Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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THE COLLEGE RECORD. 17 sensitive, fanciful imagination from his mother. The life of the spirit predominated over the world and the flesh in this unique American ; the mysteries of the spirit land formed a never failing source of material for his imagination to work on ; the Puritan conscience was his by birthright. Unlike his ancestors, he was not especially troubled by his own sins, but, like them, conscience was the dominant factor in his life. Hawthorne reveals his Puritan conscience in many ways. It made him a searching critic of all he wiote ; he burned much that fell short of his own severe standards, and through- out his life conscience drove him to constant effort to over- come his imperfections in style. The imaginative faculty in Hawthorne was strong, and there must have been frequent temptations for him to give it loose vein in his alluring field of work, but here, again, his New England conscience served as a balance wheel, and even in his most fanciful sketches we find so just a proportion of the matter of fact that we never question the consistency of kis tales. We sometimes wonder if his people are spirits, sprights, or demons, but we are sure to conclude that, after all, they are flesh and blood, essentially like ourselves. Conscience and his wholesome New England temperament kept him always on the sane side of the mysteries he chose to investigate. He often approaches the borderland of gloom, and sometimes penetrates even to a morbid interior, but so rarely is he unwholesome in his suggestions that we may, with perfect safety, place his books in the hands of young people, fearing naught of evil influences from the pen of Hawthorne. Hawthorne's religion was Puritanical only in essentials. His faith was simple and trusting. He believed in the verities of the soul, and that these ultimately would bring about the betterment of the world in all its possibilities. Doubts never troubled him, and though he loved mysteries he cared as little for solving them in the religions world as elsewhere. A few extracts will illustrate: What is good and true will harden into facts while error melts away and vanishes. God who knows us will not leave us in our toilsome and doubtful march, either to wander in infinite uncertainty or to perish by the way. The wisest people and the best keep a steadfast faith

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16 THE COLLEGE RECORD. may insist on liberty of thought, but not on liberty to believe the wrong, and to the Puritan everything opposed to his creed was wrong; that the church is made up of regenerate persons, and only those are regenerate who prove their faith by holy living; and that all believers have equal rights before God. To these great essential principles were added others of lesser value. The hard doctrine of election was emphasized ; church and State were made one, and legislation extended even to the details of private life; pleasure of all kinds was condemned ; it was a sin to laugh, it was wicked to be happy. The spirit life of the Puritan was so real to him that with his vivid imagination he could people the world with ghosts or witches as the time required, but, mo st of all, to him God was a con- stant presence, ever just, but never loving ; ever angry, ever ready to hurl the unrepentant sinner into an eternal and literal lake of fire. Harsh, austere, unattractive, intolerant, superstitious, yet mighty in its compelling power — such was the religion for many generations of the Puritan family that gave us Nathaniel Hawthorne. But Time, in his accustomed leisurely way of doing things, wrought changes in the Calvinism of our New England fore- fathers. The rugged nature of the Puritan gradually yielded to gentler influences. The voice of God came to be heard not only in the individual conscience, but in the songs of birds and in the murmur of the brooks and the breezes ; the Puri- tan imagination learned to see God in the delicate blossom and in the noble mountain, as well as in the terrible calamities that overtake mankind from time to time; the intolerance of the seventeenth century was refined into the beautiful desire to call all men brothers ; the Puritan conscience slowly but sure- ly gave itself over to German philosophy, and the Puritan of the old Colony days stands transformed into the New England idealist of the nineteenth century. Into this somewhat rarified transcendental atmosphere was Hawthorne bom. He was strangely a part of the world into whi h be had come, but more strangely still a part of the Puritan world whence he was descended. He inherited many ot the good traits of his ancestors with few of their failings ; bis rugged characteristics came from his father, his delicate,

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18 THE COLLEGE RECORD. that the progress of mankind is onward and upward, and that the toil and anguish of the path serve to wear away the im- perfections of the immortal pilgrim, and will be felt no more when they have done their office. Hawthorne was never aggressive, never controversial in his religious life ; theology as such made no appeal to him, and in this he belongs rather to the period of which he was a part than to the Colonial times. Being the Puiitan that he was, Hawthorne must take for his special subject of study the soul. For his work in this province he had an unusual course of training. When only a babe Hawthorne's father died, leaving the mother, a delicate, sensitive woman, so crushed with grief that for the remainder of her life she shut herself and, so far as possible, her family steadfastly from the world. The effect of this early home training was to make of Nathaniel a recluse. Seclusion be- came with him a habit from wh ich not even his four years in Bowdoin could release him. For twelve years after leaving college he shut himself in his own room in the Salem home, and here he read and wrote, but, more than all, studied his own soul, and, therefore, the great All-Soul of humanity. It is the prerogative of genius to be a law unto itself, and what would have been ruinous to most young men just out of col- lege became for Hawthorne a graduate course in literary train- ing. He says of these years: Solitude kept the dew of youth fresh. Had I gone sooner into the world, I should have grown hard and callous. Again: If there be a faculty which I possess more perfectly than most men, it is that of throwing myself mentally into situations foreign to my own, and detecting the circumstances of each. I have a spirit- ual sense of mankind, discovering what is hidden from the wisest ; my glance comprehends the world, and penetrates the breast of the solitary man. I think better of the world than formerly, more generously of its virtues, more mercifully of its faults, with a higher estimate of its present happiness, and brighter hopes of its destiny. This penetrative faculty could have been developed in no other way so well as in the twelve years of seclusion. But Hawthorne realized, too, the disadvantages of his cursed habit of solitude, as he called