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.