Unfavorable Influences. — It must not be inferred that everything done by the Pilgrims was destined to bear rich fruit. Many influences were at work decidedly hostile to literary production, and, indeed, to any degree of symmetrical intellectual development, but fortunately the good outweighed the bad. Among these unfavorable influences only three need be mentioned.
1. Puritan Narrowness. — Hawthorne has admirably summed up this influence.
Life in the Puritan settlements "must have trudged onward with hardly anything to diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intellect and sinister to the heart; especially when one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next....The sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than their progenitors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if any men of that age were, with a farseeing worldly sagacity. But it was impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven's freedom, beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character had established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to us by our Puritan forefathers." — The Snow Image, "Main Street."
2. Lack of Æsthetic Taste. — Beauty, whether in art, literature, or external surroundings, was looked upon with suspicion. The romance and the drama were condemned as vanities; poetry, aside from hymns and religious jingles, was a mere waste of words; sculpture and painting were regarded with horror as a direct violation of the Second Commandment; while the desire for orna-
