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Updated: May 4, 2025
Chillingworth is perhaps too devilish a shape of revenge to be discussed as a human individual. Septimius, again, is distinct; and the characterization of Westervelt, in "Blithedale," slight as it is, is very stimulating.
He went to West Roxbury on April 12, 1841, and as it happened in a driving northeast snowstorm, an unpropitious beginning, of which he has given a graphic account in "The Blithedale Romance." At first he liked his work at the Farm. The novelty of it proved attractive to him.
Indeed, one cannot but regret that Hawthorne should be so economical of his undoubted stores of humor, and that, in the two romances he has since written, humor, in the form of character, does not appear at all. Before proceeding to the consideration of "The Blithedale Romance," it is necessary to say a few words on the seeming separation of Hawthorne's genius from his will.
I said just now that Priscilla was infelicitous; but immediately afterwards I open the volume at a page in which the author describes some of the out-of-door amusements at Blithedale, and speaks of a foot-race across the grass, in which some of the slim young girls of the society joined. "Priscilla's peculiar charm in a foot-race was the weakness and irregularity with which she ran.
In no one instance, however, did I voluntarily speak of my three friends. They dwelt in a profounder region. The more I consider myself as I then was, the more do I recognize how deeply my connection with those three had affected all my being. As it was already the epoch of annihilated space, I might in the time I was away from Blithedale have snatched a glimpse at England, and been back again.
There is a train of thought suggested in "Blithedale" which receives only partial illustration in that story, touching the possible identity of love and hate. It had evidently engaged Hawthorne from a very early period, and would have made rich material for an entire romance, or for several treating different phases of it.
Blithedale, where their acquaintance had begun, had not allowed either of them to forget how to help himself. It was amusing to one who knew this native independence of Hawthorne, to hear, some years afterwards, that he wrote the "campaign" Life of Franklin Pierce for the sake of getting an office.
Ellery Channing came with a man named Buttrick to borrow Hawthorne's boat for the search, and Hawthorne went with them. As it happened, they were the ones who found the corpse, and Hawthorne's account in his diary of its recovery is a terribly accurate description, softened down and poetized in the rewritten statement of "The Blithedale Romance."
This conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan.
The reader may possibly find in it the original of the thrilling conclusion of the 'Blithedale Romance, and learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even in regions apparently so torpid as Concord." Far too much has been made of the realistic elements in the "Blithedale Romance."
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