He seemed to himself quite normal, and his companions
seemed always to think him so. Whatever was peculiar about him
was education, not character, and came to him, directly and
indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance
which he took with his name.
The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped,
from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political
crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature;
the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance;
for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world
chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be
abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly
succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty
implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys
naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it
so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long
struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to
love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always
been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts
politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New
England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility --
a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it -- so that
the pleasure of hating -- one's self if no better victim offered
-- was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and
natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients.
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