Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

Page 20 text:

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

Page 19 text:

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

Page 21 text:

THE COLLEGE RECORD. 19 it. He says in this connection : I have spent so much of my time alone that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of; and again: The Twice Told Tales have the tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade. Instead of passion there is sentiment ; whether from lack of power or from an uncontrollable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness: the merriest man could hardly laugh at his broadest humor ; the tenderest woman will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. All these sharp criticisms from his own pen are true because he feels his lack of sympa- thy with the real world which comes only from an intelligent contact with humanity. He says in a letter to Lonfellow at a time of bereavement : Trouble is the next best thing to en- joyment, and there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. Hawthorne's Puritan traits are revealed again in his tenden- dency to spiritualize, often to humanize, everything he touched. To the Puritan the spirit life was the real life, and accordingly Hawthorne must penetrate the surface of all things, and find there ever the spiritual meaning. The things of the spirit and the mysteries thereof were his inherited world. Here he must work if anywhere; here he did work, but he would have fallen short of his inheritance if he had worked only as an artist. Hawthorne, though never a theo- logian, was always a preacher. With the highest art he tells his stories, and weaves into them the moral so skillfully that no exposition is needed to make the lesson clear. But Haw- thorne fears lest the moral escape his audience, so in a para- graph or two at the end of the story he expounds his moral in direct violation of art ; but this Violation of his art is so es- sential to his Puritan nature that we forgive him for imposing on our intelligence, and smile at the naive way in which the preacher reveals himself. Since Hawthorne was a soul student and a preacher from necessity, from necessity also he makes sin the prevailing theme of his romances, and of many of the tales. His Calvin- ism is prominent in the extracts that follow. In Fancy's Show Box he says: Man must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest, since though his hands be clean, his heart