President Pierce, on one occasion, speaking to an acquaintance about
Hawthorne, said: "He is enthusiastic when he speaks of the aims and
self-sacrifice of some of the Brook Farm people; but when I questioned
him whether he would like to live and die in a community like that, he
confessed he was not suited to it, but said he had learned a great deal
from it. 'What, for instance?' 'Why, marketing, for one thing. I didn't
know anything about it practically, and I rode into Boston once or twice
with the men who took in things to sell, and saw how it was done.'" The
things of deepest moment which he learned were not to be stated fully in
conversation; but I suppose readers would draw the same inference from
this whimsical climax of Hawthorne's as that which has been found in
"The Blithedale Romance"; namely, that he looked on his socialistic life
as the merest jesting matter. Such, I think, is the general opinion; and
a socialistic writer, Mr. Noyes, of the Oneida Community, has
indignantly cried out against the book, as a "poetico-sneering romance."
This study of human character, which would keep its value in any state
of society that preserved its reflective faculty intact and sane, to be
belittled to the record of a brief experiment! Hawthorne indeed,
speaking in the prefatory third person of his own aim, says: "His whole
treatment of the affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of
the romance; nor does he put forward the slightest pretensions to
illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in
respect to socialism.
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