The palace and its rich odors are the Judge's distinguished career and his ostentatious good deeds, all adding up to a man of "high respecta- bility," as Hawthorne notes at his first appearance and stresses at every opportunity thereafter. Both the career and the good deeds Hawthorne develops at length, but it is more to our purpose here to quote Hyatt Waggoner's translation of Judge Pyncheon's image into contemporary terms.
If Hawthorne were writing the book today, he would have to make him a suburban Republican active in the Chamber of Commerce, opposed to fair housing laws because they endanger the rights of property, a member of a country club that excludes almost everyone, willing chairman when his turn comes of the United Fund or Community Chest drive, a trustee of a hospital and a college, a man who despite all his good works is known as a realist with his feet on the ground who can be trusted never to be taken in by baseless idealism, or any other "isms," a staunch defender of the American way of life, and a senior warden of a wealthy Episcopal parish.17
Since the official views of the Establishment control men's minds, there is little hope for justice through established institutions. Hepzibah knows that the truly insane man is Judge Pyncheon. Yet when the Judge threatens to accuse Clifford of insanity unless he reveals the title to the northern lands, she knows better than to call for help: "But how wild, how almost laughable the fatality, and yet how continually it comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a world, that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side!" (p. 389). In Hawthorne, as in Huckleberrv Finn, if justice triumphs in the end it is not because of but in spite of the official institutions of justice; justice is supplied by Providence, or by the author's manipulation.
Yet for all the "darkness" Melville celebrated in Hawthorne, he was never the complete pessimist. If he insisted on evil in all men he also insisted on the good in nearly all. If the masses' heads are addled, there is a residium of virtue in their hearts; when they judge with their hearts, as he tells us in The Scarlet Letter, they judge correctly. Though the Judge and his Puritan ancestor the Colonel are praised in sermons, on gravestones, and in written history, Hawthorne observes the "vast discrepancy" between "these cold, formal, and empty words of the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that writes for the public eye and for distant time" and "the pencil sketches that pass from hand to hand, behind the original's back" (p. 316). Melville was to develop the same theme in Billy Budd. Billy is recorded in official Naval records as an example of "extreme depravity," but in the living tradition of enlisted sailors a chip from the spar from which he was hanged is cherished as "a piece of the Cross." Holgrave's camera too, using honest sunlight as its medium of portraiture, sees the true Jaffrey Pyncheon. The implication should please our hippies nature is in sympathy with truth and with the lowly.
Judge Pyncheon is a "capatalist," as Hawthorne keeps reminding us. The term was new in Hawthorne's time and Hawthorne is concerned with showing us a man of his own time. Yet he is equally concerned with showing the Judge as a current version of a continuing type, a surface modidcation of his Puritan ancestor to ft modern conditions, but with the resemblance of his photo to the Colonel's portrait revealing the true continuity. In his account of that adaptation, Hawthorne touches notes which are "modern" not only for 1850 but for 1970. The Judge is a hypocrite of a special form, unknown to his more frankly aristocratic ancestors. To hold power in a democratic society he must pretend an equality he does not believe; he must bend lower in proportion as he feels himself above the man he meets, and put on a smile that, as Hawthorne remarks in the best tall-tale tradition, would ripen grapes. He is a manipulator of the democratic process, "skilled to adjust those preliminary measures, which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers" (p. 407). Yet Hawthorne is penetrating enough to know that such a man is not a conscious hypocrite. Rather, he is "unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his image." Such men are untroubled by conscience "unless it might be for the little space of five minutes in the twenty-four hours" (pp. 380-82).
On those qualities that in part contribute toward success and in part result from it, Hawthorne again anticipates more recent social critics. The Puritan Colonel who founded the Pyncheon line in America was "endowed with common-sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps" (p. 247). In other Puritan portraits and in his pictures of current worldly success Hawthorne stressed images of iron, granite, rigidity. He stressed, as James, Sherwood Anderson and others were to stress, the loss that goes with achieving, the high price paid for the favors of the Bitch Goddess. An unbalance, an overdevelopment of some aspects of personality and underdevelopment of others, results in character that Hawthorne could usually pity while he condemned. Of Judge Pyncheon he exclaimed, 'Surely, it must have been at no slight cost, that he had thus fortified his soul with iron!'' (p. 386). A part of the loss is lack of self-knowledge, an inability to look inward. Another is the "hard texture of the sensibilities," what the young of 1970 would call lack of sensitivity. The emphasis on "common-sense" and business, together with hostility to art and beauty, gives a narrow focus that aids efficiency, but certainly at the cost of love, perception, and joy. Such men collect ''splendid rubbish" and ''big, heavy, solid unrealities," but as James's Strether would say, they live less.
In the Hawthorne value system the loss of love, particularly domestic love, is crucial. The Puritan Colonel, we are told, "had worn out three wives . . . merely by the remorseless weight and hardness of his character.'' The Judge had lost his wife early in marriage, and according to ''fable'' or folk rumor she had died heart-broken. Is it speculating too wildly to see Hawthorne as approaching the analysis, common to our time, that sees acquisitiveness and aggressiveness allied to an exaggerated and false concept of the male role'? The Colonel, he tells us, ''had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide of a manly character" (p. 316). I have added emphasis. To see Hawthorne as a defender of joy, lamenting its absence among the squares of his day, may seem paradoxical to those accustomed to stressing his "darkness." But to some extent the emphasis on gloom in Hawthorne is the result of recent critical fashion.18 As he repeatedly explained, the gloom of his stories was not the product of his will. He repeatedly promised his publisher, Fields, "a more genial book," or a "sunshiny" one, but he added, "the Devil himself seems to get into my inkstand." The novels he wanted to write would have resembled Trollope's.19 His notebooks record his longing for brightness. Though his American Notes show him falling in with a surprising number of funeral processions they also show him enjoying such bright spots as a girl met on his travels: "If she were larger than she is, and of less pleasing aspect, I think she might be intolerable; but being so small, and with a white skin, healthy as a wild flower, she is really very agreeable; and to look at her face is like being shone upon by a ray of the sun."20 His first reaction to an English almshouse was ''that the sense of beauty was insuffciently regarded in all the arrangements."21 In The House of the Seven Gables, Clifford (a true flower child) blows soap bubbles from an arched upper window. Hawthorne's account of the reactions of those on whom they fall shows his sympathy with beauty, imagination, the spirit of play: "It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopt to gaze, and perhaps carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward, as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them, by setting an image of beauty so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers, or their walking-sticks, to touch withal, and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky-scene, vanished as if it had never been" (p. 346).
Hawthorne even anticipates our hippies (and D. H. Lawrence and other critics of the twenties) in suspecting that modern times more than earlier times and America more than other nations are hostile to joy and beauty. A sense of loss of color, gaiety, ancient customs and rituals runs through The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne feared that in the new world and the new day even physical vigor might be declining: "for throughout that chain of ancestry [since the Puritan migration] every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame” (p. 114). “Refinement” may have been gained, but Hawthorne, as always, notes the price. But “The Maypole of Merrymount” is the chief case in point. It is largely on this story that Q. D. Leavis has advanced her thesis that the gains and losses involved in transmitting culture from England to America form one of Hawthorne’s major concerns.
Hawthorne calls the story a ‘’sort of allegory” dealing with an episode in which “jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.” Leavis has commented on the care and artistic brilliance with which he balances accounts, including modifications in the true history of Merrymount in order to make that colony fully representative of “the immemorial culture of the English folk with its Catholic and ultimately pagan roots, preserved in song and dance, festivals and superstitions, and especially the rites and dramatic practices of which the May-Day ceremonies were the key.”22 She concludes that Hawthorne saw it as a ”disaster for New England” that the traditions of Merrymount and of the Puritans could not be reconciled. My student ends his paper on a similar note that the hope of America lies in uniting the hippie and the square.
Certainly the opening of the story shows the hippie and the square as the hippie views them. Though there is a subtle shift during the course of the story, sympathy remains divided. If the revellers of Merrymount win, Hawthorne tells us, they will “pour sunshine over New England’s rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds throughout the veil.” The Puritans, who ”unfortunately” are in the same land, are “most dismal wretches.” Hawthorne presents them through the familiar images of iron, granite, darkness, black shadows. It is they, not the triflers of Merrymount, whom Hawthorne accuses of “superstition.” Their whipping post, he tells us, ”might be termed the Puritan maypole,” and the institution of which they are most proud, as showing their “well ordered settlements,” is the stocks. They are given, in short, the combination of solemnity, piety, avariciousness, and disciplined violence which our hippies see as ultimate square vices ”Their weapons are always at hand to shoot down the straggling savage.” They meet not ‘`to keep up the old English mirth” but to hear three-hour sermons ”or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians.” In a final assault on beauty and individual freedom, Endicott orders that the “long glossy curls” of the May Lord be cut “in the true pumpkin-shell fashion.” The indictment is thorough; the sense of loss in what he has made Merrymount represent is real. In the terms used now by such theologians as Harvey Cox, Hawthorne deplored the absence of “festival” in American life. He never, in this story or elsewhere, repudiated those things the hippie longs for. He did differ with the hippie in his analysis of conditions under which they may be attainable, and in his sense of human limitations.
First, he knew that all men are defective. ”Earth’s Holocaust” is his most striking statement of the theme, but every story and novel is based on that premise. Those who ignore human imperfection in their planning become, like Aylmer of “The Birthmark,” destroyers rather than creators. From his knowledge of universal depravity came and not as paradoxically as it may seem a humility and a sense of social solidarity too often lacking in our young critics of society. The society with which he was concerned was a wider society. As we have noted, his people are often ‘’saved” through love for one other person. The heart is touched by love, bringing warmth, or ”reality.” But the saved one does not then withdraw with his loved one in a society of the elect; he does not join a Brook Farm or a commune. He returns to the larger society, to what Lewis calls “the tribe.” He is defective and incomplete-as it is defective and incomplete; he needs it as it needs him. Thus love unites Phoebe and Holgrave, but also serves the larger social purpose of uniting two warring families, displacing hate by love and “cleansing” a cursed house. Love for Clifford brings Hepzibah out of destructive pride and isolation into intercourse with the world. Hester is saved at the end not by the “consecration of its own” she once thought blessed her union with Dimmesdale, not by escape into the trackless forest or to the Old World, but by returning to serve the people of her village. Pearl offers the clearest example. The belated courage, honesty, and love of Dimmesdale in the final scaffold scene effect her saving miracle. Learning to love her father she learns also to love mankind and becomes a part of the magic circle or magnetic chain of humanity: ”Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her lather’s cheek, they were a pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it” (p. 236).
The scene of Pearl’s conversion (I think we must call it that) suggests another distinction between Hawthorne and the hippie. He had a different view of joy’ a different view of the relation between joy and sorrow, a different view of the part love plays in both joy and sorrow.
Note the linking of “joy and sorrow” in the passage. Sorrow accompanies joy in almost every reference Hawthorne makes. To Longfellow he wrote in the days of his isolation in the haunted chamber in Salem, “I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.”23 Not suffering, but existing untouched, unawakened, is the true loss of life. Sorrow is an unavoidable part of life, but a repeated pattern in Hawthorne’s fiction suggests that it may be a constructive part. Hepzibah, we are told, has ”been enriched by poverty, developed by sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life.” Phoebe half regrets that she is less ”merry” then before she knew Hepzibah and Clifford and shared their troubles, but trusts that she is wiser” than before. Holgrave assures her that it is wrong to mourn for ”the first, careless, shallow gaiety of youth.” For in its place can come, if one loves, a “profound happiness at youth regained, -so much deeper and richer than that we lost” (pp. 371-72). It is a scene of grief that develops Pearl’s sympathies. Without sympathy, in turn, there can be no escape from self, no reaching out to love and through it to joy. Love, Hawthorne would agree with the hippie, is the route to Joy. But he saw that it also has a logical connection to sorrow. Of the Lord and Lady of May, in “The Maypole of Merrymount,” he observed, “From the moment that they truly loved, they had subjected themselves to earth’s doom of care and sorrow, and had no more a home at MerryMount” (p. 85). Love binds us to others, and thus to sharing in their sorrows as well as their joys. It commits us to life, to warm awareness and vulnerability.