The only direct exposition of his own case is
contained in a sketch, "The Journal of a Solitary Man," not reprinted
during his life. One extract from this I will make, because it sums up,
though more plaintively than was his wont, Hawthorne's view of his own
life at this epoch:--
"It is hard to die without one's happiness; to none more so than myself,
whose early resolution it had been to partake largely of the joys of
life, but never to be burdened with its cares. Vain philosophy! The very
hardships of the poorest laborer, whose whole existence seems one long
toil, has something preferable to my best pleasures. Merely skimming the
surface of life, I know nothing by my own experience of its deep and
warm realities, ... so that few mortals, even the humblest and weakest,
have been such ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I
must. Even a young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand
vagrant fantasies, I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed
to loneliness throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my
soul has never married itself to the soul of woman."
The touch about avoiding the cares of life is no doubt merely
metaphorical; but the self-imposed doom of eternal loneliness reveals
the excess of sombreness in which he clothed his condition to his own
perception. One may say that the adverse factors in his problem at this
time were purely imaginary; that a little resolution and determined
activity would have shaken off the incubus: but this is to lose sight of
the gist of the matter.
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