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The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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There is no other writer but Shakespeare who has portrayed the absolute
devotion of a woman's love with such delicacy of feeling and depth of
sympathy as Hawthorne. In the two stories we have just considered, and
also in "The Bosom Serpent," this element serves, like the refrain of a
Greek chorus, to give a sweet, penetrating undertone which reconciles
us to much that would otherwise seem intolerable. The heroines in these
pieces have such a close spiritual relationship that one suspects them
of having been studied from the same model, and who could this have
been so likely as Hawthorne's own wife. [Footnote: Notice also the
similar character of Sophia in J. Hawthorne's "Bressant."]

The theme of "The Bosom Serpent" is a husband's jealousy; and it is the
self-forgetful devotion of his wife that finally cures his malady and
relieves him of his unpleasant companion. The tale ends with one of
those mystifying passages which Hawthorne weaves so skilfully, so that
it is difficult to determine from the text whether there was a real
serpent secreted under the man's clothing, or only an imaginary one,--
although we presume the latter. Francis of Verulam says, "the best
fortune for a husband is for his wife to consider him wise, which she
will never do if she find him jealous"; and with good reason, for if he
is unreasonably jealous, it shows a lack of confidence in her; but
mutal confidence is the well-spring from which love flows, and if the
well dries up, there is an end of it.

"The Select Party" is quite a relief, after this tragical trilogy. It
is easy to believe that Hawthorne imagined this dream of a summer
evening, while watching the great cumulus clouds, tinted with rose and
lavender like aerial snow-mountains, floating toward the horizon. Here
were true castles in the air, which he could people with shapes
according to his fancy; but he chose the most common abstract
conceptions, such as, the Clerk of the Weather, the Beau Ideal, Mr. So-
they-say, the Coming Man, and other ubiquitous personages, whom we
continually hear of, but never see. The Man of Fancy invites these and
many others to a banquet in his cloud-castle, where they all converse
and behave according to their special characters. A ripple of delicate
humor, like the ripple made by a light summer breeze upon the calm
surface of a lake, runs through the piece from the first sentence to
the last; and the scene is brought to a close by the approach of a
thunder-storm, which spreads consternation among these unsubstantial
guests, much like that which takes place at a picnic under similar
circumstances; and Hawthorne, with his customary mystification, leaves
us in doubt as to whether they ever reached _terra firma_ again.

There is one proverbial character, however, whom Hawthorne has omitted
from this account; namely, Mr. Everybody. "What Everybody says, must be
true;" but unfortunately Everybody's information is none of the best,
and his judgment does not rise above his information. His self-
confidence, however, is enormous. He understands law better than the
lawyer, and medicine better than the physicians. He is never tired of
settling the affairs of the country, and of proposing constitutional
amendments. Is it not perfectly natural that Everybody should
understand Everybody's business as well as or better than his own? He
is continually predicting future events, and if they fail to take place
he predicts them again. He is omnipresent, but if you seek him he is
nowhere to be found,--which we may presume to be the reason why he did
not appear at the entertainment given by the Man of Fancy.

That which gives the elevated character to Raphael's faces--as in the
"Sistine Madonna" and other paintings--is not their drawing, though
that is always refined, but the expression of the eyes, which are truly
the windows of the soul. It was the same in Hawthorne's face, and may
be observed in all good portraits of him. An immutable calmness
overspread his features, but in and about his eyes there was a spring-
like mirthfulness; while down in the shadowy depth of those luminous
orbs was concealed the pathos that formed the undercurrent of his life.
So it is that high comedy, as Plato long ago observed, lies very close
to tragedy.

A well-known French writer compares English humor, in a general way, to
beer-drinking, and this is more particularly applicable to Dickens's
characters. The very name of Mark Tapley suggests ale bottles.
Thackeray's humor is of a more refined quality, but a trifle sharp and
satirical. It is, however, pure and healthful and might be compared to
Rhine-wine. Hawthorne's humor at its best is more refined than
Thackeray's, as well as of a more amiable quality, and reminds one (on
Taine's principle) of those delicate Italian wines which have very
little body, but a delightful bouquet. As a humorist, however,
Hawthorne varies in different times and places more than in any other
respect. He adapts himself to his subject; is light and playful in "The
Select Party"; takes on a more serious vein in "The Celestial
Railroad"; in his resuscitation of Byron, in the letter from a lunatic
called "P's Correspondence" he is simply sardonic; and "The Virtuoso's
Collection" has all the effect, although he does not anywhere descend
to low comedy, of a roaring farce. In "Mrs. Bull-Frog," as the title
intimates, he approaches closely to the grotesque.

In "The Virtuoso's Collection" we have the humor of impossibility.
Nothing is more common than this, but Hawthorne gives it a peculiar
value of his own. A procession of mythological objects, strange
historical relics, and the odd creations of fiction passes before our
eyes. The abruptness of their juxtaposition excites continuous laughter
in us. It would be an extremely phlegmatic person who could read it
with a serious face. Don Quixote's Rosinante, Doctor Johnson's cat,
Shelley's skylark, a live phœnix, Prospero's magic wand, the hard-
ridden Pegasus, the dove which brought the olive branch, and many
others appear in such rapid succession that the reader has no time to
take breath, or to consider what will turn up next. Like an
accomplished showman, Hawthorne enlivens the performance here and there
with original reflections on life, which are perfectly dignified, but
become humorous from contrast with their surroundings. In spite of its
comical effect, the piece has a very genteel air, for its material is
taken from that general stock of information that passes current in
cultivated families. The young man of fashion who had never heard of
Elijah, or of Poe's "Raven," would not have understood it.

In "The Hall of Fantasy," we catch some glimpses of Hawthorne's
favorite authors:

"The grand old countenance of Homer, the shrunken and decrepit form,
but vivid face, of Æsop, the dark presence of Dante, the wild Ariosto,
Rabelais's smile of deep-wrought mirth, the profound, pathetic humor of
Cervantes, the all glorious Shakespeare, Spenser, meet guest for an
allegoric structure, the severe divinity of Milton and Bunyan, molded
of the homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire--were those
that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott occupied
conspicuous pedestals."

He also adds Goethe and Swedenborg, and remarks of them:

"Were ever two men of transcendent imagination more unlike?"

It is evident that Byron was not a favorite with Hawthorne. In addition
to his severe treatment of that poet, in "P's Correspondence," he says
in "Earth's Holocaust," where he imagines the works of various authors
to be consumed in a bonfire:

"Speaking of the properties of flame, me-thought Shelley's poetry
emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day,
contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of
black vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron."

This seems like rather puritanical treatment. If there are false lines
in Byron, there are quite as many weak lines in Shelley. If sincerity
were to give out a pure flame, Byron would stand that test equal to
any. His real fault is to be found in his somewhat glaring diction,
like the _voix blanc_ in singing, and in an occasional stroke of
_persiflage_. This increases his attractiveness to youthful minds,
but to a nature like Hawthorne's anything of an exhibitory character
must always be unpleasant.

Emerson and Hawthorne only knew Goethe through the translations of
Dwight, Carlyle and Margaret Fuller, and yet his poetry made a deeper
impression on them than on Lowell and Longfellow, who read it in the
original. Hawthorne appears to have taken lessons in German while at
Brook Farm, for we find him studying a German book at the Old Manse,
with a grammar and lexicon; but, as he confesses in his diary, without
making satisfactory progress.

"The Artist of the Beautiful" is a Dantean allegory, and a poetic gem.
A young watchmaker, imbued with a spirit above his calling, neglects
the profits of his business in order to construct an artificial
butterfly,--at once the type of useless beauty and the symbol of
immortality, and he perseveres in spite of the difficulties of the
undertaking and the contemptuous opposition of his acquaintances. He
finally succeeds in making one which seems to be almost endowed with
life, but only to be informed that it is no better than a toy, and that
he has wasted his time on a thing which has no practical value. A child
(who represents the thoughtlessness of the great world) crushes the
exquisite piece of workmanship in his little hand; but the watch-maker
does not repine at this, for he realizes that after having achieved the
beautiful, in his own spirit, the outward symbol of it has
comparatively little value. The Artist of the Beautiful is Hawthorne
himself; and in this exquisite fable he has not only unfolded the
secret of all high art, but his own life-secret as well.


HAWTHORNE AND TRANSCENDENTALISM

The French and English scepticism of the eighteenth century, produced a
reaction in the more contemplative German nature, which took the form
of a strong assertion of spirit or mind as an entity in itself, and
distinct from matter. This movement was more like a national impulse
than the proselytism of a sect, but the individual in whom this
spiritual impulse of the German people manifested itself at that time
was Immanuel Kant. Without discrediting the revelations of Hebrew
tradition, he taught the doctrine that instead of looking for evidence
of a Supreme Being in the external world, we should seek him in our own
hearts; that every man could find a revelation in his own conscience,--
in the consciousness of good and evil, by which man improves his
condition on earth; that the ideas of a Supreme Being, or of
immortality and freedom of will, are inherent in the human mind, and
are not to be acquired from experience; but that, as the finite mind
cannot comprehend the infinite, we cannot know God in the same sense
that we know our own earthly fathers, or as Goethe afterwards expressed
it,---

"Who can say I know Him;
Who can say, I know Him not;"

and that it is in this aspiration for the unattainable, in this
reverence for absolute purity, wisdom and love, that the spirit of true
religion consists.

The new philosophy was named "Transcendentalism" by Kant's followers,
because it included ideas which were beyond the range of experience. It
became popular in Germany, as Platonism, to which it is closely
related, became popular in ancient Greece. It has never been accepted
in France, where scepticism still predominates, though we hear of it in
Taine and a few other writers; but in Great Britain, although the
English universities repudiated it, Transcendentalism became so
influential that Gladstone has spoken of it, in his Romanes lecture, as
the dominant philosophy of the nineteenth century. Every notable
English writer of that period, with the exception of Macaulay, Mill,
and Spencer, became largely imbued with it. In America its influence
did not extend much beyond New England, but in that section at least
its proselytes were numbered by thousands, and it effected an
intellectual revolution which has since influenced the whole country.

The Concord group of transcendentalists did not accept the teaching of
Kant in its original purity; but mixed with it a number of other
imported products, that in no way appertain to it. Thoreau was an
American _sansculotte_, a believer in the natural man; Ripley was
mainly a socialist; Margaret Fuller was one of the earliest leaders in
woman's rights; Alcott was a Neo-Platonist, a vegetarian, and a non-
resistant; while Emerson sympathized largely with Thoreau, and from his
poetic exaltation of Nature was looked upon as a pantheist by those who
were not accustomed to nice discriminations. Thus it happened that
Transcendentalism came to be associated in the public mind with any
exceptional mode or theory of life. Its best representatives in
America, like Professor Hedge of Harvard, Reverend David A. Wasson and
Doctor William T. Harris (so long Chief of the National Bureau of
Education), were much abler men than Emerson's followers, but did not
attract so much attention, simply because they lived according to the
customs of good society.

Sleepy Hollow, before it was converted into a cemetery, was one of the
most attractive sylvan resorts in the environs of Concord. It was a
sort of natural amphitheatre, a small oval plane, more than half
surrounded by a low wooded ridge; a sheltered and sequestered spot,
cool in summer, but also warm and sunny in spring, where the wild
flowers bloomed and the birds sang earlier than in other places.

There, on August 22, 1842, a notable meeting took place, between
Hawthorne, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, who came that afternoon to
enjoy the inspiration of the place, without preconcerted agreement.
Margaret Fuller was first on the ground, and Hawthorne found her seated
on the hill-side--his gravestone now overlooks the spot--reading a book
with a peculiar name, which he "did not understand, and could not
afterward recollect." Such a description could only apply to Kant's
"Critique of Pure Reason," the original fountain-head and gospel of
Transcendentalism.

It does not appear that Nathaniel Hawthorne ever studied "The Critique
of Pure Reason." His mind was wholly of the artistic order,--the most
perfect type of an artist, one might say, living at that time,--and a
scientific analysis of the mental faculties would have been as
distasteful to him as the dissection of a human body. History,
biography, fiction, did not appear to him as a logical chain of cause
and effect, but as a succession of pictures illustrating an ideal
determination of the human race. He could not even look at a group of
turkeys without seeing a dramatic situation in them. In addition to
this, as a true artist, he was possessed of a strong dislike for
everything eccentric and abnormal; he wished for symmetry in all
things, and above all in human actions; and those restless, unbalanced
spirits, who attached themselves to the transcendental movement and the
anti-slavery cause, were particularly objectionable to him. It has been
rightly affirmed that no revolutionary movement could be carried
through without the support of that ill-regulated class of persons who
are always seeking they know not what, and they have their value in the
community, like the rest of us; but Hawthorne was not a revolutionary
character, and to his mind they appeared like so many obstacles to the
peaceable enjoyment of life. His motto was, "Live and let live." There
are passages in his Concord diary in which he refers to the itinerant
transcendentalist in no very sympathetic manner.

His experience at Brook Farm may have helped to deepen this feeling.
There is no necessary connection between such an idyllic-socialistic
experiment and a belief in the direct perception of a great First
Clause; but Brook Farm was popularly supposed at that time to be an
emanation of Transcendentalism, and is still largely so considered. He
was wearied at Brook Farm by the philosophical discussions of George
Ripley and his friends, and took to walking in the country lanes, where
he could contemplate and philosophize in his own fashion,--which after
all proved to be more fruitful than theirs. Having exchanged his
interest in the West Roxbury Association for the Old Manse at Concord
(truly a poetic bargain), he wrote the most keenly humorous of his
shorter sketches, his "The Celestial Railroad," and in it represented
the dismal cavern where Bunyan located the two great enemies of true
religion, the Pope and the Pagan, as now occupied by a German giant,
the Transcendentalist, who "makes it his business to seize upon honest
travellers and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke,
mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust."

That Transcendentalism was largely associated in Hawthorne's mind with
the unnecessary discomforts and hardships of his West Roxbury life is
evident from a remark which he lets fall in "The Virtuoso's
Collection." The Virtuoso calls his attention to the seven-league boots
of childhood mythology, and Hawthorne replies, "I could show you quite
as curious a pair of cowhide boots at the transcendental community of
Brook Farm." Yet there could have been no malice in his satire, for
Mrs. Hawthorne's two sisters, Mrs. Mann and Miss Peabody, were both
transcendentalists; and so was Horace Mann himself, so far as we know
definitely in regard to his metaphysical creed. Do not we all feel at
times that the search for abstract truth is like a diet of sawdust or
Scotch mist,--a "chimera buzzing in a vacuum"?

James Russell Lowell similarly attacked Emerson in his Class Day poem,
and afterward became converted to Emerson's views through the influence
of Maria White. It is possible that a similar change took place in
Hawthorne's consciousness; although his consciousness was so profound
and his nature so reticent that what happened in the depths of it was
never indicated by more than a few bubbles at the surface. He was
emphatically an idealist, as every truly great artist must be, and
Transcendentalism was the local costume which ideality wore in
Hawthorne's time. He was a philosopher after a way of his own, and his
reflections on life and manners often have the highest value. It was
inevitable that he should feel and assimilate something from the wave
of German thought which was sweeping over England and America, and if
he did this unconsciously it was so much the better for the quality of
his art.

There are evidences of this even among his earliest sketches. In his
account of "Sunday at Home" he says: "Time--where a man lives not--what
is it but Eternity?" Does he not recognize in this condensed statement
Kant's theorem that time is a mental condition, which only exists in
man, and for man, and has no place in the external world? In fact, it
only exists by divisions of time, and it is _man_ who makes the
divisions. The rising of the sun does not constitute time; for the sun
is always rising--somewhere. The positivists and Herbert Spencer deny
this, and argue to prove that time is an external entity--independent
of man--like electricity; but Hawthorne did not agree with them. He
evidently trusted the validity of his consciousness. In that exquisite
pastoral, "The Vision at the Fountain," he says:

"We were aware of each other's presence, not by sight or sound or
touch, but by an inward consciousness. Would it not be so among the
dead?"

You have probably heard of the German who attempted to evolve a camel
out of his inner consciousness. That and similar jibes are common among
those persons of whom the Scriptures tell us that they are in the habit
of straining at gnats; but Hawthorne believed consciousness to be a
trustworthy guide. Why should he not? It was the consciousness of
_self_ that raised man above the level of the brute. This was the
rock from which Moses struck forth the fountain of everlasting life.

Again, in "Fancy's Show-Box" we meet with the following:

"Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly
tribunal, will guilty thoughts,--of which guilty deeds are no more than
shadows,--will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence
in the supreme court of eternity?"

Is this not an induction from or corollary to the preceding? If it is
not Kantian philosophy, it is certainly Goethean. Margaret Fuller was
the first American critic, if not the first of all critics, to point
out that Goethe in writing "Elective Affinities" designed to show that
an evil thought may have consequences as serious and irremediable as an
evil action--in addition to the well-known homily that evil thoughts
lead to evil actions. In his "Hall of Fantasy" Hawthorne mentions
Goethe and Swedenborg as two literary idols of the present time who may
be expected to endure through all time. Emerson makes the same
prediction in one of his poems.

In "Rappacini's Daughter" Hawthorne says: "There is something truer and
more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the
finger."

And in "The Select Party" he remarks: "To such beholders it was unreal
because they lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass
within its portals, they would have recognized the truth that the
dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become
a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their
feet, saying, 'This is solid and substantial! This may be called a
fact!'"

The essence of Transcendentalism is the assertion of the
indestructibility of spirit, that mind is more real than matter, and
the unseen than the seen. "The visible has value only," says Carlyle,
"when it is based on the invisible." No writer of the nineteenth
century affirms this more persistently than Hawthorne, and in none of
his romances is the principle so conspicuous as in "The House of the
Seven Gables." It is a sister's love which, like a cord stronger than
steel, binds together the various incidents of the story, while the
avaricious Judge Pyncheon, "with his landed estate, public honors,
offices of trust and other solid _un_realities," has after all
only succeeded in building a card castle for himself, which may be
dissipated by a single breath. Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, who
serves as a contrast to the factitious judge, is a genuine character,
and may stand for a type of the young New England liberal of 1850: a
freethinker, and so much of a transcendentalist that we suspect
Hawthorne's model for him to have been one of the younger associates of
the Brook Farm experiment. He is evidently studied from life, and
Hawthorne says of him:

"Altogether, in his culture and want of culture, in his crude, wild,
and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted
some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and
his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf;
in his faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he
lacked, the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative
of many compeers in his native land."

This is a fairly sympathetic portrait, and it largely represents the
class of young men who went to hear Emerson and supported Charles
Sumner. In the story, Holgrave achieves the reward of a veracious
nature by winning the heart of the purest and loveliest young woman in
American fiction.

If Hawthorne were still living he might object to the foregoing
argument as a misrepresentation; nor could he be blamed for this, for
Ripley, Thoreau, Alcott and other like visionary spirits have so
vitiated the significance of Transcendentalism that it ought now to be
classed among words of doubtful and uncertain meaning.

Students of German philosophy are now chiefly known as Kantists or
Hegelians, and outside of the universities they are commonly classed as
Emersonians.




CHAPTER X

FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849


In May, 1845, Paymaster Bridge found himself again on the American
coast. Meeting with Franklin Pierce in Boston, they agreed to go to
Concord together, and look into Hawthorne's affairs. Soon after
breakfast, Mrs. Hawthorne espied them coming through the gateway. She
had never met Pierce, but she recognized Bridge's tall, elegant figure,
when he waved his hat to her in the distance. Hawthorne himself was
sawing and splitting in the wood-shed, and thither she directed his
friends--to his no slight astonishment when they appeared before him.
Pierce had his arm across Hawthorne's broad shoulders when they
reappeared. There is one pleasure, indeed, which young people cannot
know, and that is, the meeting of old friends. Mrs. Hawthorne was
favorably impressed with Franklin Pierce's personality; while Horatio
Bridge danced about and acted an impromptu pantomime, making up faces
like an owl. They assured Hawthorne that something should be done to
relieve his financial embarrassment.[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 281.]

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