Selected Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne Read Free Book Online

only faintly disguised reference to Ripley’s aggressively transcendental Specimens of Modern Standard Literature (1838), just before lamenting that, under one name or another, “the Transcendentalists have their share in all the current literature in the world.” More internally still, the tale which follows—a painful faith-test for an elaborately misprepared Giovanni Guasconti—deploys Ripley’s own logic of faith and evidence, in the very late-Renaissance world where modern skepticism and fideism were certifiably twin-born. The full import of the Paduan setting has required a rare mix of scholarly patience and readerly acumen fully to reconstruct; but the narrator’s tendentious emphasis on Giovanni’s failure to regard his intuitive “better evidence” plainly recalls the public battle over “miracles” which all the best and brightest young Transcendentalists had recently waged against the empiricism of their Unitarian mentors at Harvard.
    Yet Ripley was scarcely the master spirit of America’s Transcendental age, as most observers could recognize even then. It was, after all, Emerson who had delivered “The American Scholar” as Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837; and of course it was Emerson whom the divinity students asked to preach their graduation address in 1838. The studied but also uneasy ambivalences of that latter performance must certainly lie behind the problem which a “Giant Transcendentalist” creates for the latter-day pilgrims of Hawthorne’s “Celestial Rail-road” (1843): they hardly know “whether to be encouraged or affrighted” by the wondrous mixture of ideal affirmation and historic denial. More centrally still, the insistent allusions of “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843) appear to identify the Emersonian philosophy as the most radical “apocalypse” of them all: the biblical speculations of a certain “Father Miller” may predict the immanent foreclosing of mankind’s earthly career, but elsewhere—in Emerson’s Nature (1836), for example—“the Idea” has already been declared to be “all in all.” Emerson outgrew the arrogance, if not the idealism, of his early speculations, as every reader of his essay “Experience” (1844) is well aware. Still, Hawthorne’s “Christmas Banquet” (1844) exists to notice that the psychological consequences of worldly denial are not so easy to unsay, as the puritanic self-absorption of “Egotism; or the Bosom Serpent” (1843) lapses to a positively schizophrenic sense of universal unreality. Possibly Emerson’s philosophic cure was somehow worse than its correlative disease; perhaps a guilty identity was better than none.
    For a more literal treatment of Emerson, the reader will have to turn (elsewhere) to “The Old Manse” (1846), a lengthy and revealing piece of fictionalized autobiography Hawthorne wrote to summarize his entire experience of Transcendental Concord, and to introduce the Mosses. Compressing several years of life into a single turning of the seasons, Hawthorne lovingly evokes the house and grounds, and also the historic associations, of the parsonage or “manse” to which he moved in the summer of 1842, just after his long delayed marriage to Sophia Peabody; and biographers have always used this work—along with another, less overtly personal sketch entitled “The New Adam and Eve” (1843)—to celebrate the bliss of Hawthorne’s wedded life, and to elaborate his profound commitment to conservative values. Of equal significance is Hawthorne’s strategic placement of himself, in the midst of a remarkable literary society that included, among many others, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing (the younger), and Henry David Thoreau, all swirling around the “great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite