III--HAWTHORNE
       The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the
       supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical--so surcharged with
       adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive
       fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a
       poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He
       was not a greater poet possibly than they--but a greater artist.
       Not only the character of his substance, but the care in his
       manner throws his workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind
       of bas-relief. Like Poe he quite naturally and unconsciously
       reaches out over his subject to his reader. His mesmerism seeks
       to mesmerize us--beyond Zenobia's sister. But he s too great an
       artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and
       Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too
       strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky
       seem to be by the morbidly fascinating--a kind of false beauty
       obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that
       he would weave his spell over us--as would the Grimms and Aesop.
       We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part
       of the artist's business. The effect is a part of his art-effort
       in its inception. Emerson's substance and even his manner has
       little to do with a designed effect--his thunderbolts or delicate
       fragments are flashed out regardless--they may knock us down or
       just spatter us--it matters little to him--but Hawthorne is more
       considerate; that is, he is more artistic, as men say.
       Hawthorne may be more noticeably indigenous or may have more
       local color, perhaps more national color than his Concord
       contemporaries. But the work of anyone who is somewhat more
       interested in psychology than in transcendental philosophy, will
       weave itself around individuals and their personalities. If the
       same anyone happens to live in Salem, his work is likely to be
       colored by the Salem wharves and Salem witches. If the same
       anyone happens to live in the "Old Manse" near the Concord Battle
       Bridge, he is likely "of a rainy day to betake himself to the
       huge garret," the secrets of which he wonders at, "but is too
       reverent of their dust and cobwebs to disturb." He is likely to
       "bow below the shriveled canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in
       wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of
       Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell of this
       reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens
       and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely
       "to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that
       the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands"...
       "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in
       Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be
       quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels
       rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the
       life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a
       poet of philosophy is.
       In Hawthorne's usual vicinity, the atmosphere was charged with
       the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England,-
       -ascetic or noble New England as you like. A novel, of necessity,
       nails an art-effort down to some definite part or parts of the
       earth's surface--the novelist's wagon can't always be hitched to
       a star. To say that Hawthorne was more deeply interested than
       some of the other Concord writers--Emerson, for example--in the
       idealism peculiar to his native land (in so far as such idealism
       of a country can be conceived of as separate from the political)
       would be as unreasoning as to hold that he was more interested in
       social progress than Thoreau, because he was in the consular
       service and Thoreau was in no one's service--or that the War
       Governor of Massachusetts was a greater patriot than Wendell
       Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. Hawthorne's
       art was true and typically American--as is the art of all men
       living in America who believe in freedom of thought and who live
       wholesome lives to prove it, whatever their means of expression.
       Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne, either in words or
       music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do
       with the influence of sin upon the conscience--something more
       than the Puritan conscience, but something which is permeated by
       it. In this relation he is wont to use what Hazlitt calls the
       "moral power of imagination." Hawthorne would try to spiritualize
       a guilty conscience. He would sing of the relentlessness of
       guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening
       innocent posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors, its
       specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play
       around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less
       guilty Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man
       Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne.
       There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet
       says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but
       penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the
       ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in
       its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound
       waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them
       rather than explain them--and here, some may say that he is wiser
       in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.
       Perhaps so, but no greater in the deeper ranges and profound
       mysteries of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life.
       This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music
       (the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended
       fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical
       adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal
       realms. It may have something to do with the children's
       excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost
       imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with
       "Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the
       little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do
       with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to
       those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as
       when the circus parade comes down Main Street; or something to do
       with the concert at the Stamford camp meeting, or the "Slave's
       Shuffle"; or something to do with the Concord he-nymph, or the
       "Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's Palace," or something else in the
       wonderbook--not something that happens, but the way something
       happens; or something to do with the "Celestial Railroad," or
       "Phoebe's Garden," or something personal, which tries to be
       "national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at
       midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived,
       or about something that never will happen, or something else that
       is not.
       Content of III--HAWTHORNE [Charles Ives' essays: "Essays Before a Sonata"
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