Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)

by Hawthorne, Nathaniel

  ”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 tho
se 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.]

  All those whose attention Hawthorne attracted out of the rush and hurry of the world were sure to become interested in his welfare. O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review, had already exerted himself in Hawthorne's behalf; but President Polk evidently did not know who Hawthorne was, so that O'Sullivan was obliged to have a puff inserted in his review for the President's better information. George Bancroft was now in the Cabinet, and could easily have obtained a lucrative post for Hawthorne, but it is plain that Bancroft was not over-friendly to him and that Hawthorne was fully aware of this. Hawthorne had suggested the Salem postmastership, but when O'Sullivan mentioned this, Bancroft objected on the ground that the present incumbent was too good a man to be displaced, and proposed the consulates of Genoa and Marseilles, two deplorable positions and quite out of the question for Hawthorne, in the condition of his family at that time. Perhaps it would have been better for him in a material sense, if he had accepted the invitation to dine with Margaret Fuller.

  The summer wore away, but nothing was acomplished; and late in the autumn Hawthorne left the Old Manse to return to his Uncle Robert Manning's house in Salem, where he could always count on a warm welcome. There he spent the winter with his wife and child, until suddenly, in March, 1846, he was appointed Surveyor of the Port, or, as it is now more properly called, Collector of Customs.

  This was, in truth, worth waiting for. The salary was not large, but it was a dignified position and allowed Hawthorne sufficient leisure for other pursuits, — the leisure of the merchant or banker. Salem had already begun to lose its foreign trade, and for days together it sometimes happened that there was nothing to do. Hawthorne's chief business was to prevent the government from being cheated, either by the importers or by his own subordinates; and it required a pretty sharp eye to do this. All the appointments, even to his own clerks, were made by outside politicians, and when a reduction of employees was necessary, Hawthorne consulted with the local Democratic Committee, and followed their advice. Such a method was not to the advantage of the public service, but it saved Hawthorne from an annoying responsibility. His strictness and impartiality, however, soon brought him into conflict with his more self-important subordinates, who were by no means accustomed to exactness in their dealings, and this finally produced a good deal of official unpleasantness; and the unfavorable reports which were afterward circulated concerning Hawthorne's life during this period, probably originated in that quarter.

  [Illustration: THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM, MASS., WHERE HAWTHORNE WAS

  EMPLOYED AS SURVEYOR OF THE FORT OF SALEM, AT THE TIME OF HIS WRITING

  “THE SCARLET LETTER”]

  All the poetry that Hawthorne could extract from his occupation at the Custom House is to be found in his preface to “The Scarlet Letter,” but he withholds from us the prosaic side of it, — as he well might. At times he comes close to caricature, especially in his descriptions of “those venerable incumbents who hibernated durin
g the winter season, and then crawled out during the warm days of spring to draw their pay and perform those pretended duties, for which they were engaged.” There were formerly large numbers of moss-grown loafers in the government service, with whiskey-reddened noses and greasy old clothing, who would sun themselves on the door-steps, and tell anecdotes of General Jackson, Senator Benton, and other popular heroes, with whom they would intimate a good acquaintance at some remote period of their lives. If removed from office, they were quite as likely to turn up in a neighboring jail as in any other location. This is no satire, but serious truth; and instances of it can be given.

  Hawthorne's life during the next three years was essentially domestic. In June, 1846, his son Julian was born — a remarkably vigorous baby — at Doctor Peabody's house in West Street, Boston; Mrs. Hawthorne wisely preferring to be with her own mother during her confinement. [Footnote: At the age of thirty-five, Julian resembled his father so closely that Nathaniel Hawthorne's old friends were sometimes startled by him, as if they had seen an apparition. He was, however, of a stouter build, and his eyes were different.] With two small children on her hands, Mrs. Hawthorne had slight opportunity to enjoy general society, fashionable or otherwise. Rebecca Manning says, however:

  “Neither Hawthorne nor his wife could be said to be 'in society' in the technical sense. When the Peabody family lived in Salem, they were, I have been told, somewhat straitened pecuniarily. After Hawthorne's marriage, I think I remember hearing of his wife going to parties and dinners occasionally. Dr. Loring's wife was her cousin. Other friends were the Misses Howes, one of whom is now Mrs. Cabot of Boston. Mrs. Foote, who was a daughter of Judge White, was a friend, and I remember some Silsbees who were also her friends. Hawthorne's wife knew how to cultivate her friends and make the most of them far better than either Hawthorne or his sisters did. I have been told that when Hawthorne was a young man, before his marriage, if he had chosen to enter Salem's 'first circle' he would have been welcome there.”