Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (858 page)

One sees in his letters of this time [Footnote: American Note-Books, Vol. I.] how the life wore upon him; and his journal apparently ceased during the whole bucolic experience. How joyously his mind begins to disport itself again with fancies, the moment he leaves the association, even temporarily! And in 1842, as soon as he is fairly quit of it, the old darkling or waywardly gleaming stream of thought and imagination flows freshly, untamably forward. Hawthorne remained with the Brook Farm community nearly a twelvemonth, a small part of which time was spent in Boston. Some of the letters which his sisters wrote him show a delightful solicitude reigning at home, during the period of his experiment.

“What is the use,” says one, “of burning your brains out in the sun, if you can do anything better with them?… I am bent upon coming to see you, this summer. Do not you remember how we used to go a-fishing together in Raymond? Your mention of wild flowers and pickerel has given me a longing for the woods and waters again.”

Then, in August,

“C —
 
— A —
 
— ,” writes his sister Louisa, “told me the other day that he heard you were to do the travelling in Europe for the community.”

This design, if it existed, might well have found a place in the Dialogues of the Unborn which Hawthorne once meant to write; for this was his only summer at Brook Farm. “A summer of toil, of interest, of something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and there became a rich experience,” he writes, in “Blithedale.” “I found myself looking forward to years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system.” This was, in fact, his attitude; for, after passing the winter at the farm as a boarder, and then absenting himself a little while, he returned in the spring to look over the ground and perhaps select a house-site, just before his marriage, but came to an adverse decision. This no doubt accorded with perceptions which he was not called upon to make public; but because he was a writer of fiction there seems to have arisen a tacit agreement, in some quarters, to call him insincere in his connection with this socialistic enterprise. He had not much to gain by leaving the community; for he had put into its treasury a thousand dollars, about the whole of his savings from the custom-house stipend, and had next to nothing to establish a home with elsewhere, while a niche in the temple of the reformers would have cost him nothing but labor. The length of his stay was by no means uncommonly short, for there was always a transient contingent at Brook Farm, many of whom remained but a few weeks. A devoted but not a wealthy disciple, who had given six thousand dollars for the building of the Pilgrim House, and hoped to end his days within it, retired forever after a very short sojourn, not dissuaded from the theory, but convinced that the practical application was foredoomed to disaster. And, in truth, though a manful effort was made, with good pecuniary success for a time, ten years brought the final hour of failure to this millennial plan.

Very few people who were at Brook Farm seem to have known or even to have seen Hawthorne there, though he was elected chairman of the Finance Committee just before leaving, and I am told that his handsome presence, his quiet sympathy, his literary reputation, and his hearty participation in labor commanded a kind of reverence from some of the members. Next to his friend George P. Bradford, one of the workers and teachers in the community, his most frequent associates were a certain Rev. Warren Burton, author of a curious little book called “Scenery-Shower,” designed to develop a proper taste for landscape; and one Frank Farley, who had been a pioneer in the West, a man of singular experiences and of an original turn, who was subject to mental derangement at times. The latter visited him at the Old Manse, afterward, when Hawthorne was alone there, and entered actively into his makeshift housekeeping.

President Pierce, on one occasion, speaking to an acquaintance about Hawthorne, said: “He is enthusiastic when he speaks of the aims and self-sacrifice of some of the Brook Farm people; but when I questioned him whether he would like to live and die in a community like that, he confessed he was not suited to it, but said he had learned a great deal from it. 'What, for instance?' 'Why, marketing, for one thing. I didn't know anything about it practically, and I rode into Boston once or twice with the men who took in things to sell, and saw how it was done.'“ The things of deepest moment which he learned were not to be stated fully in conversation; but I suppose readers would draw the same inference from this whimsical climax of Hawthorne's as that which has been found in “The Blithedale Romance”; namely, that he looked on his socialistic life as the merest jesting matter. Such, I think, is the general opinion; and a socialistic writer, Mr. Noyes, of the Oneida Community, has indignantly cried out against the book, as a “poetico-sneering romance.” This study of human character, which would keep its value in any state of society that preserved its reflective faculty intact and sane, to be belittled to the record of a brief experiment! Hawthorne indeed, speaking in the prefatory third person of his own aim, says: “His whole treatment of the affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance; nor does he put forward the slightest pretensions to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism.” And though he has told the story autobiographically, it is through a character whom we ought by no means to identify with Hawthorne in his whole mood. I have taken the liberty of applying to Hawthorne's own experience two passages from Coverdale's account, because they picture something known to be the case; and a careful sympathy will find no difficulty in distinguishing how much is real and how much assumed. Coverdale, being merely the medium for impressions of the other characters, is necessarily light and diaphanous, and Hawthorne, finding it more convenient, and an advantage to the lifelikeness of the story, does not attempt to hold him up in the air all the time, but lets him down now and then, and assumes the part himself. The allusions to the community scheme are few, and most of them are in the deepest way sympathetic. Precisely because the hopes of the socialists were so unduly high, he values them and still is glad of them, though they have fallen to ruin. “In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error.” Where is the sneer concealed in this serious and comprehensive utterance? There is a class of two-pronged minds, which seize a pair of facts eagerly, and let the truth drop out of sight between them. For these it is enough that Hawthorne made some use of his Brook Farm memories in a romance, and then wrote that romance in the first person, with a few dashes of humor.

Another critic, acting on a conventional idea as to Hawthorne's “cold, self-removed observation,” quotes to his disadvantage this paragraph in a letter from Brook Farm: “Nothing here is settled…. My mind will not be abstracted. I must observe and think and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter. Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set seriously about literary occupation for the present.” This is offered as showing that Hawthorne went to the community — unconsciously, admits our critic, but still in obedience to some curious, chilly “dictate of his nature” — for the simple purpose of getting fresh impressions, to work up into fiction. But no one joined the society expecting to give up his entire individuality, and it was a special part of the design that each should take such share of the labor as was for his own and the general good, and follow his own tastes entirely as to ideal pursuits. A singular prerogative this, which every one who writes about Hawthorne lays claim to, that he may be construed as a man who, at bottom, had no other motive in life than to make himself uneasy by withdrawing from hearty communion with people, in order to pry upon them intellectually! He speaks of “that quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other lives, and to endeavor —
by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions
, by taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with the companions God had assigned me — to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves”; and this is cited as evidence of “his cold inquisitiveness, his incredulity, his determination to worm out the inmost secrets of all associated with him.” Such distortion is amazing. The few poets who search constantly for truth are certainly impelled to get at the inmost of everything. But what, in Heaven's name, is the motive? Does any one seriously suppose it to be for the amusement of making stories out of it? The holding up to one's self the stern and secret realities of life is no such pleasing pursuit. These men are driven to it by the divine impulse which has made them seers and recorders.

As for Hawthorne, he hoped and loved and planned with the same rich human faith that fills the heart of every manly genius; and if discouraging truth made him suffer, it was all the more because his ideals — and at first his trust in their realization — were so generous and so high. Two of his observations as to Brook Farm, transferred to the “The Blithedale Romance,” show the wisdom on which his withdrawal was based. The first relates to himself: “No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.” He had too much imagination to feel safe in giving free rein to it, in a special direction of theoretic conduct; he also remembered that, as the old system of things was full of error, it was possible that a new one might become so in new ways, unless watched. The second observation touches the real weakness of the Brook Farm institution: “It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that,
as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility rather than new brotherhood.
” And, in fact, the real good which Mr. Ripley's attempt did, was to implant the co-operative idea in the minds of men who have gone out into the world to effect its gradual application on a grander scale. It is by introducing it into one branch of social energy after another that the regenerative agency of to-day can alone be made effectual. The leaders of that community have been broad-minded, and recognize this truth. None of them, however, have ever taken the trouble to formulate it as Hawthorne did, on perceiving it some years in advance.

The jocose tone, it maybe added, seems to have been a characteristic part of the Brook Farm experiment, despite the sober earnest and rapt enthusiasm that accompanied it. The members had their laughing allusions, and talked — in a strain of self-ridicule precisely similar to Coverdale's — of having bands of music to play for the field-laborers, who should plough in tune. This merely proves that they were people who kept their wits whole, and had the humor that comes with refinement; while it illustrates by the way the naturalness of the tone Hawthorne has given to Coverdale.

The Priscilla of Blithedale was evidently founded upon the little seamstress whom he describes in the Note-Books as coming out to the farm, and Old Moodie's spectre can be discerned in a brief memorandum of a man seen (at Parker's old bar-room in Court Square) in 1850. It has been thought that Zenobia was drawn from Margaret Fuller, or from a lady at Brook Farm, or perhaps from both: a gentleman who was there says that he traces in her a partial likeness to several women. It is as well to remember that Hawthorne distinctly negatived the idea that he wrote with any one that he knew before his mind; and he illustrated it, to one of his most intimate friends, by saying that sometimes in the course of composition it would suddenly occur to him, that the character he was describing resembled in some point one or more persons of his acquaintance. Thus, I suppose that when the character of Priscilla had developed itself in his imagination, he found he could give her a greater reality by associating her with the seamstress alluded to; and that the plaintive old man at Parker's offered himself as a good figure to prop up the web-work of pure invention which was the history of Zenobia's and Priscilla's father. There is a conviction in the minds of all readers, dearer to them than truth, that novelists simply sit down and describe their own acquaintances, using a few clumsy disguises to make the thing tolerable. When they do take a hint from real persons the character becomes quite a different thing to them from the actual prototype. It was not even so definite as this with Hawthorne. Yet no doubt, his own atmosphere being peculiar, the contrast between that and the atmosphere of those he met stimulated his imagination; so that, without his actually seeing a given trait in another person, the meeting might have the effect of
suggesting
it. Then he would brood over this suggestion till it became a reality, a person, to his mind; and thus his characters were conceived independently in a region somewhere between himself and the people who had awakened speculation in his mind.

He had a very sure instinct as to when a piece of reality might be transferred to his fiction with advantage. Mr. Curtis has told the story of a young woman of Concord, a farmer's daughter, who had had her aspirations roused by education until the conflict between these and the hard and barren life she was born to, made her thoroughly miserable and morbid; and one summer's evening she sought relief in the quiet, homely stream that flowed by the Old Manse, and found the end of earthly troubles in its oozy depths. Hawthorne was roused by Curtis himself coming beneath his window (precisely as Coverdale comes to summon Hollingsworth), and with one other they went out on the river, to find the poor girl's body. “The man,” writes his friend, “whom the villagers had only seen at morning as a musing spectre in the garden, now appeared among them at night to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service.”