There are, then, different kinds of happiness; one label will not cover all. Hawthorne, who chose his words carefully, used “joy” only once in “The Maypole of Merrymount,” and then rel’erred to ”a troubled joy.” For the rest, the key words are “glee,” ”mirth,” “gay,” ”jollity.” Mirth, gaiety, jollity belong to the “silken” people of Merrymount, and before the end of the story they are forced and artificial, masks of “gay despair,” even among them. We are told of the people of Merrymount, “Once, it is said, they were seen following a flower-decked corpse, with merriment and festive movement to the grave. But did the dead man laugh?” (p.86). In their treatment of death they tried to ignore a truth that Hawthorne could never forget, and which he suggests we should not ignore. It is a part of the falsity of Judge Pyncheon that he tried to ignore it’ crowding his life with material gain and public honors, and fmally dying with his watch before him and his mind filled with speculation on further gains to be made in the fiteen, twenty “yes, perhaps fve and twenty” years he hoped lay before him. My freshman student quotes, as the perfect expression of hippie belief, this couplet:
The Creator has a master plan Peace and joy throughout the land.
Hawthorne, in addition to objecting to the false rhyme, would have added qualifications. For the awakened person he saw a “troubled joy,” including knowledge of sorrow, of death, of sin in which somehow we all bear complicity, and with both joy and trouble intensifed by love, linking us to others who share in the human condition.
With such distinctions, we can hardly call Hawthorne a true and complete hippie. Neither can we deny that he shared the hippies’ aversions and the most essential of their desires. We can see him as relevant the word is useful if overworked even to the hippie generation. To do so we need those qualities in which he was strongest: humility to accept as equals and as like ourselves people of all classes, ages, and times, and historical imagination to see essential likeness of one time to another beneath their superficial differences.
NOTES
1 A recent immigrant, with the fresh perspective of the newcomer, has been struck with how clearly the hippie is a part of older American tradition. Only in America, he points out, do youth who turn to free love, perversions, and drugs feel the need to turn them into virtues by linking them to the cause of peace. Like Cotton Mather, they must convince themselves that they are doing good before they can act. See Leopold Tyrmand, “Reflections: Notebook of a Dilettante,” New Yorker, November 6, 1968, p. 72.
2 See William E Bridges, “Transcendentalism and Psychotherapy: Another Look at Emerson,” American Literature, XLI (1969), 157-77.
3 Frederick J. Hoffman sketches that mood in chapter 1, ‘ The Temper of the Twenties,” in The Twenties (New York, 1962).
4 Thomas Woodson comments (unfavorably) on Thoreau’s change of principles m “Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity,” PMLA, LXXXI (1970). 21-34.
5 Q. D. Leavis, ”Hawthorne as Poet,” in Interpretarions of American Literature, ed.
Charles Feidelson, Jr. and Paul Brodtkorb. Jr. (New York, 1959), p. 32; R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), p. 111.
6 The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, 1937), p. 200. All quotations from the novels and stories are from this edition. Page numbers will hereafter be given in parentheses in the text.
7 Lewis,p. 112.
8 American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 1932), p. 174.
9 Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife(Boston, 1888), p. 238. 10 American Notebooks, pp. 203-4.
I I Mossesfrom an Old Manse (Philadelphia, 1891), p. 20.
12 Pp. Ixxvi-lxxix.
13 In Hawthorne in Eng/and, ed. Cushing Strout (Ithaca, 1965), pp. 230-33.
14 See my essay, “The Body in Hawthorne’s Fountain,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Ll l (1967), 383-89.
I 5 Hawthorne in England, pp. 207-8.
16 Ibid., p. 2S8.
17 The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Hyatt H. Waggoner (Boston, 1964), pp. xi-xii.
18 See Howard Mumford Jones’s comment: “The American wing of the literary museum was virtually unvisited until rumor went round that Melville and Hawthorne were seen there conversing with the devil.” The Bright Medusa (Urbane, 1952), p. 2.
19 F. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), pp. 234-35.
20 American Notebooks, p. 82.
21 Hawthorne in England, p. 223.
22 Interpretations of American Literature, p. 35
23 Matthiessen, p. 227.
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