Perry Miller’s Analogies
The style of Perry Miller’s writing is plain, so the substantive sections of his work make the reader understand the Puritans. But Miller also uses makes his reader feel the force of what the Puritans felt. In the first chapter of Errand into the Wilderness, he uses several analogies to good effect.
First, Miller discusses the double meaning of the word errand in the phrase errand into the wilderness taken from Samuel Danforth’s sermon: the Puritans believed themselves to be on an “errand” in the sense that they were on “a definite mission,” but they also feared that they might be on just a minor task. He illustrates their fear with this analogy:
Anyone who has run errands for other people, particularly for people of great importance with many things on their minds, such as army commanders, knows how real is the peril that, by the time he returns with the report of a message delivered or a bridge blown up, the Superior may be interested in something else; the situation at headquarters may be entirely changed, and the gallant errand boy, or the husband who desperately remembered to buy the ribbon, may be told he is too late. This tragic pattern appears again and again in modern warfare: an agent is dropped by parachute and, after immense hardships, comes back to find that, in the shifting tactical or strategic situations, his contribution is no longer of value. If he gets home in time and his service proves useful, he receives a medal; otherwise, no matter what prodigies he has performed, he may not even be thanked. He has been sent, as the devastating phrase has it, upon a fool’s errand, than which there can be a no more shattering blow to self-esteem.[1]
Next, Miller explains that the Puritans considered themselves a model to Europe and all Reformed Christianity. He begins his discussion of how they failed in their mission because England never watched them with this analogy:
If an actor, playing the leading role in the greatest dramatic spectacle of the century, were to attire himself and put on his make-up, rehearse his lines, take a deep breath, and stride onto the stage, only to find the theater dark and empty, no spotlight working, and himself entirely alone, he would feel as did New England around 1650 or 1660. For in the 1640’s, during the Civil Wars, the colonies, so to speak, lost their audience.[2]
Miller then explains how England during the Civil Wars changed its direction while New England did not. Again, he illustrates with an analogy:
Year after year, as the circus tours this country, crowds howl with laughter, no matter how many times they have seen the stunt, at the bustle that walks by itself: the clown comes out dressed in a large skirt with a bustle behind; he turns sharply to the left, and the bustle continues blindly and obstinately straight ahead, on the original course. It is funny in a circus, but not in history. There is nothing but tragedy in the realization that one was in the main path of events, and now is sidetracked and disregarded. One is always able, of course, to stand firm on his first resolution, and to condemn the clown of history for taking the wrong turning: yet this is a desolating sort of stoicism, because it always carries with it the recognition that history will never come back to the predicted path, and that with one’s own demise, righteousness must die out of the world.[3]
At the end of the chapter, Miller explains how the Puritans carried on, though they no longer had the promise of the glory of their calling:
Many a man has done a brave deed, been hailed as a public hero, had honors and ticker tape heaped upon him—and then had to live, day after day, in the ordinary routine, eating breakfast and brushing his teeth, in what seems protracted anticlimax. A couple may win their way to each other across insuperable obstacles, elope in a blaze of passion and glory—and then have to learn that life is a matter of buying the groceries and getting the laundry done. This sense of the meaning having gone out of life, that all adventures are over, that no great days and no heroism lie ahead, is particularly galling when it falls upon a son whose father once was the public hero or the great lover. He has to put up with the daily routine without ever having known at first hand the thrill of danger or the ecstasy of passion. True, he has his own hardships—clearing rocky pastures, hauling in the cod during a storm, fighting Indians in a swamp—but what are these compared with the magnificence of leading an exodus of saints to found a city on a hill, for the eyes of all the world to behold?[4]
Miller does not use each analogy once, only to abandon it for a fresh one. Rather, echoes of the analogies—subtly modified repetitions—unify the chapter. For example, in the first paragraph I quoted, an analogy of a husband on an errand for his wife is mixed in with the analogy of a soldier on a special mission; the reference to the husband is a repetition of an analogy developed at length earlier in the chapter. Still later in the chapter, the soldier on a mission will reappear in a single sentence: “Amid this shambles [i.e., toleration in England], the errand of New England collapsed. There was nobody left at headquarters to whom reports could be sent.”[5] Of course, the analogies that I have quoted are much more forceful when coupled with the facts and interpretation that Miller presents.
Miller’s style—and perhaps his technique of explanation by analogy—is worthy of emulation.
