" And though he has told the story
autobiographically, it is through a character whom we ought by no means
to identify with Hawthorne in his whole mood. I have taken the liberty
of applying to Hawthorne's own experience two passages from Coverdale's
account, because they picture something known to be the case; and a
careful sympathy will find no difficulty in distinguishing how much is
real and how much assumed. Coverdale, being merely the medium for
impressions of the other characters, is necessarily light and
diaphanous, and Hawthorne, finding it more convenient, and an advantage
to the lifelikeness of the story, does not attempt to hold him up in the
air all the time, but lets him down now and then, and assumes the part
himself. The allusions to the community scheme are few, and most of them
are in the deepest way sympathetic. Precisely because the hopes of the
socialists were so unduly high, he values them and still is glad of
them, though they have fallen to ruin. "In my own behalf, I rejoice that
I could once think better of the world than it deserved. It is a mistake
into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and
higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error."
Where is the sneer concealed in this serious and comprehensive
utterance? There is a class of two-pronged minds, which seize a pair of
facts eagerly, and let the truth drop out of sight between them. For
these it is enough that Hawthorne made some use of his Brook Farm
memories in a romance, and then wrote that romance in the first person,
with a few dashes of humor.
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