The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk

Author:Russell Kirk [Kirk, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B002CJM6CC
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 1953-11-28T23:00:00+00:00

And that part of the American past which was Hawthorne's especial province, Puritan New England, exerted an influence in the long run substantially conservative. Though born of a stern dissent, Puritanism in America soon manifested a character more demandingly orthodox, according to its own canons, than the comparative leniency of Anglicanism. In The Scarlet Letter, retrospectively in The House of the Seven Gables, in many of the Twice Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, that Puritan spirit is disclosed with inimitable perspicacity and candor: fiercely censorious, bold, resolute, industrious, allied with free political institutions, introspective, repressive of emotion, seeking after godliness with a zeal that does not spare self-love, self-pity, or even worldly ambition. Much to fear here, something to hate, a great deal to hold in awe. The Puritan character, for all its enduring influence upon the American mind through the agency of its gentler New England descendants, stands poles apart from the common aspirations and impulses of modern American life. Cautious of action, suspicious of alteration and expansion, repressive of self, armored in a steely theology, Puritanism detests the materialistic, hedonistic appetities that predominate in modern America, and Puritanism is abhorred by the modern spirit. Puritanism is moral conservatism in its extreme form; and of all the varieties of mutiny that the modern world suffers, moral revolution is the most violent. But because of Hawthorne, America never has been able to forget the Puritans, either their vices or their virtues. Upon American society today, the memory of Puritanism still exerts some degree of restraint, if only by holding out the other extreme of remorseless discipline; and this conservative vestige of old New England belief will linger, embalmed by Hawthorne, so long as anyone reads American literature.

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