Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of the _Divina Commedia_ would go forward even while the country was
being torn asunder. In a sense such work was his refuge against the
storm and stress of malignant forces that troubled him. He did not like
the tumult and the shouting, and much of Longfellow is compressed into
the sonnets that preface the translation, much of the gentleness of his
evasion, and much of the finer craftsmanship of his later years.
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!
A single incursion Longfellow made into the field of Abolition
controversy, prompted perhaps by Dickens, whose “grand chapter on
slavery” in _American Notes_ he had read in London. The seven poems
were written to beguile the tedium of a sea voyage. They are unreal
enough to seem quite harmless, yet they created a decided stir on
their appearance. For a Harvard professor to express publicly even a
mild sympathy with the Abolition movement, may well have been somewhat
perilous, considering the fate of Professor Follen; and the sacred
institution may have scented a real danger in such romanticisms.
Grotesque as these academic poems were, with their burnt-cork figures,
they perhaps served to romanticize and sentimentalize the negro
for northern minds, as _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ did a decade later with
tremendous effect. Slavery had no weapon against such an attack, and
no doubt Longfellow’s contributions proved serviceable to the cause
of Abolitionism. But this one venture satisfied him, and having got
safely back to his library, he shut the door on the whole vexatious
question of slavery. He was not made for battle, and causes commanded
an unwilling allegiance. Little remained of his Puritanism save
conscience, a sense of struggle against somewhat vague and indolent
powers of evil, a pleasant melancholy that transmuted itself into
pleasant verse. He lived vicariously the lives of other poets, sharing
their emotions, repeating their thoughts, reproducing their pictures;
yet adding some individual color from his own sincere nature. Not
richly endowed, he was more than an echo. He marked the transition
from the nebulous ferment of the creative renaissance to the scholarly
culture of Brahmin Cambridge. After Longfellow came Charles Eliot
Norton in whose blameless life that culture flowered, and after that
came sterility.
Footnotes
[466] Quoted in Stanton, _Manual of American Literature_, p. 101.
Chapter II • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Skeptic
After his immersion for some months in the Utopian dreams of Brook
Farm, Miles Coverdale in _The Blithedale Romance_ discovered that he
had drifted far from reality. “No sagacious man,” he remarked, “will
long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and
progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled
system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
standpoint.”
It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk
with the conservatives, the writers of the North American Review,
the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which
had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.
In this suggestive pronouncement the intellectual position of Hawthorne
is revealed. Cool, detached, rationalistic, curiously inquisitive,
he looked out upon the ferment of the times, the clash of rival
philosophies and rival interests, only to bring them into his study
and turn upon them the light of his critical analysis. One after
another he weighed the several faiths of New England, conservative and
transcendental and radical, and ended skeptic. He was too much of a
realist to change fashions in creeds. Time, experience--he is always
remembering--have created men as we find them, and very likely only
time and experience can make them over into something different. The
conservatives would seem to have common sense on their side, for they
are seeking to retain what has hitherto been won; but the reformers
are not without justification as well, for impelled by an ardent
faith they are seeking to win new conquests. But whether that which
the conservatives defend so valiantly is worth defending, or whether
the goal towards which the reformers drive so furiously is worth the
trouble, are questions about which the rationalist may be permitted his
doubts. The universe in which he found himself was a moral universe,
Hawthorne on the whole believed; and if that were true then man’s
chief business and urgent problem was the matter of a sufficient
morality.
Radical in his intellectual processes, he could never become
greatly interested in specific radicalisms. He is often thought of
as a transcendentalist, and his association with the Peabodys and
his venture into Brook Farm might seem to lend color to such an
interpretation. Yet nothing in his intellectual sympathies marks him
as of the school. The polar conceptions of transcendentalism repelled
rather than attracted him. Political and metaphysical speculation
left him cold, and the twin revolutionary forces of the time, French
romanticism and German idealism, never deeply affected his thinking.
Amid all the flux he retained much of the older Calvinist view of
life and human destiny. Though nominally a Unitarian he did not share
Channing’s faith in the perfectibility of man. The buried voice of God
that the transcendentalists professed to have discovered in instinct,
he greatly distrusted. Man seemed to him quite as likely to turn out
to be a child of the devil as the first-born of God. Perhaps through a
long and uncertain process he may grow into something nobler than he
now is, but for the present the fact remains that the human heart, if
not desperately wicked, is at least on familiar terms with evil; too
often it is cold, selfish, malignant, and its secret promptings need
watching. Doubting the indwelling presence of the divine Over-soul,
he could find no justification for the transcendental faith in the
excellence of the universe, out of which came the genial optimism
of the Emersonians. Too pronounced a rationalist to comprehend the
mysticism that lurked in the heart of the transcendental faith, he
remained cold to the revolutionary criticism that was eager to pull
down the old temples to make room for nobler. Eager souls, mystics and
revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with
their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret
places of the heart, Utopia is only the shadow of a dream. And so while
the Concord thinkers were proclaiming man to be the indubitable child
of God, Hawthorne was critically examining the question of evil as
it appeared in the light of his own experience. It was the central,
fascinating problem of his intellectual life, and in pursuit of a
solution he probed curiously into the hidden, furtive recesses of the
soul.
The isolation in which he chose to brood over the problem, seeking to
take the solution by surprise in unguarded moments, was the natural
consequence of his temperament and his habits. He lived singularly
remote from common interests, singularly self-sufficient. Both as
thinker and artist he suffered from his self-imposed isolation.
The twelve years of his apprenticeship, closely immured and given
over to spinning cobwebs about the old Puritan rafters, drawing the
stuff of his romance out of his own bowels, may have facilitated the
development of technic, but it laid narrow limitations on the matter
of his art. Intellectually unlocalized in his Yankee world, he was
the romancer of a dead but unforgotten past, at home only where the
New England conscience brooded over sin--subduing the old nightmares
to less terrifying dreams, intruding his doubts into old dogmas yet
never emerging from the old shadows. Although he was a child of the
liberation and had broken the web that Calvinism had woven about the
mind of New England, he did not choose to quit the world from whose
bondage he had freed himself. He would examine the old problem in a
new light. In rejecting Calvinism as a religion, he retained it as a
background for his inquisitive probing. It appealed to his imagination
after his reason had rejected its dogmas; it determined his art after
it had ceased to command his loyalty. In consequence, all his life
Hawthorne dwelt between worlds. Though at times he tried to establish
contact with Yankee reality, though he essayed to establish an
intellectual _rapport_ with his generation, he never quite succeeded,
but remained to the last isolated, a frequenter of the twilight.
Only in a narrow and very special sense was Hawthorne a romantic.
With the romance of love and adventure he was never concerned; what
interested him was the romance of ethics--the distortions of the soul
under the tyranny of a diseased imagination. How little he shares in
common with other romantics is revealed in his detachment from his
native Salem. The place was not lacking in picturesque charm, present
and past. During the long years he spent in his Salem study, the city
was rising to the zenith of its brisk sea life, with its ships in the
China trade, its venturesome fisheries, its echoes of the whaling
industry at Nantucket. Materials for romance were lying all about
the Salem wharves--such a show of canvas and spars and rigging, such
briny smells, such suggestions of far voyages to outlandish places,
such strange figures slipping in from the ends of the earth--such
romantic promptings in short as would have intoxicated the imagination
of Herman Melville, and that Joseph Hergesheimer wove into the rich
tapestries of _Java Head_. A romantic could scarcely have found
in America a setting better calculated to awaken a sense of brave
adventure than in old Salem; yet for three years Hawthorne sat in the
Custom House, with such materials all about him, and then turned away
to the seventeenth century to write of Hester Prynne. For a man gifted
with imagination to fail to lift his eyes to the horizon beyond which
the hurrying ships were seeking strange markets, and instead to turn
them in upon a shadowy world of half unreal characters; to overlook
the motley picturesque in the foreground of the actual, in order to
brood over an old adultery and twist it into theological sin, can be
explained only on the ground that Hawthorne was concerned with ethical
rather than romantic values, that he was interested rather in the
problem of evil than in the trappings of romance. Aloofness of time and