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III--HAWTHORNE
The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the
supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical--so surcharged with
adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive
fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a
poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He
was not a greater poet possibly than they--but a greater artist.
Not only the character of his substance, but the care in his
manner throws his workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind
of bas-relief. Like Poe he quite naturally and unconsciously
reaches out over his subject to his reader. His mesmerism seeks
to mesmerize us--beyond Zenobia's sister. But he s too great an
artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and
Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too
strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky
seem to be by the morbidly fascinating--a kind of false beauty
obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that
he would weave his spell over us--as would the Grimms and Aesop.
We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part
of the artist's business. The effect is a part of his art-effort
in its inception. Emerson's substance and even his manner has
little to do with a designed effect--his thunderbolts or delicate
fragments are flashed out regardless--they may knock us down or
just spatter us--it matters little to him--but Hawthorne is more
considerate; that is, he is more artistic, as men say.
Hawthorne may be more noticeably indigenous or may have more
local color, perhaps more national color than his Concord
contemporaries. But the work of anyone who is somewhat more
interested in psychology than in transcendental philosophy, will
weave itself around individuals and their personalities. If the
same anyone happens to live in Salem, his work is likely to be
colored by the Salem wharves and Salem witches. If the same
anyone happens to live in the "Old Manse" near the Concord Battle
Bridge, he is likely "of a rainy day to betake himself to the
huge garret," the secrets of which he wonders at, "but is too
reverent of their dust and cobwebs to disturb." He is likely to
"bow below the shriveled canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in
wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of
Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell of this
reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens
and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely
"to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that
the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands"...
"that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in
Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be
quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels
rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the
life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a
poet of philosophy is.
In Hawthorne's usual vicinity, the atmosphere was charged with
the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England,-
-ascetic or noble New England as you like. A novel, of necessity,
nails an art-effort down to some definite part or parts of the
earth's surface--the novelist's wagon can't always be hitched to
a star. To say that Hawthorne was more deeply interested than
some of the other Concord writers--Emerson, for example--in the
idealism peculiar to his native land (in so far as such idealism
of a country can be conceived of as separate from the political)
would be as unreasoning as to hold that he was more interested in
social progress than Thoreau, because he was in the consular
service and Thoreau was in no one's service--or that the War
Governor of Massachusetts was a greater patriot than Wendell
Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. Hawthorne's
art was true and typically American--as is the art of all men
living in America who believe in freedom of thought and who live
wholesome lives to prove it, whatever their means of expression.
Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne, either in words or
music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do
with the influence of sin upon the conscience--something more
than the Puritan conscience, but something which is permeated by
it. In this relation he is wont to use what Hazlitt calls the
"moral power of imagination." Hawthorne would try to spiritualize
a guilty conscience. He would sing of the relentlessness of
guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening
innocent posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors, its
specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play
around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less
guilty Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man
Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne.
There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet
says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but
penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the
ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in
its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound
waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them
rather than explain them--and here, some may say that he is wiser
in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.
Perhaps so, but no greater in the deeper ranges and profound
mysteries of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life.
This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music
(the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended
fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical
adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal
realms. It may have something to do with the children's
excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost
imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with
"Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the
little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do
with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to
those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as
when the circus parade comes down Main Street; or something to do
with the concert at the Stamford camp meeting, or the "Slave's
Shuffle"; or something to do with the Concord he-nymph, or the
"Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's Palace," or something else in the
wonderbook--not something that happens, but the way something
happens; or something to do with the "Celestial Railroad," or
"Phoebe's Garden," or something personal, which tries to be
"national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at
midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived,
or about something that never will happen, or something else that
is not.
Content of III--HAWTHORNE [Charles Ives' essays: "Essays Before a Sonata"
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Read next: IV--"THE ALCOTS"
Read previous: II--EMERSON
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