Selected Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne Read Free Book Online Page A

extremity of our village.”
    The formulation is literally accurate, as any visitor to present-day Concord may pleasantly discover. And it leads on to the personal confession that, “being happy,” Hawthorne felt no need just then to ask “of this prophet the word that should solve ... the riddle of the universe.” Also suggested, however, is Hawthorne’s own sense of his relation to Emerson and his various Transcendental disciples: he is among them, quite clearly, as Concord is but a village; and friendly, to the appearances of outward sociability; sharing, as F. O. Matthiessen well observed, a common aspiration for the democracy of American life and letters; yet he is opposite their metaphysical interest in a way he trusted only his fictions to express.
    Most noticeably, perhaps, Hawthorne continued to uphold his classic principle that literature is a shared experience rather than a private or purely subjective concern. Utterly skeptical about the discoverability, perhaps even the existence, of some occult entity called “the Self,” Hawthorne explicitly denies that he is “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.” In fact, he resisted, as no other writer of his Romantic age, the temptation to make literature out of his own “soul.” Appearing to answer the studied egotism of Walden in advance, “The Old Manse” invites its readers, at last, not to the personal intimacy of confession but to the dramatic interest of some stories, most of which turn out to suggest where the logic of the Newness might lead, if anyone dared follow its lead alone: to the “liberal” escape, in the “Rail-road,” from the sense of sin and suffering; to the “apocalyptic” denial, in the “Hall,” that the facts of life impose any final restraint on the autonomous life of the “fantasy”; and to the “idealist” and rather chilling discovery, in the “Banquet,” that a self without relation is an empty philosophical construct and a deadly human end.
    This last theme—of the ineluctable relationality of all personal existence—may fairly be regarded as Hawthorne’s own thematic “bottom line,” everywhere, uniting works from all his later phases with earlier, puritanic manifestations such as “The Man of Adamant” (1837) and even “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Nor is it entirely misguided to regard the sobering tale of “Wakefield” as a sort of once-for-all abstraction of this variously adumbrated but repeatedly recurring psychological insight. Yet it is equally important to recognize that this one master idea lends structure to a significant variety of historical experiences; that in the “Old Manse” period it often mixes with and sometimes yields place to an altogether “timely” consideration only hinted at earlier, in his observations of the deadly hatred which the religious idealism of the Puritans regularly directed at all things merely “natural”; and that in fact some “death by idealism” emerges as the controlling theme of Hawthorne’s anti-transcendental efforts of the 1840s.
    The same spirit that unites Emerson with Father Miller—a sort of neopuritanical hatred of the merely existent—appears to motivate the project of radical reform as Hawthorne represents it in “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844). An altogether unstable narrator ends by proposing, conservatively, that the notoriously American effort to purify the world will fail unless the human heart itself should undergo its own prior purgation. But the shape of the drama suggests the more radical possibility that some terrific lust for perfection will remain insatiate as long as any human trace remains; that the enthusiasm which had sponsored, in 1840, an entirely