Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
place served to isolate the problem, stripping away the wrappings of
the physical, delocalizing it, transmuting the individual act into the
universal. Thus isolated, Hester’s sin becomes a symbol of that ancient
evil which forever waylays human life and by strange perversions
brings havoc to our hopes--the greatest havoc to him whose heart, like
Chillingsworth’s, is cold, selfish, malignant.
This temperamental aloofness from objective reality was both the
strength and the weakness of Hawthorne’s art. In choosing to follow
the way of the inner life he was true to his Puritan breeding. The
perpetual turning-in of the mind upon itself, the long introspective
brooding over human motives, came naturally to one who lived in the
shadow of a Puritan past. In their anxious concern over sin the
Puritans had become in some measure psychologists; how else could
the secret impulses of the soul be probed and its dark workings laid
bare? Hawthorne was only doing what Jonathan Edwards before him had
done in his psychological clinic of the Great Awakening--examining
the reactions of sin on conscience and character. From this comes the
simplicity of his theme and the compelling unity of his handling. To be
sure it is pathological phenomena that he deals with, as the phenomena
that Edwards dealt with in his _Narrative of the Surprizing Work of
God_, were pathological; and like Edwards, Hawthorne is led into
insubstantial and tenuous regions where he breathes with difficulty.
The substantial world of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew,
Hawthorne seems scarcely to have been aware of; he created instead
his own Puritanism, fantastic and unreal. He was forever dealing
with shadows, and he knew that he was dealing with shadows, and this
consciousness was a perennial source of doubt and uncertainty that
bred self-distrust. In setting himself the task of dramatizing sin
rather than sinners, of creating romance out of the problem of evil,
he encountered difficulties that oppressed him. The well-springs of
his imagination were constantly running dry and he must wait till they
filled again slowly. Hence the “development of his art is towards
ever greater elaboration of scantier and scantier materials, until
the joy of the whole becomes lost at last in the milder pleasures of
detail.”[467]
From the grave difficulties inherent in his theme came the inveterate
habit of sliding into symbolism and allegory--from this and from
the narrowness of his emotional life and the restrictions of
his sympathies. The cold thin atmosphere of his work, one comes
increasingly to feel, was due not alone or chiefly to the severity
of his artistic restraint that forbade all rioting of the sensuous
imagination; it was due rather to a lack of nourishment, to a poverty
of ideas and sensuous imagery. His inveterate skepticism robbed him of
much, but his inhibitions robbed him of more. A romantic uninterested
in adventure and afraid of sex is likely to become somewhat graveled
for matter. Like the Pyncheon fowls, Hawthorne’s imagination had
suffered from too long inbreeding; it had grown anemic, and every grain
of fancy is clucked over and picked at and made much of. Once an idea
comes into his head he is loath to let it go, but he must turn it about
curiously and examine it from every angle. The striking chapter in
_The House of the Seven Gables_, where the death of Judge Pyncheon is
played upon so persistently, is only an extreme example of his habitual
method. The tongues that wagged over the minister’s black veil were no
more inquisitive and tireless than Hawthorne’s when his imagination
is fired by a vivid image. He will not let it go till it is sucked as
dry as last year’s cider cask. It is the way of one to whom ideas are
few and precious. Knowing how little is in the bottle he will linger
out the flavor of every drop. Hence his fondness for symbolism, and
hence his frequent lapse into allegory when imagination grows dull.
Because Hawthorne was an artist he was saved from the shipwreck that
such a method might seem to invite; yet perhaps it is not unreasonable
to suggest that he was an artist for the reason that only through the
mastery of a refined technic could his scanty stock of ideas make any
show at all.
The intellectual poverty that resulted from his long immuring himself
in a void is sufficiently revealed in his _American Note-Books_.
In the somewhat tedious volume covering the eighteen years between
1835 and 1853--the most vigorous years of the renaissance--there
is no suggestion of interest in the creative ideas of the time, in
metaphysics or politics or economics or humanitarianism. It is the
occasional record of one who lived an unintellectual life, and it
makes but a paltry showing when set beside the journals of Emerson
for the same years. Few books are referred to; systems of thought lie
beyond his ken. Compared with the thinkers and scholars of the time he
is only an idler lying in wait for such casual suggestions as he may
turn into stories. Almost childish is his delight in marvels. There is
something of the spirit of Cotton Mather in his persistent recording of
the gruesome and fantastic, in the hope that they will open a quarry
for his art. In the year that Emerson wrote _Nature_, Hawthorne set
down the following amongst some dozens of similar suggestions: “A
snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen to
thirty-five years, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some
other evil passion.” The _Note-Books_, of course, are very inadequate
records of his life, and yet that a mind should lie in wait for such
grotesqueries, and treasure them, offers food for speculation. After
his marriage they are much less frequent and his jottings become more
normal--a change which the Freudians, no doubt, would be ready enough
to explain.
The one great adventure of Hawthorne’s life was the plunge into Brook
Farm Utopianism, a plunge that only proved the waters colder and less
hospitable than he had hoped. It was a curious adventure for one of
his temperament to engage in, and his eventual disillusion might
have been foretold. Perhaps it may be explained as reaction from his
long isolation. The glowing enthusiasms of the times must often have
tempted him to leave his narrow walls, and share the intellectual and
emotional stimulus that others professed to discover in the work of
making society over. Whatever the explanation the venture turned out
to be a failure. His skepticism followed him there and came to later
expression in _The Blithedale Romance_, a work as thin and unreal as
anything he ever did. It is worse. There is in its pages more than a
hint of ill humor that colors his interpretation of the Fourieristic
stage of the experiment, and slips out in his portraiture of the
major characters. Hollingsworth both fascinates and repels him. A
dramatization of the intransigent spirit of reform, his single-minded
zeal for righteousness, is subtly fused with an intolerant egotism
that destroys Zenobia, cows Priscilla, and wrecks the venture. Perhaps
Albert Brisbane may have been in the background of Hawthorne’s mind
when he drew Hollingsworth, for it was Brisbane who influenced the
change he seems to have resented; perhaps Garrison may have served to
fill out the picture. Whoever it was, the figure of Hollingsworth is
Hawthorne’s reply to the summons of the social conscience of the times,
done by a critic whose insistent skepticism will not shut its eyes, but
discovers under a new masquerade the ancient evil of a cold imperious
heart. Seventeen years before he wrote _The Blithedale Romance_, he had
jotted down in his _Note-Book_ the conception out of which came the
later portrait:
A sketch to be given of a modern reformer,--a type of the extreme
doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and other such
topics. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently,
and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors
are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a
mad-house, whence he has escaped. Much may be made of the idea.
(_American Note-Books_, pp. 20-21.)
Hawthorne’s interpretation of Margaret Fuller is not so easily
explained. Perhaps it came out of a subconscious personal spleen. Her
rich paganism may well have disturbed a nature so reticent as his,
so restrained by certain Puritan inhibitions. In an early sketch he
commented on the unfitness of authorship for women, on the ground
that “there is a delicacy ... that perceives, or fancies, a sort
of impropriety in the display of woman’s natal mind to the gaze
of the world, with indications by which its inmost secrets may be
searched out” (quoted by Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the
Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne”). Margaret’s frankness in displaying
her natal mind to the gaze of the world, her bold discussion of
prohibited subjects like prostitution, could not fail to rub across
Hawthorne’s deepest prejudices. She was too vigorous and outspoken,
too consciously endowed with sex, too frankly feminist, not to have
ruffled his instinctive squeamishness. It was not her radical feminism
in the abstract that offended him, if he may be trusted; but certainly
in the concrete. A sexless feminism would not greatly disturb a mind
tolerantly familiar with the current radicalisms; but the frank
avowal of sex touched a sensitive nerve. It offended certain latent
Puritanisms in him. He was fascinated by Zenobia and yet afraid of
her--or of himself; so his hero falls in love with the anemic and
witless Priscilla. How characteristic of a mind long fed on symbols, to
turn away from the wealth of reality and prefer a shadow!
After Brook Farm came no further experiments in the unsatisfactory
business of a _rapprochement_ with his generation. His marriage with
Sophia Peabody brought with it the prosaic duties of providing for a
family, and he had no leisure to play with social reform. Abolitionism
he would have none of, nor perfectionism, nor Jacksonianism--the
futility of such things became for him a fixed idea. That he once
had the courage to make his plunge he seems to have rejoiced over:
“Whatever else I may repent of,” Miles Coverdale wrote, “let it be
reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and
force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny,--yes!--and
to do what in me lay for their accomplishment.” Yet the truer Hawthorne
is to be found in the judgments set down in the _Note-Book_: “It is my
opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap,
or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.”
“Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it
without becoming proportionably brutified.” The man who wrote that had
much to learn about life and society, much that he might have learned
from Thoreau. But Hawthorne never grappled with economics as Thoreau
did, and he learned no more from him than from Melville, or from
Emerson, or from any of the books he read by the wise of other days.
Self-sufficient he remained to the last, hard-headed and practical,
yet missing many a deeper truth that more receptive minds discover.
He was traveling the path that leads to sterility, and the lifelong
business of playing Paul Pry to the secrets of the conscience brought
him at last to the comment, “Taking no root I soon weary of any soil in
which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes
feel, or conceive of, as regards this earthly life.” He was the extreme
and finest expression of the refined alienation from reality that in
the end palsied the creative mind of New England. Having consumed his
fancies, what remained to feed on?
Footnotes
[467] Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel