She would knit socks while she
talked Plato: but the best testimony to her character is the character
of her friends. People are known by the company they keep.
The one quality which Hawthorne had in common with the
transcendentalists, except such qualities as are common to all good
people, was ideality. Next to the grand structure of his head, this is
the most noticeable characteristic in the pictures of him. He seems to
have been attracted to them at first, and was even mistaken for a
transcendentalist by Edgar A. Poe, and was attacked by that fiery
Virginian in a most belligerent manner.
At Brook Farm, however, he soon began to differentiate from them, and
finally acquired for them something like an aversion. Neither is this to
be wondered at. Hawthorne was an artist pure and simple. He looked for
ideality in human life; not in the ideas that control and direct it. He
was not like Raphael and Shakspeare, men who could enjoy philosophy and
make their art so much the richer and deeper for it. He saw everything
in a pictorial form; facts and conditions which did not make a picture
had no value for him, and reasoning was a weariness and a disagreeable
effort. Nevertheless he did the best he could.
It is delightful to think of the tremendous energy with which he worked
at Brook Farm. No one else seems to have done so much hard labor there.
He was better fitted for this than many of his colleagues, having a
strong, full-chested frame, and is said in his youth to have been a very
swift runner and skater; but nothing indicates better the latent force
that was in this quiet and usually inactive man.
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