VIII Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance”
No other book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual, and so complete as The Scarlet Letter: this great allegory of the triumph of sin.
Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one’s own integrity.
For instance, the sin in Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale’s case was a sin because they did what they thought it wrong to do. If they had really wanted to be lovers, and if they had had the honest courage of their own passion, there would have been no sin: even had the desire been only momentary.
But if there had been no sin, they would have lost half the fun, or more, of the game.
It was this very doing of the thing that they themselves believed to be wrong, that constituted the chief charm of the act. Man invents sin, in order to enjoy the feeling of being naughty. Also, in order to shift the responsibility for his own acts. A Divine Father tells him what to do. And man is naughty and doesn’t obey. And then shiveringly, ignoble man lets down his pants for a flogging.
If the Divine Father doesn’t bring on the flogging, in this life, then Sinful Man shiveringly awaits his whipping in the afterlife.
Bah, the Divine Father, like so many other Crowned Heads, has abdicated his authority. Man can sin as much as he likes.
There is only one penalty: the loss of his own integrity. Man should never do the thing he believes to be wrong. Because if he does, he loses his own singleness, wholeness, natural honour.
If you want to do a thing, you’ve either got to believe, sincerely, that it’s your true nature to do this thing: or else you’ve got to let it alone.
Believe in your own Holy Ghost. Or else, if you doubt, abstain.
A thing that you sincerely believe in, cannot be wrong. Because belief does not come at will. It comes only from the Holy Ghost within. Therefore a thing you truly believe in, cannot be wrong.
But there is such a thing as spurious belief. There is such a thing as evil belief: a belief that one cannot do wrong. There is also such a thing as a half-spurious belief. And this is rottenest of all. The devil lurking behind the cross.
So there you are. Between genuine belief, and spurious belief, and half-genuine belief, you’re as likely as not to be in a pickle. And the half-genuine belief is much the dirtiest, and most deceptive thing in life.
Hester and Dimmesdale believed in the Divine Father, and almost gloatingly sinned against Him. The Allegory of Sin.
Pearl no longer believes in the Divine Father. She says so. She has no Divine Father. Disowns Papa both big and little.
So she can’t sin against him.
What will she do, then, if she’s got no god to sin against? Why, of course, she’ll not be able to sin at all. She’ll go her own way gaily, and do as she likes, and she’ll say, afterwards, when she’s made a mess: “Yes, I did it. But I acted for the best, and therefore I am blameless. It’s the other person’s fault. Or else it’s Its fault.”
She will be blameless, will Pearl, come what may.
And the world is simply a string of Pearls to-day. And America is a whole rope of these absolutely immaculate Pearls, who can’t sin, let them do what they may. Because they’ve no god to sin against. Mere men, one after another. Men with no ghost to their name.
Pearls!
Oh, the irony, the bitter, bitter irony of the name! Oh, Nathaniel, you great man! Oh, America, you Pearl, you Pearl without a blemish!
How can Pearl have a blemish, when there’s no one but herself to judge Herself? Of course she’ll be immaculate, even if, like Cleopatra, she drowns a lover a night in her dirty Nile. The Nilus Flux of her love.
Candida!
By Hawthorne’s day it was already Pearl. Before swine, of course. There never yet was a Pearl that wasn’t cast before swine.
It’s part of her game, part of her pearl-dom.
Because when Circe lies with a man, he’s a swine after it, if he wasn’t one before. Not she. Circe is the great white impeccable Pearl.
And yet, oh. Pearl, there’s a Nemesis even for you.
There’s a Doom, Pearl.
Doom! What a beautiful northern word. Doom.
The Doom of the Pearl.
Who will write that Allegory?
Here’s what the Doom is, anyhow.
When you don’t have a Divine Father to sin against: and when you don’t sin against the Son; which the Pearls don’t, because they all are very strong on LOVE, stronger on LOVE than on anything: then there’s nothing left for you to sin against except the Holy Ghost.
Now, Pearl, come, let’s drop you in the vinegar.
And it’s a ticklish thing sinning against the Holy Ghost. “It shall not be forgiven him.”
Didn’t I tell you there was Doom.
It shall not be forgiven her.
The Father forgives: the Son forgives: but the Holy Ghost does not forgive. So take that.
The Holy Ghost doesn’t forgive because the Holy Ghost is within you. The Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in your conceit of your ego, you make a break in your own YOU, in your own integrity, how can you be forgiven? You might as well make a rip in your own bowels. You know if you rip your own bowels they will go rotten and you will go rotten. And there’s an end of you: in the body.
The same if you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost. You go soul-rotten. Like the Pearls.
These dear Pearls, they do anything they like, and remain pure. Oh, purity!
But they can’t stop themselves from going rotten inside. Rotten Pearls, fair outside. Their souls smell, because their souls are putrefying inside them.
The sin against the Holy Ghost.
And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form of dementia. A thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche. Dementia.
Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius.
Watch these Pearls, these Pearls of modern women. Particularly American 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.