It does not appear that Nathaniel Hawthorne ever studied “The Critique of Pure Reason.” His mind was wholly of the artistic order,—the most perfect type of an artist, one might say, living at that time,—and a scientific analysis of the mental faculties would have been as distasteful to him as the dissection of a human body. History, biography, fiction, did not appear to him as a logical chain of cause and effect, but as a succession of pictures illustrating an ideal determination of the human race. He could not even look at a group of turkeys without seeing a dramatic situation in them. In addition to this, as a true artist, he was possessed of a strong dislike for everything eccentric and abnormal; he wished for symmetry in all things, and above all in human actions; and those restless, unbalanced spirits, who attached themselves to the transcendental movement and the anti-slavery cause, were particularly objectionable to him. It has been rightly affirmed that no revolutionary movement could be carried through without the support of that ill-regulated class of persons who are always seeking they know not what, and they have their value in the community, like the rest of us; but Hawthorne was not a revolutionary character, and to his mind they appeared like so many obstacles to the peaceable enjoyment of life. His motto was, “Live and let live.” There are passages in his Concord diary in which he refers to the itinerant transcendentalist in no very sympathetic manner.
His experience at Brook Farm may have helped to deepen this feeling. There is no necessary connection between such an idyllic-socialistic experiment and a belief in the direct perception of a great First Clause; but Brook Farm was popularly supposed at that time to be an emanation of Transcendentalism, and is still largely so considered. He was wearied at Brook Farm by the philosophical discussions of George Ripley and his friends, and took to walking in the country lanes, where he could contemplate and philosophize in his own fashion,—which after all proved to be more fruitful than theirs. Having exchanged his interest in the West Roxbury Association for the Old Manse at Concord (truly a poetic bargain), he wrote the most keenly humorous of his shorter sketches, his “The Celestial Railroad,” and in it represented the dismal cavern where Bunyan located the two great enemies of true religion, the Pope and the Pagan, as now occupied by a German giant, the Transcendentalist, who “makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust.”
That Transcendentalism was largely associated in Hawthorne’s mind with the unnecessary discomforts and hardships of his West Roxbury life is evident from a remark which he lets fall in “The Virtuoso’s Collection.” The Virtuoso calls his attention to the seven-league boots of childhood mythology, and Hawthorne replies, “I could show you quite as curious a pair of cowhide boots at the transcendental community of Brook Farm.” Yet there could have been no malice in his satire, for Mrs. Hawthorne’s two sisters, Mrs. Mann and Miss Peabody, were both transcendentalists; and so was Horace Mann himself, so far as we know definitely in regard to his metaphysical creed. Do not we all feel at times that the search for abstract truth is like a diet of sawdust or Scotch mist,—a “chimera buzzing in a vacuum”?
James Russell Lowell similarly attacked Emerson in his Class Day poem, and afterward became converted to Emerson’s views through the influence of Maria White. It is possible that a similar change took place in Hawthorne’s consciousness; although his consciousness was so profound and his nature so reticent that what happened in the depths of it was never indicated by more than a few bubbles at the surface. He was emphatically an idealist, as every truly great artist must be, and Transcendentalism was the local costume which ideality wore in Hawthorne’s time. He was a philosopher after a way of his own, and his reflections on life and manners often have the highest value. It was inevitable that he should feel and assimilate something from the wave of German thought which was sweeping over England and America, and if he did this unconsciously it was so much the better for the quality of his art.
There are evidences of this even among his earliest sketches. In his account of “Sunday at Home” he says: “Time—where a man lives not—what is it but Eternity?” Does he not recognize in this condensed statement Kant’s theorem that time is a mental condition, which only exists in man, and for man, and has no place in the external world? In fact, it only exists by divisions of time, and it is man who makes the divisions. The rising of the sun does not constitute time; for the sun is always rising—somewhere. The positivists and Herbert Spencer deny this, and argue to prove that time is an external entity—independent of man—like electricity; but Hawthorne did not agree with them. He evidently trusted the validity of his consciousness. In that exquisite pastoral, “The Vision at the Fountain,” he says:
“We were aware of each other’s presence, not by sight or sound or touch, but by an inward consciousness. Would it not be so among the dead?”
You have probably heard of the German who attempted to evolve a camel out of his inner consciousness. That and similar jibes are common among those persons of whom the Scriptures tell us that they are in the habit of straining at gnats; but Hawthorne believed consciousness to be a trustworthy guide. Why should he not? It was the consciousness of self that raised man above the level of the brute. This was the rock from which Moses struck forth the fountain of everlasting life.
Again, in “Fancy’s Show-Box” we meet with the following:
“Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly tribunal, will guilty thoughts,—of which guilty deeds are no more than shadows,—will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence in the supreme court of eternity?”
Is this not an induction from or corollary to the preceding? If it is not Kantian philosophy, it is certainly Goethean. Margaret Fuller was the first American critic, if not the first of all critics, to point out that Goethe in writing “Elective Affinities” designed to show that an evil thought may have consequences as serious and irremediable as an evil action—in addition to the well-known homily that evil thoughts lead to evil actions. In his “Hall of Fantasy” Hawthorne mentions Goethe and Swedenborg as two literary idols of the present time who may be expected to endure through all time. Emerson makes the same prediction in one of his poems.