Pagan Qualities in the Puritans

And the Growing Misapprehension About America Among Foreigners

SIMEON STRUNSKY

THREE hundred years ago, on November twenty-first, the M ay flower cast anchor in the little harbour on Cape Cod which has since won a place in history as the original home of the Provincetown Players.

The chances are more than good that, by November twenty-first, everything that can be said about the Pilgrim Fathers and what they did for this country will have been said—at least once. But how about what the Pilgrim Fathers did to this country?

We need the truth about the Puritans almost as badly as we need the truth about Russia. But I very much doubt whether we shall ever get it. In the first place, nearly all the people who are in the position, and the mood, to tell the truth -about William Bradford and John Carver are now busy with Bertrand Russell. And, in the second place, even if they had the time, I doubt whether they are strong enough to resist a mistaken sense of duty in the matter. It is deplorable that, just when Americans were fast getting into the way of telling the truth about their grandfathers, a centenary or a tercentenary should come around and overwhelm objective truth in a rush of Victorian sentimentality.

The simple truth is, of course, that the good which the Puritans did is interred with the bones of the Quakers and witches whom they burned. The harm that they did is still virulently active among us.

One of the tragic might-have-beens of history is suggested by the thought of what would have happened if Cape Cod had been colonized by a boatload of Ezra Pound pagans, instead of William Bradford Puritans, or if the first covenant signed on American shores had been written, not in the English of the Bible, but in Mr. Pound's Doric strophes running from right to left. For one thing, as the reader no doubt has guessed, Mr. W. Wilson would have inserted into the Treaty of Versailles, not a Covenant but a Sapphic ode, which, edited with textual emendations, notes and vocabulary, by Senator Harding, would now be a best-seller. If America had been settled by a people utterly oblivious of the savage theology of Calvin, all the dry-goods advertisements would now be appearing in The Liberator instead of in the New York Times.

Would they?

Sad as it is to think of New England being conquered with gun and Bible instead of with the javelin and the pipes of Pan, there are compensations (as R. W. Emerson might have said in his great Ode to the Cyprian Venus), if Massachusetts has been settled by the right kind of people. If New England had been colonized by a band of Dionysiac refugees from Thrace, the disadvantage for the present generation would be obvious. We should now be in full reaction from paganism to—exactly —Puritanism.

If the Mayflower had been called the Passionflower, and if the passengers had landed in a lotus bed instead of on a rock, it is plain that we should now be in revolt against the Corinthian Conscience. Instead of nobody reading Little Reviews of Cubism, nobody would now be reading Little Reviews of HellFire. So, perhaps, we are better off, after all.

But we are not concerned with what might have been. The fact remains that the Puritans did beat the free spirits to it, and objective truth demands that the Puritans be revealed in their right colours. That colour, was, significantly enough, White. The Bradfords and the Endicotts were the Kolchaks and Wrangles of their day. They landed on a continent where a vigorous Red civilization flourished, and they lost no time in starting up a counter-revolution. It is true that the original Indian inhabitants of America were not sufficiently paganized to provide a basis for a completely emancipated form of society. For instance, they seem to have moved far enough in the direction of Puritan error to have developed, on their own account, the idea of a Great Spirit of some sort. But with this exception they were immeasurably superior to the Pilgrim Fathers in their capacity for complete social realization. They saw life as a great adventure. They had a great gift for self-expression, whether with the tongue or with the tomahawk. They practiced an individual and group freedom, limited only by periodical starvation. They had a form of picture writing attaining almost the coherence of Imagism. If, nevertheless, no great, free Indian civilization arose in New England and the Western Reserve, it must have been because the Indians disappeared, for some unaccountable reason, before an .intrinsically lower civilization.

The Puritans Living Their Own Lives

AND yet objective truth once more compels us to an admission. The original Puritans were not devoid of certain excellent, almost pagan, qualities. The original Puritans were far less Puritan than their descendants of the third and subsequent generations. There was, after all, a fine spontaneity about the way in which the Pilgrim Fathers went at the Red aborigines. There was very adequate selfexpression in the way they used to gather in a hundred square miles of Indian lands for a gallon of bad whiskey, and so laid the foundation of the fortunes that were later to make colleges and endowed magazines possible. Pagan again was their direct method of approach to the Quakers and Anabaptists and old ladies of Salem of whom I have already spoken. This was, no doubt, rather hard upon the Quakers and the old ladies, but that could scarcely be helped. When the soul starts out to realize itself, to live its own life, so to speak, the process is bound to be hard on somebody. Only when they gave up burning witches and Quakers did the Puritans cease to be interesting. There was hope for the Puritan conscience as long as it managed to combine church-going and reticence with Indian battues. Only when the supply of Indians gave out did the black clouds of Puritanism envelop the land and the Curtis publications begin to build up their circulation.

The great evil of Puritanism in America is not really the harm it has done to Americans, but the profound disappointment it has raised up for a long line of distinguished European observers and visitors, all the way from Baudelaire to Henry W. Nevinson. Native sons may groan under the Bradford-CabotLowell stigma, but, after all, it's in the family, But, oh, the shame of it, when people drop in for dinner from across the Atlantic, and find out that America isn't at all what she ought to be! That is what hurts.

They get off the boat, our visitors, and find that we are not the rebels we ought to be; we are not the intellectual raw-bones we ought to be; we are not emotionally the broad-chested, deep-breathing, rip-snorting race we were predestined to be. We are not pioneers in cowhides. We are snivelling hypocrits, and subscribers to the Saturday Evening Post.

American Literary Heroes

TO cite but one instance: See the kind of men we pick for our heroes. Our greatest poet—and we still refuse to recognize him as such—is Poe. Baudelaire picked him out for us. Yet the American text-books, and Chautauqua lectures, reek with Whittier and Longfellow. If not Poe, then our greatest poet is Walt Whitman. Again a European picked him out for us.

But, at heart, we do not accept Whitman. Our greatest all-round American has just been discovered by the visiting Henry W. Nevinson. It is Thoreau. And the reason for Thoreau is the same as the reason for Poe and Whitman. These men were non-conformists. No, that is not exactly the right word; the Pilgrims who messed up America so badly were nonconformists.

Well, then, Thoreau, Whitman and Poe were rebels and not quite respectable; and there is no use in recalling that the Pilgrims in their day were not quite respectable, because, that way, we shall never get anywhere.

Well, then, rebels. What Europe cannot understand is our not being in chronic mutiny and fermentation. What Europe cannot forgive is our failure to live up to the blue-print of what a brand new people on a brand new continent ought to be. Such a people ought to yawp barbarically. Such a people ought to be making the ladies blush. Such a people ought to be shying bricks. Such a people ought to take first place in the development of bad manners which are so necessary to keep civilization from going stale.

Europe expects every American to do his duty—and behave like an Indian.

And all the more because Europe is still apparently of the idea that Gov. Coolidge is a direct descendant of Massassoit; that when Gov. Cox speaks to Will Hayes, it is the blood of Tecumseh that speaks, and that when Princeton goes through Yale's center the tactics hark back to the ancestral tomahawk. Here's a nation composed of the kinsmen of Sitting Bull—and they like to read the Elsie books.

That is where the malign Puritan influence comes in—Puritan reticence, Puritan gloom, Puritan aversion for the beautiful, and for the physical truth of life. In short, Puritan hypocrisy has made this nation what it is, in spite of the Iroquois blood spurting through its arteries.

The French have said it. The British have said it. The Germans have said it. Mr. Mencken has said it so often that he can probably say it in his sleep. This nation being steeped in a snivelling Puritanism — Mr. Mencken could think of a much better word than snivelling—it follows that our literature isn't worth what Mr. Mencken would say about it.

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But, then, one thing puzzles me. If this nation is, indeed, a nation of Uriah Heeps and little Rollos, what is the kick coming from the Europeans across the Atlantic, and the neo-Europeans from the lower West Side, if we go in for smug poets and plaster heroes? Haven't we been told, a thousand times, that literature is real when it mirrors life honestly? Well, then. A nation of Pecksniffs ought to be represented by Pecksniff in literature and politics. Since most Americans are engaged in trying to get the dollars of their neighbours away from them, why try to unload upon us ''representative" Americans like Poe and Whitman and Thoreau, who never knew their own dollar from their neighbor's? Greece never created a more authentic art than we have here created—a sanctimonious community embodying itself in a shoddy literature. Yet the Europeans are cross with us. "Be yourselves," they say. And when we take their word for it and send out for a copy of High Lights in Salesmanship, they get mad and treat us with contempt.

What is the answer? Mr. R. L. Goldberg, the cartoonist, alone can supply it. It is all wrong, Cotton Mather, it is all wrong.