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 is 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.