Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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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

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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

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20 THE COLLEGE RECORD. has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity — imaginity. Father Hooper says: When man does not vain- ly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin, then deem me a monster for the sym- bol beneath which I have lived and died. Hooked, and lo! every visage a Black veil! It seems to me there is no chasm nor any hideous emptiness under our feet except what the evil in us digs. It is a terrible thought that an individ- ual wrong doing melts us into the great mass of human crime and makes us who dreamed only of our own little separate sin — makes us guilty of the whole. These few quotations show how true Hawthorne was to his Puritan training, yet he had no love for his ancestors, much less for their religion as they taught it. It was with shame that he contemplated the cruelties perpetrated by them in the name of religion, and he thanked God heartily that every day removed him a little far- ther from his hard, unloving forefathers. He was the Puritan preacher from necessity not from choice, the unwilling repre- sentative of the seventeenth century in American literary art of the nineteenth. In the romances he has ample space in which to work over his problems in the varying but inevitable effects of sin; he sometimes only states his problem through the story, some- times does hardly more than suggest it, but he never works it out to a satisfactory result. He often seems as much baffled by the mysteries of sin as his reader is. In the Blithedale Romance, his cheeriest long story, we know that Zenobia's life has been shadowed by sin, though what the sin was, or what led to it, we are left to guess. In the Marble Faun some terrible crime has darkened the life of Miriam, yet here Haw- thorne but faintly suggests what the sin has been ; his real problem is not with the sin itself, but with the effects of sin — sin as a force in the soul development of the sinner. Haw- thorne fails to solve the problem because such problems can never be solved in this life. The scarlet letter, more than any of his other works, reveals Hawthorne the Puritan. The theme goes back in time to the old ny days, when Calvinism was strongest in its harsh, unloving, unforgiving ideals. As a hoy, and during his years of seclusion,