Emerson and Hawthorne only knew Goethe through the translations of Dwight, Carlyle and Margaret Fuller, and yet his poetry made a deeper impression on them than on Lowell and Longfellow, who read it in the original. Hawthorne appears to have taken lessons in German while at Brook Farm, for we find him studying a German book at the Old Manse, with a grammar and lexicon; but, as he confesses in his diary, without making satisfactory progress.
“The Artist of the Beautiful” is a Dantean allegory, and a poetic gem. A young watchmaker, imbued with a spirit above his calling, neglects the profits of his business in order to construct an artificial butterfly,—at once the type of useless beauty and the symbol of immortality, and he perseveres in spite of the difficulties of the undertaking and the contemptuous opposition of his acquaintances. He finally succeeds in making one which seems to be almost endowed with life, but only to be informed that it is no better than a toy, and that he has wasted his time on a thing which has no practical value. A child (who represents the thoughtlessness of the great world) crushes the exquisite piece of workmanship in his little hand; but the watch-maker does not repine at this, for he realizes that after having achieved the beautiful, in his own spirit, the outward symbol of it has comparatively little value. The Artist of the Beautiful is Hawthorne himself; and in this exquisite fable he has not only unfolded the secret of all high art, but his own life-secret as well.
HAWTHORNE AND TRANSCENDENTALISM
The French and English scepticism of the eighteenth century, produced a reaction in the more contemplative German nature, which took the form of a strong assertion of spirit or mind as an entity in itself, and distinct from matter. This movement was more like a national impulse than the proselytism of a sect, but the individual in whom this spiritual impulse of the German people manifested itself at that time was Immanuel Kant. Without discrediting the revelations of Hebrew tradition, he taught the doctrine that instead of looking for evidence of a Supreme Being in the external world, we should seek him in our own hearts; that every man could find a revelation in his own conscience,—in the consciousness of good and evil, by which man improves his condition on earth; that the ideas of a Supreme Being, or of immortality and freedom of will, are inherent in the human mind, and are not to be acquired from experience; but that, as the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite, we cannot know God in the same sense that we know our own earthly fathers, or as Goethe afterwards expressed it,—-
“Who can say I know Him;
Who can say, I know Him not;”
and that it is in this aspiration for the unattainable, in this reverence for absolute purity, wisdom and love, that the spirit of true religion consists.
The new philosophy was named “Transcendentalism” by Kant’s followers, because it included ideas which were beyond the range of experience. It became popular in Germany, as Platonism, to which it is closely related, became popular in ancient Greece. It has never been accepted in France, where scepticism still predominates, though we hear of it in Taine and a few other writers; but in Great Britain, although the English universities repudiated it, Transcendentalism became so influential that Gladstone has spoken of it, in his Romanes lecture, as the dominant philosophy of the nineteenth century. Every notable English writer of that period, with the exception of Macaulay, Mill, and Spencer, became largely imbued with it. In America its influence did not extend much beyond New England, but in that section at least its proselytes were numbered by thousands, and it effected an intellectual revolution which has since influenced the whole country.
The Concord group of transcendentalists did not accept the teaching of Kant in its original purity; but mixed with it a number of other imported products, that in no way appertain to it. Thoreau was an American sansculotte, a believer in the natural man; Ripley was mainly a socialist; Margaret Fuller was one of the earliest leaders in woman’s rights; Alcott was a Neo-Platonist, a vegetarian, and a non-resistant; while Emerson sympathized largely with Thoreau, and from his poetic exaltation of Nature was looked upon as a pantheist by those who were not accustomed to nice discriminations. Thus it happened that Transcendentalism came to be associated in the public mind with any exceptional mode or theory of life. Its best representatives in America, like Professor Hedge of Harvard, Reverend David A. Wasson and Doctor William T. Harris (so long Chief of the National Bureau of Education), were much abler men than Emerson’s followers, but did not attract so much attention, simply because they lived according to the customs of good society.
Sleepy Hollow, before it was converted into a cemetery, was one of the most attractive sylvan resorts in the environs of Concord. It was a sort of natural amphitheatre, a small oval plane, more than half surrounded by a low wooded ridge; a sheltered and sequestered spot, cool in summer, but also warm and sunny in spring, where the wild flowers bloomed and the birds sang earlier than in other places.
There, on August 22, 1842, a notable meeting took place, between Hawthorne, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, who came that afternoon to enjoy the inspiration of the place, without preconcerted agreement. Margaret Fuller was first on the ground, and Hawthorne found her seated on the hill-side—his gravestone now overlooks the spot—reading a book with a peculiar name, which he “did not understand, and could not afterward recollect.” Such a description could only apply to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the original fountain-head and gospel of Transcendentalism.