‘She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, oriental char- acteristic - a taste for the gorgeously beautiful.’ This is Hester. This is American. But she repressed her nature in the above direction. She would not even allow herself the luxury of labouring at fine, delicate stitching. Only she dressed her little sin-child Pearl vividly, and the scarlet letter was gorge- ously embroidered. Her Hecate and Astarte insignia.
‘A voluptuous, oriental characteristic -’ That lies waiting in American women. It is probable that the Mormons are the forerunners of the coming real America. It is probable that men will have more than one wife, in the coming America. That you will have again a half-oriental womanhood, and a polygamy.
The grey nurse, Hester. The Hecate, the hell-cat. The slowly-evolving voluptuous female of the new era, with a whole new submissiveness to the dark, phallic principle.
But it takes time. Generation after generation of nurses and political women and salvationists. And in the end, the dark erection of the images of sex-worship once more, and the newly submissive women. That kind of depth. Deep women in that respect. When we have at last broken this insanity of mental-spiritual consciousness. And the women choose to experience again the great submission.
‘The poor, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched to succour them.’
Naturally. The poor hate a salvationist. They smell the devil underneath.
‘She was patient - a martyr indeed - but she forebore to pray for her enemies, lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.’
So much honesty, at least. No wonder the old witch-lady Mistress Hibbins claimed her for another witch.
‘She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but only one child.’
‘A vague idea!’ Can’t you see her ‘gliding silently’? It’s not a question of a vague idea imbibed, but a definite feeling directly received.
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an eye - a human eye - upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half her agony were shared. The next instant, back it all rushed again, with a still deeper throb of pain; for in that brief interval she had sinned again. Had Hester sinned alone ?
Of course not. As for sinning again, she would go on all her life silently, changelessly ‘sinning’. She never repented. Not she. Why should she? She had brought down Arthur Dimmesdale, that too-too snow-white bird, and that was her life-work.
As for sinning again when she met two dark eyes in a crowd, why, of course. Somebody who understood as she understood.
I always remember meeting the eyes of a gipsy woman, for one moment, in a crowd, in England. She knew, and I knew. What did we know! I was not able to make out. But we knew.
Probably the same fathomless hate of this spiritual conscious society in which the outcast woman and I both roamed like meek-looking wolves. Tame wolves waiting to shake off their tameness. Never able to.
And again, that ‘voluptuous, oriental’ characteristic that knows the mystery of the ithyphallic gods. She would not betray the ithyphallic gods to this white, leprous-white society of ‘lovers’. Neither will I, if I can help it. These leprous-white, seducing, spiritual women, who ‘understand’ so much. One has been too often seduced, and ‘understood’. ‘I can read him like a book,’ said my first lover of me. The book is in several volumes, dear. And more and more comes back to me the gulf of dark hate and other understanding, in the eyes of the gipsy woman. So different from the hateful white light of understanding which floats like scum on the eyes of white, oh, so white English and American women, with their understanding voices and their deep, sad words, and their profound, good spirits. Pfui!
Hester was scared only of one result of her sin: Pearl. Pearl, the scarlet letter incarnate. The little girl. When women bear children, they produce either devils or sons with gods in them. And it is an evolutionary process. The devil in Hester produced a purer devil in Pearl. And the devil in Pearlwill produce - she married an Italian Count - a piece of purer devilishness still.
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe.
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.
There was that in the child ‘which often impelled Hester to ask in bitterness of heart, whether it were for good or ill that the poor little creature had been born at all’.
For ill, Hester. But don’t worry. III is as necessary as good. Malevolence is as necessary as benevolence. If you have brought forth, spawned, a young malevolence, be sure there is a rampant falseness in the world against which this malevolence must be turned. Falseness has to be bitten and bitten, till it is bitten to death. Hence Pearl.
Pearl. Her own mother compares her to the demon of plague, or scarlet fever, in her red dress. But then, plague is necessary to destroy a rotten false humanity.
Pearl, the devilish girl-child, who can be so tender and loving and understanding, and then, when she has understood, will give you a hit across the mouth, and turn on you with a grin of sheer diabolic jeering.
Serves you right, you shouldn’t be understood. That is your vice. You shouldn’t want to be loved, and then you’d not get hit across the mouth. Pearl will love you: marvellously. And she’ll hit you across the mouth: oh, so neatly. And serves you right.
Pearl is perhaps the most modern child in all literature.
Old-fashioned Nathaniel, with his little-boy charm, he’ll tell you what’s what. But he’ll cover it with smarm.
Hester’simply hates her child, from one part of herself. And from another, she cherishes her child as her one precious treasure. For Pearl is the continuing of her female revenge on life. But female revenge hits both ways. Hits back at its own mother. The female revenge in Pearl hits back at Hester, the mother, and Hester is simply livid with fury and ‘sadness’, which is rather amusing.
The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in dis- order, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to discover.
Of course, the order is peculiar to themselves. But the point of variety is this: ‘Draw out the loving, sweet soul, draw it out with marvellous understanding; and then spit in its eye.’
Hester, of course, didn’t at all like it when her sweet child drew out her motherly soul, with yearning and deep under- standing: and then spit in the motherly eye, with a grin. But it was a process the mother had started.
Pearl had a peculiar look in her eyes: ‘a look so intelligent yet so inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child.’
A little demon! But her mother, and the saintly Dimmesdale, had borne her. And Pearl, by the very openness of her perversity, was more straightforward than her parents. She flatly refuses any Heavenly Father, seeing the earthly one such a fraud. And she has the pietistic Dimmesdale on toast, spits right in his eye: in both his eyes.
Poor, brave, tormented little soul, always in a state of recoil, she’ll be a devil to men when she grows up. But the men deserve it. If they’ll let themselves be ‘drawn’, by her loving understanding, they deserve that she shall slap them across the mouth the moment they are drawn. The chickens! Drawn and trussed.
Poor little phenomenon of a modern child, she’ll grow up into the devil of a modern woman. The nemesis of weak-kneed modern men, craving to be love-drawn.
The third person in the diabolic trinity, or triangle, of the Scarlet Letter, is Hester’s first husband, Roger Chillingworth. He is an old Elizabethan physician, with a grey beard and a long-furred coat and a twis
ted shoulder. Another healer. But something of an alchemist, a magician. He is a magician on the verge of modern science, like Francis Bacon.
Roger Chillingworth is of the old order of intellect, in direct line from the medieval Roger Bacon alchemists. He has an old, intellectual belief in the dark sciences, the flermetic philosophies. He is no Christian, no selfless aspirer. He is not an aspirer. He is the old authoritarian in man. The old male authority. But without passional belief. Only intellectual belief in himself and his male authority.
Shakespeare’s whole tragic wail is because of the downfall of the true male authority, the ithyphallic authority and masterhood. It fell with Elizabeth. It was trodden underfoot with Victoria.
But Chillingworth keeps on the intellectual tradition. He hates the new spiritual aspirers, like Dimmesdale, with a black, crippled hate. He is the old male authority, in intellectual tradition.
You can’t keep a wife by force of an intellectual tradition. So Hester took to seducing Dimmesdale.
Yet her only marriage, and her last oath, is with the old Roger. He and she are accomplices in pulling down thc spiritual saint.
‘Why dost thou smile so at me -’ she says to her old, vengeful husband. ‘Art thou not like the Black Man that haunts the forest around us? Hast thou not enticed me into a bond which will prove the ruin of my soul ?’
‘Not thy soul!’ he answered with another smile. ‘No, not thy soul!’
It is the soul of the pure preacher, that false thing, which they are after. And the crippled physician - this other healer - blackly vengeful in his old, distorted male authority, and the ‘loving’ woman, they bring down the saint between them.
A black and complementary hatred, akin to love, is what Chillingworth feels for the young, saintly parson. And Dimmesdale responds, in a hideous kind of love. Slowly the saint’s life is poisoned. But the black old physician smiles, and tries to keep him alive. Dimmesdale goes in for self- torture, self-lashing his own white, thin, spiritual saviour’s body. The dark Chillingworth listens outside the door and laughs, and prepares another medicine, so that the game can go on longer. And the saint’s very soul goes rotten. Which is the supreme triumph. Yet he keeps up appearances still.
The black, vengeful soul of the crippled, masterful male, still dark in his authority: and the white ghastliness of the fallen saint! The two halves of manhood mutually destroying one another.
Dimmesdale has a ‘coup’ in the very end. He gives the whole show away by confessing publicly on the scaffold, and dodging into death, leaving Hester dished, and Roger as it were, doubly cuckolded. It is a neat last revenge.
Down comes the curtain, as in Ligeia’s poem.
But the child Pearl will be on in the next act, with her Italian Count and a new brood of vipers. And Hester greyly Abelling, in the shadows, after her rebelling.
It is a marvellous allegory. It is to me one of the greatest allegories in all literature. The Scarlet Letter. Its marvellous under-meaning! And its perfect duplicity.
The absolute duplicity of that blue-eyed Wunderkind of a Nathaniel. The American wonder-child, with his magical allegorical insight.
But even wonder-children have to grow up in a generation or two.
And even SIN becomes stale.
CHAPTER 8
Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance
NO OTHER book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual, and so complete as The Scarlet Letter: this great allegory of the triumph of sin.
Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one’s own integrity.
For instance, the sin in Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale’s case was a sin because they did what they thought? it wrong to do. If they had really wanted to be lovers, and if they had had the honest courage of their own passion, there would have been no sin, even had the desire been only momentary.
But if there had been no sin, they would have lost half the fun, or more, of the game.
It was this very doing of the thing that they themselves believed to be wrong, that constituted the chief harm of the act. Man invents sin, in order to enjoy the feeling of being naughty. Also, in order to shift the responsibility for his own acts. A Divine Father tells him what to do. And man is naughty and doesn’t obey. And then shiveringly, ignoble man lets down his pants for a flogging.
If the Divine Father doesn’t bring on the flogging, in this life, then Sinful Man shiveringly awaits his whipping in the afterlife.
Bah, the Divine Father, like so many other Crowned Heads, has abdicated his authority. Man can sin as much as he likes.
There is only one penalty: the loss of his own integrity. Man should never do the thing he believes to be wrong. Because if he does, he loses his own singleness, wholeness, natural honour.
If you want to do a thing, you’ve either got to believe, sincerely, that its your true nature to do this thing - or else you’ve got to let it alone.
Believe in your own Holy Ghost. Or else, if you doubt, abstain.
A thing that you sincerely believe in cannot be wrong, because belief does not come at will. It comes only from the Holy Ghost within. Therefore a thing you truly believe in, cannot be wrong.
But there is such a thing as spurious belief. There is such a thing as evil belief: a belief that one cannot do wrong. There is also such a thing as a half-spurious belief. And this is rottenest of all. The devil lurking behind the cross.
So there you are. Between genuine belief, and spurious belief, and half-genuine belief, you’re as likely as not to be in a pickle. And the half-genuine belief is much the dirtiest, and most deceptive thing in life.
Hester and Dimmesdale believed in the Divine Father, and almost gloatingly sinned against Him. The Allegory of Sin.
Pearl no longer believes in the Divine Father. She says so. She has no Divine Father. Disowns Papa both big and little.
So she can’t sin against him.
What will she do, then, if she’s got no god to sin against? Why, of course, she’ll not be able to sin at all. She’ll go her own way gaily, and do as she likes, and she’ll say, afterwards, when she’s made a mess: ‘Yes, I did it. But I acted for the best, and therefore I am blameless. It’s the other person’s fault. Or else it’s Its fault.’
She will be blameless, will Pearl, come what may.
And the world is simply a string of Pearls today. And America is a whole rope of these absolutely immaculate Pearls, who can’t sin, let them do what they may, because they’ve no god to sin against. Mere men, one after another. Men with no ghost to their name.
Pearls!
Oh, the irony, the bitter, bitter irony of the name! Oh Nathaniel, you great man! Oh, America, you Pearl, you Pearl without a blemish!
How can Pearl have a blemish, when there’s no one but herself to judge Herself? Of course she’ll be immaculate, even if, like Cleopatra, she drowns a lover a night in her dirty Nile. The Nilus Flux of her love.
Candida!
By Hawthorne’s day it was already Pearl. Before swine, of course. There never yet was a Pearl that wasn’t cast before swine.
It’s part of her game, part of her pearldom.
Because when Circe lies with a man, he’s a swine after it, if he wasn’t one before. Not she. Circe is the great white impeccable Pearl.
And yet, oh, Pearl, there’s a Nemesis even for you.
There’s a Doom, Pearl.
Doom! What a beautiful northern word. Doom.
The doom of the Pearl.
Who will write that Allegory?
Here’s what the Doom is, anyhow.
When you don’t have a Divine Father to sin against; and when you don’t sin against the Son; which the Pearls don’t, because they all are very strong on LOVE, stronger on LOVE than on anything: then there’s nothing left for you to sin against except the Holy Ghost.
Now, Pearl, come, let’s drop you in the vinegar.
And it’s a ticklish thing sinning against the Holy Ghost. ‘It shall not be forgiven
him.’
Didn’t I tell you there was Doom?
It shall not be forgiven her.
The Father forgives: the Son forgives: but the Holy Ghost does not forgive. So take that.
The Holy Ghost doesn’t forgive because the Holy Ghost is within you. The Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in your conceit of your ego, you make a break in your own YOU, in your own integrity, how can you be forgiven? You might as well make a rip in your own bowels. You know if you rip your own bowels they will go rotten and you will go rotten. And there’s an end of you, in the body.
The same if you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost. You go soul-rotten. Like the Pearls.
These dear Pearls, they do anything they like, and remain pure. Oh, purity!
But they can’t stop themselves from going rotten inside. Rotten Pearls, fair outside. Their souls smell, because their souls are putrefying inside them.
The sin against the Holy Ghost.
And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form of dementia. A thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche. Dementia.
Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius.
Watch these Pearls, these Pearls of modern women. Particularly American women. Battening on love. And fluttering in the first batlike throes of dementia.
You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.
Hawthorne’s other books are nothing compared to The Scarlet Letter.
But there are good parables, and wonderful dark glimpses of early Puritan America, in Twice Told Tales.
The House of the Seven Gables has ‘atmosphere’. The passing of the old order of the proud, bearded, black-browed Father: an order which is slowly ousted from life, and lingeringly haunts the old dark places. But comes a new generation to sweep out even the ghosts, with these new vacuum cleaners. No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner.
The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is setting up in the photography line, and is just going to make a sound financial thing out of it. For this purpose all old hates and old glooms, that belong to the antique order of Haughty Fathers, all these are swept up in the vacuum cleaner, and the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect understanding under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. Vivat Industria!
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 956