is conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and
moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale
Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to
his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically
Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and
its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House
of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and
Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do
anything directly to improve the condition of things. God will bring
about amendment in his own good time. And this fatalism again is subtly
connected with New England's ancestral creed--Calvinism. Hawthorne--it
has been pointed out a hundred times--is the Puritan romancer. His tales
are tales of the conscience: he is obsessed with the thought of sin,
with the doctrines of foreordination and total depravity. In the
theological library which he found stowed away in the garret of the Old
Manse, he preferred the seventeenth-century folio volumes of Puritan
divinity to the thin Unitarian sermons and controversial articles in the
files of _The Christian Examiner_. The former, at least, had once been
warm with a deep belief, however they had now "cooled down even to the
freezing point." But "the frigidity of the modern productions" was
"inherent." Hawthorne was never a church-goer and adhered to no
particular form of creed. But speculatively he liked his religion thick.

The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,
The songs that dared to go
Down searching through the abyss of man,
His deeps of conscious woe--

spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberal
Christianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm,
not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, but
attracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and by
the interesting varieties of human nature there assembled: literary
material which he used in "The Blithedale Romance." He complains slyly
of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows
(though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only a
symbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of any
kind).

Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irving
_plus_ something of his own. The resemblanc