Chapter 2

You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort. Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink, as it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex Street, or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come upon shy, ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses stand out here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold the whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient pumps like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear and sparkling little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into so many and such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now disappeared, having been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of all, by ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over the past and the present of the place. Looking down from here you behold the ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears a probable aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would have chosen for the standpoint of his "Sights from a Steeple"; and the two kinds of spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the Puritan aspiration that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond the gray and sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective seems to rise above it and to dominate the place with its dim, half-threatening blue; as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great measure, bringing first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many successive generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary privateering or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too, Hawthorne's name again is connected, as we shall presently notice. Then, quitting the brimming blue, our eyes return over the "flat, unvaried surface covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty," with its "irregularity which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame"; and retracing the line upon which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in "Main Street," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] we fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name. At its foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world full of witches. But here on the hill there is no special suggestion of the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the witches and their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering with their own barren little dwellings the three sides of the height facing the town. Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line. One small area at the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting place for execution, indeed! It looms up visible for many miles of lower country around; and as you stand upon the top, earth seems to fall away with such a fatal ease around it!

The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed with bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous "witch-pins." These are the identical little instruments which the afflicted children drew from different parts of their dress, in the trial-room, declaring that some one of the accused had just caused them to be sharply inserted into their persons. The pins are kept in a small glass bottle, and are thin and rudely made; and as one looks at the curious, homely little relics, it is hard to know whether to laugh at the absurdly insignificant sight, or shudder at the thought of what deadly harm they worked in the hands of the bewitched. So, while one is hesitating, one gives the bottle back to the clerk, who locks it up speedily, and at the next instant is absorbed in the drawing up of some document; leaving the intruder free to pursue his search for antiquities elsewhere. But the monuments and remains of the past are nowhere large enough, in our American towns, to furnish the pilgrim a complete shelter and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion, or "Witch House," to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark and grimy room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a solid scrap of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been fastened on to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a wasp's nest,--as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The descendants of the first settlers have with pious care preserved the remains of the First Church of Salem, and the plain little temple may still be seen, though hidden away in the rear of the solid, brick-built Essex Institute. Yet, after all, it is only the skeleton of the thing, the original framework set into a modern covering for protection,--the whole church being about as large as a small drawing-room only. Into this little space a few dumb and shrinking witnesses of the past have been huddled: the old communion-table, two ancient harpsichords, a single pew-door, a wooden samp-mortar, and a huge, half-ruinous loom; and some engraved portraits of ancient ministers hang upon the walls. When I visited the place, a party of young men and women were there, who hopelessly scattered any slight dust of revery that might have settled on me from the ancient beams, and sent the ghosts fleeing before their light laughter. The young women fingered the old harpsichords, and incontinently thrummed upon them; and one cried, "Play a waltz!" She was a pretty creature; and, as her gay tone mingled with the rattle of protesting strings in the worn-out instrument, one might easily have divined how dire a fate would have been hers, in the days when men not only believed in bewitchment, but made it punishable. Then a young man who had clung for guidance amid her spells to the little printed pamphlet that describes the church, read aloud from its pages, seriously: "'Nowhere else in this land may one find so ancient and worshipful a shrine. Within these walls, silent with the remembered presence of Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, Roger Williams, and their grave compeers, the very day seems haunted, and the sunshine falls but soberly in.'"

"O don't!" besought the siren, again. "We're not in a solemn state."

And, whether it was the spell of her voice or not, I confess the sunshine did not seem to me either haunted or sober.

Thus, all through Salem, you encounter a perverse fate which will not let you be alone with the elusive spirit of the past. Yet, on reflection, why should it? This perverse fate is simply the life of to-day, which has certainly an equal right to the soil with that of our dreams and memories. And before long the conflict of past and present thus occasioned leads to a discovery.

In the first place, it transpires that the atmosphere is more favorable than at first appears for backward-reaching revery. The town holds its history in reverence, and a good many slight traces of antiquity, with the quiet respect maintained for them in the minds of the inhabitants, finally make a strong cumulative attack on the imagination. The very meagreness and minuteness of the physical witnesses to a former condition of things cease to discourage, and actually become an incitement more effective than bulkier relics might impart. The delicacy of suggestion lends a zest to your dream; and the sober streets open out before you into vistas of austere reminiscence. The first night that I passed in Salem, I heard a church-bell ringing loudly, and asked what it was. It was the nine-o'clock bell; and it had been appointed to ring thus every night, a hundred years ago or more. How it reverberated through my mind, till every brain-cell seemed like the empty chamber of a vanished year! Then, in the room where I slept, there was rich and ponderous furniture of the fashion of eld; the bed was draped and canopied with hangings that seemed full of spells and dreamery; and there was a mirror, tall, and swung between stately mahogany posts spreading their feet out on the floor, which recalled that fancy of Hawthorne's, in the tale of "Old Esther Dudley," [Footnote: See also American Note-Books, Vol. I.; and the first chapter of The House of the Seven Gables.] about perished dames and grandees made to sweep in procession through "the inner world" of a glass. Such small matters as these engage the fancy, and lead it back through a systematic review of local history with unlooked-for nimbleness. Gradually the mind gets to roving among scenes imaged as if by memory, and bearing some strangely intimate relation to the actual scenes before one. The drift of clouds, the sifting of sudden light from the sky, acquire the import of historic changes of adversity and prosperity. The spires of Salem, seen one day through a semi-shrouding rain, appeared to loom up through the mist of centuries; and the real antiquity of sunlight shone out upon me, at other times, with cunning quietude, from the weather-worn wood of old, unpainted houses. Every hour was full of yesterdays. Something of primitive strangeness and adventure seemed to settle into my mood, and the air teemed with anticipation of a startling event; as if the deeds of the past were continually on the eve of returning. With all this, too, a certain gray shadow of unreality stole over everything.

Then one becomes aware that this frame of mind, produced by actual contact with Salem, is subtly akin to the mood from which so many of Hawthorne's visions were projected. A flickering semblance, perhaps, of what to him must have been a constant though subdued and dreamy flame summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but from this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the founders themselves.

John White, the English Puritan divine, who, with the "Dorchester Adventurers," established the first colony at Cape Ann, was moved to this by the wish to establish in Massachusetts Bay a resting-place for the fishermen who came over from Dorchester in England, so that they might be kept under religious influences. This was the origin of Salem; for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it "proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem, "for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond, 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, was as intense as the unlettered belief of Bunyan; and perhaps he shared the prevalent opinions about witchcraft; yet when he touches upon the superstitious element, the material used is so transfused with the pictorial and poetic quality which Milton has distilled from the common belief, and then poured into this _image_ of the common belief, that I am not sure he cared for any other quality in it.

"Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, call'd In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured by the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon Ellipses at their charms."

_Paradise Lost_, II. 662.

Again, in Comus:--

"Some say, no evil thing that walks by night, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn, unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity."

How near these passages come to Shakespere, where he touches the same string! And is it not clear that both poets exulted so in the _beauty_ born among dark, earthy depths of fear, that they would have rejected any and every horror which failed to contribute something to the beautiful? Indeed, it may easily be that such high spirits accept awful traditions and cruel theologies, merely because they possess a transmuting touch which gives these things a secret and relative value not intrinsically theirs; because they find here something to satisfy an inward demand for immense expansions of thought, a desire for all sorts of proportioned and balanced extremes. This is no superficial suggestion, though it may seem so. But in such cases it is not the positive horror and its direct effect which attract the poet: a deeper symbolism and an effect both aesthetic and moral recommend the element to him. With Milton, however, there follows a curious result. He produces his manufactured myth of Sin and Death and his ludicrous Limbo of Vanity with a gravity and earnestness as convincing as those which urge home any part of his theme; yet we are aware that he is only making poetic pretence of belief; so that a certain distrust of his sincerity throughout creeps in, as we read. How much, we ask, is allegory in the poet's own estimation, and how much real belief? Now in Bunyan there is nothing of this doubt. Though the author declares his narrative to be the relation of a dream, the figment becomes absolute fact to us; and the homely realism of Giant Despair gives him a firmer hold upon me as an actual existence, than all the splendid characterization of Milton's Beelzebub can gain. Even Apollyon is more real. Milton assumes the historic air of the epic poet, Bunyan admits that he is giving an allegory; yet of the two the humble recorder of Christian's progress seems the more worthy of credit. Something of this effect is doubtless due to art: the "Pilgrim's Progress" is more adequately couched in a single and consistent strain than the "Paradise Lost." Milton, by implying veracity and then vaporing off into allegory, challenges dispute; but Bunyan, in humbly confessing himself a dreamer, disarms his reader and traps him into entire assent. Certainly Bunyan was not the greater artist: that supposition will not even bear a moment's contemplation; but, as it happened, his weakness was his strength. He had but one chance. His work would have been nothing without allegory, and the simple device of the dream--which is the refuge of a man unskilled in composition, who feels that his figures cannot quite stand as self-sufficient entities--happens to be as valuable to him as it was necessary; for the plea of unreality brings out, in the strong light of surprise, a contrast between the sincere substance of the story and its assumed insubstantiality. Milton had many chances, many resources of power to rely on; but by grasping boldly at the effect of authenticity he loses that one among the several prizes within his reach. I do not know that I am right, but all this seems to me to argue a certain dividing and weakening influence exerted by the imagination which uses religious or superstitious dread for the purposes of beauty; while that which discourses confidently of the passage from this to another life, with all the several stages clearly marked, and floods the whole scene with a vivid and inartificial light from "the powers and terrors of what is yet unseen," affects the mind with every atom of energy economized and concentred.