The Scarlet Letter
Page 142Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes
of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same
piece and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were
none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily
have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of
James--no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his
harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to
his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no
Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a
hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the
very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors
of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly
repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which give law its vitality. Not the less,
however, the great, honest face of the people smiled--grimly,
perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the
colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country
fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was
courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling
matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire,
were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner,
there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted
most interest of all--on the platform of the pillory, already so
noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an
exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the
disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off
by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an
abuse of one of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people
being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the
offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day),
that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping,
with their descendants, even at so long an interval as
ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the
early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so
years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gaiety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its
general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English
emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party
of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously embroidered
deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and
feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed
spear--stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as
were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of
the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some
mariners--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish
Main--who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day.
They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces,
and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were
confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough
plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some
palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and
merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed
without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were
binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle's very
nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling;
and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae
from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping
crowd around them. It remarkably characterised the incomplete
morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was
allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on
shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element.
The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate
in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this
very ship's crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the
nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have
perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.