women. Battening on love. And fluttering in the first bat-like throes of
dementia.
You _can_ have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten
inside you.
Hawthorne's other books are nothing compared to _The Scarlet Letter._
But there are good parables, and wonderful dark glimpses of early
Puritan America, in _Twice Told Tales._
_The House of the Seven Gables_ has "atmosphere." The passing of the old
order of the proud, bearded, black-browed Father: an order which is
slowly ousted from life, and lingeringly haunts the old dark places. But
comes a new generation to sweep out even the ghosts, with these new
vacuum cleaners. No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner.
The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is setting up in
the photography line, and is just going to make a sound financial thing
out of it. For this purpose all old hates and old glooms, that belong to
the antique order of Haughty Fathers, all these are swept up in the
vacuum cleaner, and the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect
understanding under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. _Vivat
Industria!_
Oh, Nathaniel, you savage ironist! Ugh, how you'd have _hated_ it if
you'd had nothing but the prosperous, "dear" young couple to write
about! If you'd lived to the day when America was nothing but a Main
Street.
The Dark Old Fathers.
The Beloved Wishy-Washy Sons.
The Photography Business.
? ? ?
Hawthorne came nearest to actuality in the _Blithedale Romance._ This
novel is a sort of picture of the notorious Brook Farm experiment. There
the famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the
soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high
thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and
tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a
super-celestial harp. An old twang of the Crèvecœur instrument.
Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn't stand one another.
And all the music they made was the music of their quarrelling.
You _can't_ idealize hard work. Which is why America invents so many
machines and contrivances of all sort: so that they need do no physical
work.
And that's why the idealists left off brookfarming, and took to
bookfarming.
You _can't_ idealize the essential brute blood-activity, the brute blood
desires, the basic, sardonic blood-knowledge.
That you _can't_ idealize.
And you can't eliminate it.
So there's the end of ideal man.
Man is made up of a dual consciousness, of which the two halves are most
of the time in opposition to one another. And will be so as long as time
lasts.
You've got to learn to change from one consciousness to the other, turn
and about. Not to try to make either absolute, or dominant. The Holy
Ghost tells you the how and when.
Never did Nathaniel feel himself more spectral--of course he went
brookfarming--than when he was winding the horn in the morning to summon
the transcendental labourers to their tasks, or than when marching off
with a hoe ideally to hoe the turnips, "Never did I feel more spectral,"
says Nathaniel.
Never did I feel such a fool, would have been more to the point.
Farcical fools, trying to idealize labour. You'll never succeed in
idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take
off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labour, the
thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind. And the harder a man
works at mental labour, at idealism, at transcendental occupations, the
thinner becomes his blood, and the more brittle his nerves.
Oh, the brittle-nerved brookfarmers!
You've got to be able to do both: the mental work, and the brute work.
But be prepared to step from one pair of shoes into another. Don't try
and make it all one pair of shoes.
The attempt to idealize the blood!
Nathaniel knew he was a fool, attempting it.
He went home to his amiable spouse and his sanctum sanctorum of a study.
Nathaniel!
But the _Blithedale Romance._ It has a beautiful, wintry-evening
farm-kitchen sort of opening.
_Dramatis Personæ_:
1. _I._--The narrator: whom we will call Nathaniel. A wisp of a
sensitive, withal deep, literary young man no longer so very young.
2. _Zenobia_: a dark, proudly voluptuous clever woman with a tropical
flower in her hair. Said to be sketched from Margaret Fuller, in whom
Hawthorne saw some "evil nature." Nathaniel was more aware of Zenobia's
voluptuousness than of her "mind."
3. _Hollingsworth_: a black-bearded blacksmith with a deep-voiced lust
for saving criminals. Wants to build a great Home for these
unfortunates.
4. _Priscilla_: a sort of White Lily, a clinging little mediumistic
sempstress who has been made use of in public seances. A sort of
prostitute soul.
5. _Zenobia's Husband_: an unpleasant decayed person with magnetic
powers and teeth full of gold--or set in gold. It is he who has given
public spiritualist demonstrations, with Priscilla for the medium. He is
of the dark, sensual, decayed-handsome sort, and comes in unexpectedly
by the back door.
_Plot I._--I, Nathaniel, at once catch cold, and have to be put to bed.
Am nursed with inordinate tenderness by the black-smith, whose great
hands are gentler than a woman's, etc.
The two men love one another with a love surpassing the love of women,
so long as the healing-and-salvation business lasts. When Nathaniel
wants to get well and have a soul of his own, he turns with hate to this
black-bearded, booming Salvationist, Hephæstos of the underworld. Hates
him for tryrannous monomaniac.
_Plot II._--Zenobia, that clever lustrous woman, is fascinated by the
criminal-saving black-smith, and would have him at any price. Meanwhile
she has the subtlest current of understanding with the frail but deep
Nathaniel. And she takes the White Lily half-pityingly, half
contemptuously under a rich and glossy dark wing.
_Plot III._--The blacksmith is after Zenobia, to get her money for his
criminal asylum: of which of course he will be the first inmate.
_Plot IV._--Nathaniel also feels his mouth watering for the
dark-luscious Zenobia.
_Plot V._--The White Lily, Priscilla, vaporously festering, turns out to
be the famous Veiled Lady of public spiritualist shows: she whom the
undesirable Husband, called the Professor, has used as a medium. Also
she is Zenohia's half-sister.
_Débâcle_
Nobody wants Zenohia in the end. She goes off without her flower. The
blacksmith marries Priscilla. Nathaniel dribblingly confesses that he,
too, has loved Prissy all the while. Boo-hoo!
_Conclusion_
A few years after, Nathaniel meets the blacksmith in a country lane near
a humble cottage, leaning totteringly on the arm of the frail but
fervent Priscilla. Gone are all dreams of asylums, and the saviour of
criminals can't even save himself from his own Veiled Lady.
There you have a nice little bunch of idealists, transcendentalists,
brookfarmers, and disintegrated gentry. All going slightly rotten.
Two Pearls: a white Pearl and a black Pearl: the latter more expensive,
lurid with money.
The white Pearl, the little medium, Priscilla, the imitation pearl, has
truly some "supernormal" powers. She could drain the blacksmith of his
blackness and his smith-strength.
Priscilla, the little psychic prostitute. The degenerate descendant of
Ligeia. The absolutely yielding, "loving" woman, who abandons herself
utterly to her lover. Or even to a gold-toothed "professor" of
spiritualism.
Is it all bunkum, this spiritualism? Is it just rot, this Veiled Lady?
Not quite. Apart even from telepathy, the apparatus of human
consciousness is the most wonderful message-receiver in existence. Beats
a wireless station to nothing.
Put Prissy under the tablecloth then. Miaow!
What happens? Prissy under the tablecloth, like a canary when you cover
his cage, goes into a "sleep," a trance.
A trance, not a sleep. A trance means that all her _individual_,
personal intelligence goes to sleep, like a hen with her head under her
wing. But the _apparatus_ of consciousness remains working. Without a
soul in it.
And what can this apparatus of consciousness do, when it works? Why
surely something. A wireless apparatus goes tick-tick-tick, taking down
messages. So does your human apparatus. All kinds of messages. Only the
soul, or the under-consciousness deals with these messages in the dark,
in the under-conscious. Which is the natural course of events.
But what sorts of messages? All sorts. Vibrations from the stars,
vibrations from unknown magnetos, vibrations from unknown people,
unknown passions. The human apparatus receives them all, and they are
all dealt with in the under-conscious.
There are also vibrations of thought, many, many. Necessary to get the
two human instruments in key.
There may even be vibrations of ghosts in the air. Ghosts being dead
_wills_, mind you, not dead souls. The soul has nothing to do with these
dodges.
But some unit of force may persist for a time, after the death of an
individual--some associations of vibrations may linger like little
clouds in the etheric atmosphere after the death of a human being, or an
animal. And these little clots of vibration may transfer themselves to
the conscious-apparatus of the medium. So that the dead son of a
disconsolate widow may send a message to his mourning mother to tell her
that he owes Bill Jackson seven dollars: or that Uncle Sam's will is in
the back of the bureau: and cheer up. Mother, I'm all right.
There is never much worth in these "messages." Because they are never
more than fragmentary items of dead, disintegrated consciousness. And
the medium has and always will have a hopeless job, trying to
disentangle the muddle of messages.
Again, coming events _may_ cast their shadow before. The oracle may
receive on her conscious-apparatus material vibrations to say that the
next great war will break out in 1925. And in so far as the realm of
cause-and-effect is master of the living soul, in so far as events are
mechanically maturing, the forecast may be true.
But the living souls of men may upset the _mechanical_ march of events
at any moment.
_Rien de certain._
Vibrations of subtlest matter. Concatenations of vibrations and shocks!
Spiritualism.
And what then? It is all just materialistic, and a good deal is and
always will be charlatanry.
Because the real human soul, the Holy Ghost, has its own deep
prescience, which will not be put into figures, but flows on dark, a
stream of prescience.
And the real human soul is too proud, and too sincere in its belief in
the Holy Ghost that is within, to stoop to the practices of these
spiritualist and other psychic tricks of material vibrations.
Because the first part of reverence is the acceptance of the fact that
the Holy Ghost will never materialize: will never be anything but a
ghost.
And the second part of reverence is the watchful observance of the
motions, the comings and goings within us, of the Holy Ghost, and of the
many gods that make up the Holy Ghost.
The Father had his day, and fell.
The Son has had his day, and fell.
It is the day of the Holy Ghost.
But when souls fall corrupt, into disintegration, they have no more day.
They have sinned against the Holy Ghost.
These people in _Blithedale Romance_ have sinned against the Holy Ghost,
and corruption has set in.
All, perhaps, except the I, Nathaniel. He is still a sad, integral
consciousness.
But not excepting Zenobia. The Black Pearl is rotting down. Fast. The
cleverer she is, the faster she rots.
And they are all disintegrating, so they take to psychic tricks. It is a
certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche in a man, and much more
so in a woman, when she takes to spiritualism, and table-rapping, and
occult messages, or witchcraft and supernatural powers of that sort.
When men want to be supernatural, be sure that something has gone wrong
in their natural stuff. More so, even, with a woman.
And yet the soul has its own profound subtleties of knowing. And the
blood has its strange omniscience.
But this isn't impudent and materialistic, like spiritualism and magic
and all that range of pretentious supernaturalism.
IX. DANA'S "TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST"
You can't idealize brute labour. That is to say, you can't idealize
brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist.
You can't idealize brute labour.
That is to say, you can't idealize brute labour, without coming undone,
as an idealist.
The soil! The great ideal of the soil. Novels like Thomas Hardy's and
pictures like the Frenchman Millet's. The soil.
What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go
back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you,
as it was upon Thomas Hardy, that the whole scheme of things is against
you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you
like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.
Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the
absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he
wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her,
loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow
Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother earth. Then let
him perish.
The great imaginative love of the soil itself! Tolstoi had it, and
Thomas Hardy. And both are driven to a kind of fanatic denial of life,
as a result.
You can't idealize mother earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But
succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons. None.
If you are a child of mother earth, you must learn to discard your ideal
self, in season, as you discard your clothes at night.
Americans have never loved the soil of America as Europeans have loved
the soil of Europe. America has never been a blood-home-land. Only an
ideal home-land. The home-land of the idea, of the _spirit._ And of the
pocket. Not of the blood.
That has yet to come, when the idea and the spirit have collapsed from
their false tyranny.
Europe has been loved with a blood love. That has made it beautiful.
In America, you have Fenimore Cooper's beautiful landscape: but that is
wish-fulfilment, done from a distance. And you have Thoreau in Concord.
But Thoreau sort of isolated his own bit of locality and put it under a
lens, to examine it. He almost anatomized it, with his admiration.
America isn't a blood-home-land. For every American, the blood-home-land
is Europe. The spirit home-land is America.
Transcendentalism. Transcend this home-land business, exalt the idea of
These States till you have made it a universal idea, says the true
American. The oversoul is a world-soul, not a local thing.
So, in the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to
the sea. Not to the land. Earth is too specific, too particular.
Besides, the blood of white men is wine of no American soil. No, no.
But the blood of all men is ocean-born. We have our material
universality, our blood-oneness, in the sea. The salt water.
You can't idealize the soil. But you've got to try. And trying, you reap
a great imaginative reward. And the greatest reward is failure. To know
you have failed, that you _must_ fail. That is the greatest comfort of
all, at last.
Tolstoi failed with the soil: Thomas Hardy too: and Giovanni Verga; the
three greatest.
The further extreme, the greatest mother, is the sea. Love the great
mother of the sea, the Magna Mater. And see how bitter it is. And see
how you must fail to win her to your ideal: forever fail. Absolutely
fail.
Swinburne tried in England. But the Americans made the greatest trial.
The most vivid failure.
At a certain point, human life becomes uninteresting to men. What then?
They turn to some universal.
The greatest material mother of us all is the sea.
Dana's eyes failed him when he was studying at Harvard. And suddenly, he
turned to the sea, the naked Mother. He went to sea as a common sailor
before the mast.
You can't idealize brute labour. Yet you can. You can go through with
brute labour, and _know_ what it means. You can even meet and match the
sea, and KNOW her.
This is what Dana wanted: a naked fighting experience with the sea.
KNOW THYSELF. That means, know the earth that is in your blood. Know the
sea that is in your blood. The great elementals.
But we must repeat: KNOWING and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states.
The more you know, exactly, the less you _are._ The more you _are_, in
being, the less you know.
This is the great cross of man, his dualism. The blood-self, and the
nerve-brain self.
Knowing, then, is the slow death of being. Man has his epochs of being,
his epochs of knowing. It will always be a great oscillation. The goal
is to know how not-to-know.
Dana took another great step in knowing: knowing the mother sea. But it
was a step also in his own undoing. It was a new phase of dissolution of
his own being. Afterwards, he would be a less human thing. He would be a
knower: but more near to mechanism than before. That is our cross, our
doom.
And so he writes, in his first days at sea, in winter, on the Atlantic:
"Nothing can compare with the _early breaking of day_ upon the wide, sad
ocean. There is something in the first grey streaks stretching along the
Eastern horizon, and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the
deep, which creates a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy
foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give."
So he ventures wakeful and alone into the great naked watery universe of
the end of life, the twilight place where integral being lapses, and
warm life begins to give out. It is man moving on into the face of
death, the great adventure, the great undoing, the strange extension of
the consciousness. The same in his vision of the albatross. "But one of
the finest sights that I have ever seen was an albatross asleep upon the
water, off Cape Horn, when a heavy sea was running. There being no
breeze, the surface of the water was unbroken, but a long, heavy swell
was rolling, and we saw the fellow, all white, directly ahead of us,
asleep upon the waves, with his head under his wing; now rising upon the
top of a huge billow, and then falling slowly until he was lost in the
hollow between. He was undisturbed for some time, until the noise of our
bows, gradually approaching, roused him; when lifting his head, he
stared upon us for a moment, and then spread his wide wings, and took
his flight."
We must give Dana credit for a profound mystic vision. The best
Americans are mystics by instinct. Simple and bare as his narrative is,
it is deep with profound emotion and stark comprehension. He sees the
last light-loving incarnation of life exposed upon the eternal waters: a
speck, solitary upon the verge of the two naked principles, aerial and
watery. And his own soul is as the soul of the albatross.
It is a storm-bird. And so is Dana. He has gone down to fight with the
sea. It is a metaphysical, actual struggle of an integral soul with the
vast, non-living, yet potent element. Dana never forgets, never ceases
to watch. If Hawthorne was a spectre on the land, how much more is Dana
a spectre at sea. But he must watch, he must know, he must conquer the
sea in his consciousness. This is the poignant difference between him
and the common sailor. The common sailor lapses from consciousness,
becomes elemental like a seal, a creature. Tiny and alone Dana watches
the great seas mount round his own small body. If he is swept away, some
other man will have to take up what he has begun. For the sea must be
mastered by the human consciousness, in the great fight of the human
soul for mastery over life and death, in KNOWLEDGE. It is the last
bitter necessity of the Tree. The Cross. Impartial, Dana beholds himself
among the elements, calm and fatal. His style is great and hopeless, the
style of a perfect tragic recorder.
"Between five and six the cry of 'All star-bowlines ahoy!' summoned our
watch on deck, and immediately all hands were called. A great cloud of a
dark slate-colour was driving on us from the south-west; and we did our
best to take in sail before we were in the midst of it. We had got the
light-sails furled, the courses hauled up, and the top-sail reef tackles
hauled out, and were just mounting the forerigging when the storm struck
us. In an instant the sea, which had been comparatively quiet, was
running higher and higher; and it became almost as dark as night. The
hail and sleet were harder than I had yet felt them, seeming almost to
pin us down to the rigging."
It is in the dispassionate statement of plain material facts that Dana
achieves his greatness. Dana writes from the remoter, non-emotional
centres of being--not from the passional emotional self.
So the ship battles on, round Cape Horn, then into quieter seas. The
island of Juan Fernandez, Crusoe's island, rises like a dream from the
sea, like a green cloud, and like a ghost Dana watches it, feeling only
a faint, ghostly pang of regret for the life that was.
But the strain of the long sea-voyage begins to tell. The sea is a great
disintegrative force. Its tonic quality is its disintegrative quality.
It burns down the tissue, liberates energy. And after a long time, this
burning-down is destructive. The pysche becomes destroyed, irritable,
frayed, almost dehumanized.
So there is trouble on board the ship, irritating discontent, friction
unbearable, and at last a flogging. This flogging rouses Dana for the
first and last time to human and ideal passion.
"Sam was by this time seized up--that is, placed against the shrouds,
with his wrists made fast to the shrouds, his jacket off, and his back
exposed. The captain stood on the break of the deck, a few feet from
him, and a little raised, so as to have a good swing at him, and held in
his hand a light, thick rope. The officers stood round, and the crew
grouped together in the waist. All these preparations made me feel sick
and faint, angry and excited as I was. A man--a human being made in
God's likeness--fastened up and flogged like a beast! The first and
almost uncontrollable impulse was resistance. But what could be
done?--The time for it had gone by----"
So Mr. Dana couldn't act. He could only lean over the side of the ship
and spue.
Whatever made him vomit?
Why shall man not be whipped?
As long as man has a bottom, he must surely be whipped. It is as if the
Lord intended it so.
Why? For lots of reasons.
Man doth not live by bread alone, to absorb it and to evacuate it.
What is the breath of life? My dear, it is the strange current of
interchange that flows between men and men, and men and women, and men
and things. A constant current of interflow, a constant vibrating
interchange. That is the breath of life.
And this interflow, this electric vibration is polarized. There is a
positive and a negative polarity. This is a law of life, of vitalism.
Only ideas are final, finite, static, and single.
All life-interchange is a polarized communication. A circuit.
There are lots of circuits. Male and female, for example, and master and
servant. The idea, the IDEA, that fixed gorgon monster, and the IDEAL,
that great stationary engine, these two gods-of-the-machine have been
busy destroying all _natural_ reciprocity and _natural_ circuits, for
centuries. IDEAS have played the very old Harry with sex relationship,
that is, with the great circuit of man and woman. Turned the thing into
a wheel on which the human being in both is broken. And the IDEAL has
mangled the blood-reciprocity of master and servant into an abstract
horror.
Master and servant--or master and man relationship is, essentially, a
polarized flow, like love. It is a circuit of vitalism which flows
between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each,
and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium. Deny
it as you like, it is so. But once you _abstract_ both master and man,
and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency, and so
on: so that each looks on himself as an instrument performing a certain
repeated evolution, then you have changed the vital, quivering circuit
of master and man into a mechanical machine unison. Just another way of
life: or anti-life.