Puritanic bourgeois psychology succeeded the aristocratic these obvious expressions of sex-worship were immediately suppressed and what traces remained were subtilized into forms too devious for the uninitiated to recognize their origin. Even Maypole worship, which continued for a time, was attacked; in America for instance, Hawthorne gave a vivid account of the festivity, and the opposition of the Puritans to its continuance. The Maypole of Merry Mount is a striking picture of pagan devotion. That the enthusiastic worshipers were unconscious of the phallic nature of their practice does not lessen its significance as an index to the prevalence of the custom in a kind of sublimated form. The following passage from the sketch or story, as one may choose to call it, affords a singular glimpse into the nature of the rite and of the attitude of the Puritans toward it:

"But what chiefly characterized the colonists of Merry Mount was their veneration for the Maypole. It has made their history a poet's tale. Spring decked the hallowed emblem with young blossoms and fresh green boughs; but then Summer brought roses of the deepest blush, and the perfected foliage of the forest. Autumn enriched it with that red and yellow gorgeousness which converts each wild wood leaf into a painted flower; and Winter silvered it with sleep and hung it round with icicles, till it flashed in the cold

sunshine, itself a frozen sunbeam. Thus each alternate season did homage to the Maypole, and paid it a tribute of its own richest splendor. Its votaries danced round it, once, at least, in every month; sometimes they called it their religion, or their altar; but always, it was the banner staff of Merry Mount.

"Unfortunately, there were men in the New World of a sterner face than these Maypole worshipers. Not far from Merry Mount was a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, who said their prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the cornfield till evening made it prayertime again. Their weapons were always at hand to shoot down the straggling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians. Their festivals were Fast Days, and their chief pastime the singing of songs. Woe to the youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance."

What Hawthorne meant by old English mirth, of course, was the joy of life found in a "Merrie England," unconquered by an astringent bourgeois culture.

In summary, it was the rise of a bourgeois culture, scarred with the ashes of asceticism, that brought to an abrupt and dismal conclusion the splendor of Elizabethan art. Treatises have been written trying to show

how the decline of morality and the degeneracy of impulse were the causes of the death of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Rupert Brooke, for instance, in his entertaining but sentimental way, avers that it was in a "sinking to prettiness and to absence of seriousness that the degeneracy of the later Elizabethan drama lies." The real fact of the matter has been largely missed or neglected. The fall of the Elizabethan drama marked the transient fall of a social class. The cause of its fall had been its conflict with another class: the bourgeoisie. Feudalism had begun to sway and bend; the system was unable to support an aristocratic class in the fashion that earlier centuries had made possible, and this class came to depend more and more upon the rising bourgeois groups in the nation. The economic roots of English society were hastening the evolution of a bourgeois class and diminishing the influence and potency of an aristocracy. Such a condition inevitably signifies the existence of class decay and dissolution. It was not a "sinking to prettiness" or a "degeneracy of sentiment" that was the fundamental cause of the collapse of early seventeenth century drama in England, but the economic struggle that intensified the conflict of the two social classes, antithetic in both purpose and esthetic, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The sex attitudes, their freedom and liberty of utterance, that we have

traced in this analysis are manifestations of a class psychology of aristocratic type, specifically expressing the economic conditions of England and Europe that gave this class its shape and tendency. The opposition to this psychology was the Puritanic psychology of the English bourgeoisie which not only fought against the mention of sex in literature, but also tried to ostracize its entire expression to the privacy of the sanctified canons of an ascetic religion. It was the clash of these classes with their antipodal psychologies that precipitated the temporary decadence of a literature.

CHAPTER II

SEX IN PURITAN ESTHETICS

EUDALISM, with its basis in an agrarian system

FEU

of production, had its castes and its fixities of organization, its static economics and rigid metaphysics, but about its philosophy was a sociality of attitude that gave unity to life and coöperation to endeavor. The Christian hierophants of the Middle Ages, reflecting the ethical outlook of the feudal order, were opposed to avarice and competition. In other words, to paraphrase the ethics of St. Antonino, riches exist for man, not man for riches. The ideal system of life, wrote Gratian, is communism. Usury was condemned and private gain at the expense of public benefit declared a social sacrilege. Gratian's statement:

"The man who buys (something) that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God's temple"

is illustrative of the feudal attitude toward cupidity and exploitation. The "lust of gain" was invariably scourged. A Schoolman of the fourteenth century ex