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 transcen- dentalists 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 Crevecoeur 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 w as 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.
Dramatis Personae:
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 voluptu- ousness 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 blacksmith, 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 the black-bearded, booming salvationist, Hephaestos of the underworld. Hates him,for tyrannous monomania.
PLOT II. - Zenobia, that clever lustrous woman, is fascin- ated by the criminal-saving blacksmith, and would have him at any price. Meanwhile she has the subtlest current of under- standing 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 Zenobia’s half- sister.
Debacle
Nobody wants Zenobia 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, transcentalists, 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. Miaowl
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 herindividual 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 a
tmosphere 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 mess- ages.
Again, coming events may cast their shadow before. The oracle may receive on her conscious-apparatus material vibra- tions 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 witch- craft 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.
CHAPTER 9
Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast
You can’t idealize brute labour. That is to say, you can’t idealize brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist.
The soil! The great ideal of the soil. Novels like Thomas Hardy’s and pictures like the Frenchman Millet’s. The soil. What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it ? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you, as it was upon Thomas Hardy, that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.
Thomas Hardy’s pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist’s last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoon snake. The idealist must perish, says mother-earth. Then let him perish.
The great imaginative love of the soil itself! Tolstoy had it, and Thomas Hardy. And both are driven to a kind of fanatic denial of life, as a result.
You can’t idealize mother-earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons. None.
If you are a child of mother-earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self, in season, as you discard your clothes at night.
Americans have never loved the soil of America as Europeans have loved the soil of Europe. America has never been a blood-home-land. Only an ideal home-land. The home-land of the idea, of the spirit. And of the pocket. Not of the blood.
That has yet to come, when the idea and the spirit have collapsed from their false tyranny.
Europe has been loved with a blood love. That has made it beautiful.
In America, you have Fenimore Cooper’s beautiful landscape: but that is wish-fulfilment, done from a distance. And you have Thoreau in Concord. But Thoreau sort of isolated his own bit of locality and put it under a lens, to examine it. He almost anatomized it, with his admiration.
America isn’t a blood-home-land. For every American, the blood-home-land is Europe. The spirit-home-land is America.
Transcendentalism. Transcend this home-land business, exalt the idea of These States till you have made it a universal idea, says the true American. The oversoul is a world-soul, not a local thing.
So, in the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to the sea. Not to the land. Earth is too specific, too particular. Besides, the blood of white men is wine of no American soil. No, no.
But the blood of all men is ocean-born. We have our material universality, our blood-oneness, in the sea. The salt water.
You can’t idealize the soil. But you’ve got to try. And trying, you reap a great imaginative reward. And the greatest reward is failure. To know you have failed, that you must fail. That is the greatest comfort of all, at last.
Tolstoi failed with the soil: Thomas Hardy too: and Gio- vanni Verga; the three greatest.
The further extreme, the greatest mother, is the sea. Love the great mother of the sea, the Magna Mater. And see how bitter it is. And see how you must fail to win her to your ideal: forever fail. Absolutely fail.
Swinburne tried in England. But the Americans made the greatest trial. The most vivid failure.
At a certain point, human life becomes uninteresting to men. What then? They turn to some universal.
The greatest material mother of us all is the sea.
Dana’s eyes failed him when he was studying at Harvard. And suddenly, he turned to the sea, the naked Mother. He went to sea as a common sailor before the mast.
You can’t idealize brute labour. Yet you can. You can go through with brute labour, and know what it means. You can even meet and match the sea, and KNOW her.
This is what Dana wanted: a naked fighting experience with the sea.
KNOW THYSELF. That means, know the earth that is in your blood. Know the sea that is in your blood. The great elementals.
But we must repeat: KNOWING and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states. The more you know, exactly, the less you are. The more you are, in being, the less you know.
This is the great cross of man, his dualism. The blood-self, and the nerve-brain self.
Knowing, then, is the slow death of being. Man has his epochs of being, his epochs of knowing. It will always be a great oscillation. The goal is to know how not-to- know.
Dana took another great step in knowing: knowing the mother sea. But it was a step also in his own undoing. It was a new phase of dissolution of his own being. Afterwards, he would be a less human thing. He would be a knower: but more near to mechanism than before. That is our cross, our doom.
And so he writes, in his first days at sea, in winter, on the Atlantic:
Nothing will compare with the early breaking of the day upon the wide ocean. There is somethin
g in the first grey streaks stretching along the eastern horizon, and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which creates . . . a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give.
So he ventures wakeful and alone into the great naked watery universe of the end of life, the twilight place where integral being lapses, and warm life begins to give out. It is man moving on into the face of death, the great adventure, the great undoing, the strange extension of the consciousness. The same in his vision of the albatross. ‘But one of the finest sights that I have ever seen was an albatross asleep upon the water, during a calm off Cape Horn, when a heavy sea was running. There being no breeze, the surface of the water was unbroken, but a long, heavy swell was rolling, and we saw the fellow, all white, directly ahead of us, asleep upon the waves, with his head under his wing; now rising on the top of a huge billow, and then falling slowly until he was lost in the hollow between. He was undisturbed for some time, until the noise of our bows, gradually approaching, roused him, when, lifting his head, he stared upon us for a moment, and then spread his wide wings, and took his flight.’
We must give Dana credit for a profound mystic vision. The best Americans are mystics by instinct. Simple and bare as his narrative is, it is deep with profound emotion and stark comprehension. He sees the last light-loving incarnation of life exposed upon the eternal waters: a speck, solitary upon the verge of the two naked principles, aerial and watery. And his own soul is as the soul of the albatross.
It is a storm-bird. And so is Dana. He has gone down to fight with the sea. It is a metaphysical, actual struggle of an integral soul with the vast, non-living, yet potent element. Dana never forgets, never ceases to watch. If Hawthorne was a spectre on the land, how much more is Dana a spectre at sea. But he must watch, he must know, he must conquer the sea in his consciousness. This is the poignant difference between him and the common sailor. The common sailor lapses from consciousness, becomes elemental like a seal, a creature. Tiny and alone, Dana watches the great seas mount round his own small body. If he is swept away, some other man will have to take up what he has begun. For the sea must be mastered by the human consciousness, in the great hght of the human soul for mastery over life and death, in KNOWLEDGE. It is the last bitter necessity of the Tree. The Cross. Impartial, Dana beholds himself among the elements, calm and fatal. His style is great and hopeless, the style of a perfect tragic recorder.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 957