity and
superstition. Sometimes one is impressed with a sense that the
prodigious force by which they subdued the knotty and forest-fettered
land, and overcame so many other more dangerous difficulties, was the
ecstasy of men made morbidly strong by excessive gloom and
indifference to the present life. "When we are in our graves," wrote
Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived in plenty or penury,
whether we have died in a bed of downe or lockes of straw." And
Hawthorne speaks of the Puritan temperament as "accomplishing so
much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little." Yet, though
they were not, as Winthrop says, "of those that dreame of perfection in
this world," they surely had vast hopes at heart, and the fire of
repressed imagination played around them and before them as a vital
and guiding gleam, of untold value to them, and using a mysterious
power in their affairs. They were something morbid in their imaginings,
but that this morbid habit was a chief source of their power is a
mistaken theory. It is true that their errors of imagination were so
closely knit up with real insight, that they could not themselves
distinguish between the two. Their religious faith, their outlook into
another life, though tinged by unhealthy terrorism, was a solid,
energetic act of imagination; but when it had to deal with intricate
tangles of mind and heart, it became credulity. That lurking
unhealthiness spread from the centre, and soon overcame their
judgment entirely. The bodeful glare of the witchcraft delusion makes
this fearfully clear. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft,"--one of the
most vigorous, true, and thorough of American histories, without which
no one can possess himself of the subject it treats,--has shown
conclusively the admirable character of the community in which that
delusion broke out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but

he points out for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in
a matter where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so
closely as in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not
come from such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source,
and it was not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the
persecution in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the
"witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and in one
county, of more than three times as many as suffered in Salem during
the whole delusion"; several persons were tried by water ordeal, and
drowned, in Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire, at the same time with
the Salem executions; and capital punishments took place there some
years after the end of the trouble here. It is well known, also, that
persons were put to death for witchcraft in two other American colonies.
The excess in Salem was heightened by a well-planned imposture, but
found quick sustenance because "the imagination, called necessarily
into extraordinary action in the absence of scientific certainty, was ...
exercised in vain attempts to discover, unassisted by observation and
experiment, the elements and first principles of nature," [Footnote:
Upham, I. 382] and "had reached a monstrous growth," nourished by a
copious literature of magic and demonology, and by the opinions of the
most eminent and humane preachers and poets.
The imagination which makes beauty out of evil, and that which
accumulates from it the utmost intensity of terror, are well exemplified
in Milton and Bunyan. Doubtless Milton's richly cultured faith, clothed
in lustrous language as in princely silks that overhang his chain-mail of
ample learning and argument,