But if the lover of humanity should give up for a time and take a rest by turning his attention to a more hopeful case, I should not be too hard on him. My Pardoner, I am sure, must have some indulgence for such a weakness.
A MAN UNDER ENCHANTMENT
I SAT down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment.” So Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his own visionary youth, and, truth to tell, the spell lasted through life.
The wayside itself was not conducive to dreams. It was a busy thoroughfare. Eager traffickers jostled one another, and there was much crying up of new wares. Many important personages went noisily along. There was a fresh interest in all sorts of good works and many improvements on the roadway. There were not many priests or Levites passing by on the other side, for ecclesiasticism was not in fashion, but there were multitudes of Good Samaritans, each one intent on his own brand-new device for universal helpfulness. There were so many of them that the poor man who fell among philanthropists often sighed for the tender mercies of the thieves. The thieves, at least, when they had done their work would let him alone. From time to time there would come groups of eager reformers, advance agents of the millennium. At last there came down the road troops hurrying to the front, and there was the distant sound of battle.
It was a stirring time, the noon of the nineteenth century; and the stir was nowhere more felt than in New England. It was a ferment of speculation, a whirl of passion, a time of great aspiration and of no mean achievement.
But if you would get a sense of all this, do not turn to the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ardor of Transcendentalism, the new spirit of reform, the war between the States,—these were noted, but they made no very vivid impression on the man who sat under enchantment. There was an interval between these happenings and his consciousness that made them seem scarcely contemporaneous.
It is a fashion in literary criticism to explain an author by his environment. With Hawthorne this method is not successful. It is not that his environment was not interesting in itself. His genius was essentially aloof. It was a plant that drew its nourishment from the air rather than from the soil. There are some men who have the happy faculty of making themselves at home wherever they happen to be. Hawthorne, wherever he had been born, would have looked upon the scene with something of a stranger’s eye. Indeed, when we think about it, the wonder is that most of us are able to take the world in such a matter-of-fact way. One would suppose that we had always been here, instead of being transient guests who cannot even engage our rooms a day in advance.
It is perhaps a happy limitation which makes us to forget our slight tenure, and to feel an absolute ownership in the present moment. We are satisfied with the passing experience because it appears to us as permanent.
To the man who sat by the wayside the present moment did not stand in the sunshine sufficient unto itself. It did not appear, as it did to the man of affairs, an ultimate and satisfying reality. He was not unobservant. He saw the persons passing by. But each one, in the present moment, seemed but a fugitive escaping from the past into the future. Futile flight! unavailing freedom! for in the Future the Past stands waiting for it. As he looked at each successive action it was as one who watches the moving shadow of an old deed, which now for some creature has become doom.