{"id":10335,"date":"2010-09-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/from-hearth-fires-to-hell-fires"},"modified":"2021-06-14T11:16:32","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T15:16:32","slug":"from-hearth-fires-to-hell-fires","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/from-hearth-fires-to-hell-fires","title":{"rendered":"From Hearth-Fires to Hell-Fires"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\r\n Editor\u2019s Note <\/div>\r\n \t
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This essay is accompanied by New Atlantis<\/em> critical editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s short stories \u201cFire Worship<\/a>,\u201d \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cEthan Brand<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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What I desire is man\u2019s red fire to make my dreams come true….
Give me the power of man\u2019s red flower so I can be like you.<\/em><\/p>\t<\/div>\r\n\t

\r\n \u2013 King Louie, the orangutan, in Disney\u2019s\u00a0The Jungle Book<\/em> <\/div>\r\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

From the ancient myth of Prometheus to the Biblical story of Babel to the modern children\u2019s fable of Mowgli, fire has been central to human identity and aspiration. Man\u2019s control of fire distinguishes him from the rest of creation. Thus, in the Kipling story, the man-child Mowgli discovers that he can keep the tiger, Shere Khan, at bay with a burning brand. In Disney\u2019s adaptation of Kipling\u2019s The Jungle Book<\/a><\/em>, King Louie and his troop of monkeys kidnap Mowgli in hopes of wresting from him the secret of fire and, thus, dominion. As Leon R. Kass notes in his book The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis<\/a><\/em>, while discussing the firing of bricks by the tower builders of Babel,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fire is universally the symbol of the arts and crafts, of technology. Through the controlled use of fire\u2019s transforming power, human beings set about to alter the world, presumably because, as it is, it is insufficient for human need. Imitating God\u2019s creation of man out of the dust of the ground, the human race begins its own project of creation by firing and transforming portions of the earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was an author much interested in the elements and their symbolic meaning, wrote three tales that make explicit reference to fire in their titles: \u201cFire Worship<\/a>,\u201d \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cEthan Brand<\/a>.\u201d Read in sequence they form an argument of sorts about technology, progress, and modernity \u2014 an argument that issues in a warning about man\u2019s quest for dominion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first of Hawthorne\u2019s fire fables, \u201cFire Worship,\u201d he traces and laments \u201ca great revolution in social and domestic life\u201d brought about by the \u201cexchange of the open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove.\u201d \u201cFire Worship\u201d is not so much a story as an essay of social criticism, not unlike an article that might appear in the pages of this journal observing the effects of some new device or application (like cell phones or the Internet) on the character and quality of human connection. There are today a fair number of people who are either leery of certain technologies (perhaps declining to own a television or regulating their children\u2019s exposure to various electronic media) or at least prepared to acknowledge the downsides (such as the explosion in access to pornography via the Internet). However, we tend to take our furnaces and central heating for granted. Aware of fuel costs, we are no longer aware of any moral or spiritual costs. \u201cFire Worship\u201d is a wonderful time-traveling exercise offering insights as startling as Socrates\u2019 complaint in the Phaedrus<\/em> about the perils of the written word. While we are no more likely to return to open hearths than to an oral culture, we can benefit from the remembrance, as Hawthorne indicates by the title of the collection in which \u201cFire Worship\u201d appeared: Mosses from an Old Manse<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of the twenty-six tales, essays, and sketches in the volume, two of them, \u201cFire Worship\u201d and \u201cBuds and Bird Voices,\u201d are explicitly linked to the autobiographical title piece, \u201cThe Old Manse: The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode.\u201d That abode was a \u201cmossgrown country parsonage\u201d (the ancestral home of the priestly Emerson family), where, for three and a half years, the newly-married Hawthorne lived as the first \u201clay occupant.\u201d \u201cThe Old Manse\u201d is a transcendentalist idyll about the house (especially the study \u2014 \u201cIt was here that Emerson wrote \u2018Nature\u2019\u201d \u2014 and superannuated library) and its natural environs (\u201cthe river, the battle field, the orchard, and the garden\u201d). Similar in tone, although without the focus on scholarly productions, \u201cBuds and Bird Voices\u201d is a paean to the arrival of Spring. By contrast, \u201cFire Worship\u201d is an anti-idyll \u2014 a wintry meditation on an advancing technological \u201cabomination.\u201d The seasonal setting of each piece is distinct: \u201cBuds and Bird Voices\u201d belongs to \u201cbalmy spring\u201d; \u201cThe Old Manse\u201d is set in summer and fall; \u201cFire Worship\u201d opens in bleakest winter. Both the non-winter essays, however, make brief but pointed reference to the infernal contraption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is the airtight stove an \u201cenormity\u201d? Hawthorne grants that the stove is vastly more efficient than the open hearth, consuming fewer cords of wood, generating more heat, with less risk of danger. Indeed, efficiency, comfort, and safety were the motives behind Benjamin Franklin\u2019s invention of the cast-iron stove in the 1740s. Whereas Franklin fully subscribed to the Baconian and Cartesian faith in technology, Hawthorne is a dissenter. He challenges all three motives. Another name for the virtue of efficiency is the vice of inhospitality: \u201cgrudging the food that kept him cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a daily pittance.\u201d The comfort we gain from our stinginess is a \u201cblack and cheerless comfort.\u201d We are deprived of \u201cthe bright face of [an] ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the hearth and play the part of more familiar sunshine.\u201d Even our increased safety is quite overrated, according to Hawthorne:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor did it lessen the charm of his soft, familiar courtesy and helpfulness, that the mighty spirit, were opportunity offered him, would run riot through the peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible embrace, and leave nothing of them save their whitened bones. This possibility of mad destruction only made his domestic kindness the more … touching.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The gravamen of Hawthorne\u2019s complaint, which is a complaint not just about the Franklin stove but about the spirit of Franklin, is that \u201cthe inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.\u201d The stove is a representative instance, but also a special one, since fire is \u201cthat quick and subtle spirit, whom Prometheus lured from Heaven to civilize mankind.\u201d Fire is both an elemental force of \u201cwild Nature\u201d \u2014 \u201che that comes roaring out of \u00c6tna and rushes madly up the sky like a fiend breaking loose from torment\u201d \u2014 and our instrument \u2014 \u201che is the great artisan and laborer by whose aid men are enabled to build a world within a world, or, at least, to smoothe down the rough creation which Nature flung to us.\u201d But beyond his \u201cterrible might\u201d and \u201cmany-sided utility,\u201d he was heretofore also our \u201chomely friend.\u201d Hawthorne calls fire \u201cthe great conservative of Nature\u201d because of his part in all \u201clifelong and age-coeval associations.\u201d The hearth is the center of the home, and the home is the foundation of larger enterprises. Hawthorne asserts that \u201cWhile a man was true to the fireside, so long would he be true to country and law, to the God whom his fathers worshipped, to the wife of his youth, and to all things else which instinct or religion have taught us to consider sacred.\u201d The virtues of marital fidelity, patriotism, and piety all take their spark from the domesticated fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawthorne attaches particular importance to the glowing face of the fire which works sympathetically upon the imagination. For whoever looks into the fire-light, \u201cHe pictured forth their very thoughts. To the youthful he showed the scenes of the adventurous life before them; to the aged the shadows of departed love and hope; and, if all earthly things had grown distasteful, he could gladden the fireside muser with golden glimpses of a better world\u201d \u2014 all the while, \u201ccausing the teakettle to boil.\u201d The stove, of course, retains (and even intensifies) the useful heat. However, it removes our contact with the light. The fire becomes invisible, damaging both communion and contemplation. In the opening sentence, Hawthorne speaks of a revolution not only in \u201csocial and domestic life,\u201d but also \u201cin the life of a secluded student.\u201d Without \u201cthat peculiar medium of vision,\u201d both fellowship and scholarship will take on a different \u2014 less insightful and generous \u2014 quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Elliott Banfield<\/cite><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>\u201cFire Worship\u201d is a tightly constructed piece, just eleven paragraphs in length. After the opening four paragraphs, in which Hawthorne delineates the multifarious nature of fire, the central three paragraphs offer a description of a day around the hearth of \u201cthe good old clergyman, my predecessor in this mansion.\u201d Hawthorne imagines him in his prime, decades before he would brick over the fireplace and install the wretched modern convenience. We see him writing a sermon under the influence of \u201cthe aspect of the morning fireside\u201d; receiving a parishioner who has \u201cbeen looking the inclement weather in the face\u201d but to whom the \u201cwarmth of benevolence\u201d is now extended. We see him, after making his own daily pastoral rounds, return to the twilight fireside, \u201ca beacon light of humanity.\u201d Finally, in the evening, the family gathers, \u201cchildren tumbled themselves upon the hearth rug, and grave puss sat with her back to the fire.\u201d After this commemorative portrait, Hawthorne declares: \u201cHeaven forgive the old clergyman!\u201d He notes the reasons that might have led the octogenarian to \u201cbid farewell to the face of his old friend forever\u201d: cutbacks in his monthly allotment of wood and the increasing draftiness of the old house; \u201cbut still it was one of the saddest tokens of the decline and fall of open fireplaces that the gray patriarch should have deigned to warm himself at an airtight stove.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final four paragraphs shift to Hawthorne, who, despite his views on the matter, compounded the \u201cshame\u201d by installing three more stoves throughout the house, so now \u201cnot a glimpse of this mighty and kindly one will greet your eyes.\u201d Hawthorne finds himself in the position of so many technological doubters. His conscience worries and objects, but in point of fact, he allows himself to follow the current. Hawthorne\u2019s own complicity may help explain his ironic tone. In the preface to the Mosses<\/em>, he says that these sketches are \u201coften but half in earnest.\u201d So while he has no intention of forwarding a rejectionist policy of radical reaction, he does want us to reflect on the moral effects of living with stoves and furnaces. Poetic hyperbole is part of his method. He writes from experience \u2014 the experience of his own grudging participation. As a member of the transitional generation, he warns of the coming hearthlessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he had described the gladsome character of fire\u2019s visible presence, Hawthorne in turn describes the malign character of its invisible presence. Though caged, the fire can still be felt in scorched fingers and singed garments; and smelled in the \u201cvolumes of smoke and noisome gas\u201d that issue through the cracks; and especially heard \u2014 sighing, hissing, and moaning, \u201cburdened with unutterable grief\u201d at \u201cthe ingratitude of mankind … to whom he taught all their arts, even that of making his own prison house.\u201d In transforming the transformative agent, we live with a \u201cdarkened source.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawthorne traces the \u201cinvaluable moral influences\u201d that will be lost when \u201cthe sacred trust of the household fire … transmitted in unbroken succession from the earliest ages\u201d has been extinguished by \u201cphysical science.\u201d The effects will be most profound for future generations. Those who grew up around the fireside will retain certain salutary habits:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We shall draw our chairs together as we and our forefathers have been wont for thousands of years back, and sit around some blank and empty corner of the room, babbling with unreal cheerfulness of topics suitable to the homely fireside. A warmth from the past \u2014 from the ashes of by-gone years and the raked-up embers of long ago \u2014 will sometimes thaw the ice about our hearts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For the young, however, raised with either \u201cthe sullen stove\u201d or, even worse, \u201cfurnace heat\u201d in \u201chouses which might be fancied to have their foundation over the infernal pit,\u201d the mutual bond will be broken. Hawthorne predicts that \u201cThere will be nothing to attract these poor children to one centre…. Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners.\u201d If Hawthorne is right, it didn\u2019t require televisions and personal computers in every room for the family to be atomized. What we call \u201ccentral heat\u201d is in truth diffused heat. With heat diffused so efficiently into every nook and cranny, there is no necessity for family and friends to gather together, and no special atmosphere (which \u201cmelts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts\u201d) to vivify the occasional grouping. Along with the heat, fellow-feeling is diffused. Social intercourse of many types will suffer or even disappear: \u201ceasy gossip; the merry yet unambitious jest; the lifelike, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word.\u201d Instead, \u201cconversation will contract the air of debate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a kind of confirmation of Hawthorne\u2019s intuition, it is interesting that for a long time after the advent of whole-house heating, homes continued to be built with at least one functioning fireplace, usually in the living room. However, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, new homes were constructed without even that token of tradition. In the last two decades, this trend toward hearthlessness has been dramatically reversed. New homes now have multiple fireplaces, in kitchens, family rooms, and master bedrooms. They are of course often gas or electric, so they are convenient, but they do offer a visible flame (or simulacrum thereof). Wood-burning fire-pits for the deck are also all the rage. Sales of candles increase every year. Perhaps there is an ineradicable human longing for the fireside and fire-light. We seek ways to compensate for the social and psychic disruptions of technological progress. It remains an open question whether these modern versions of the hearth (which are strictly speaking gratuitous) can truly preserve traditional practices and virtues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the final paragraph, Hawthorne returns to his opening claim about the linkage between the virtues of the domestic, religious, and political realms. His text is the ancient \u201cexhortation to fight \u2018pro aris et focis,\u2019 for the altars and the hearths.\u201d These are the sacred locations \u2014 kindred in spirit \u2014 that inspire patriotic sacrifice. Hawthorne calls the hearth \u201ca divine idea, imbodied in brick and mortar,\u201d presided over by mothers rather than priests. The hearth with its chimney, though constructed of the same brick that built the impious tower of Babel, expresses a very different aspiration. Those who would defile the hearth would stop at nothing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man who did not put off his shoes upon this holy ground would have deemed it pastime to trample upon the altar. It has been our task to uproot the hearth. What further reform is left for our children to achieve, unless they overthrow the altar too?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Once hearth and altar are both gone, Hawthorne wonders what patriotism will rest upon or appeal to. \u201cFight for your stoves!<\/span>\u201d is not a battle cry that will \u201crouse up native valor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One change begets others. At the close of \u201cThe Old Manse,\u201d Hawthorne tells of his forced relocation from the Old Manse to the Custom-House prompted by the current owner\u2019s desire to renovate \u2014 not a project of which Hawthorne approves, inasmuch as \u201cthe hand that renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which destroys.\u201d The renovating, progressive temperament is the main theme of Hawthorne\u2019s second fire story, \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this satirical allegory we find not a hearth but a bonfire, by means of which Earth\u2019s inhabitants plan to rid themselves of \u201can accumulation of wornout trumpery.\u201d Instead of being \u201cthe great conservative,\u201d fire will become the cleansing and purging agent of reform. The site of the bonfire, selected by \u201cthe insurance companies\u201d with a view to safety and accessibility, \u201cwas one of the broadest prairies of the west.\u201d The account of the fire\u2019s progress and the reactions of various bystanders are given by a narrator who hopes that \u201cthe illumination of the bonfire might reveal some profundity of moral truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the bonfire is kindled with \u201cyesterday\u2019s newspapers,\u201d a group of \u201crough-looking men\u201d hurl all the paraphernalia of aristocracy into the fire, such things as \u201cthe blazonry of coat armor, the crests and devices of illustrious families, pedigrees that extended back … into the mist of the dark ages,\u201d at the sight of which \u201cthe multitude of plebeian spectators set up a joyous shout.\u201d The narrator\u2019s comment acknowledges the justice of the democratic triumph over the past. After all, the nobility were \u201ccreatures of the same clay and same spiritual infirmities, who had dared to assume the privileges due only to Heaven\u2019s better workmanship.\u201d Nonetheless, Hawthorne does not allow the reader to forget the beauty that is lost with the demise of aristocracy. A \u201cgrayhaired man, of stately presence,\u201d steps forward and lectures the spectators:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People, what have you done? This fire is consuming all that marked your advance from barbarism, or that could have prevented your relapse thither. We, the men of the privileged orders, were those who kept alive from age to age the old chivalrous spirit; the gentle and generous thought; the higher, the purer, the more refined and delicate life. With the nobles, too, you cast off the poet, the painter, the sculptor \u2014 all the beautiful arts; for we were their patrons, and created the atmosphere in which they flourish. In abolishing the majestic distinctions of rank, society loses not only its grace, but its steadfastness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA rude figure,\u201d who threatens to cast the nobleman himself into the fire, responds with a speech in defense of various natural superiorities (\u201cstrength of arm … wit, wisdom, courage, force of character\u201d) but dismissive of the \u201cnonsense\u201d of inherited \u201cplace and consideration.\u201d The final word on this first reform goes to a \u201cgrave observer,\u201d with whom the narrator converses, who approves of the burning of this \u201cantiquated trash\u201d but with a caveat: \u201cif no worse nonsense comes in its place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next upon the pile went all the insignia and pomp of monarchy. The age of \u201cuniversal manhood\u201d having arrived, no one speaks up for monarchy. The \u201cfallen nobleman,\u201d hooted from the scene for defending his prerogatives, has \u201cshrunk back into the crowd.\u201d Hawthorne seems to suggest that the fundamental political alternatives are aristocracy and democracy. Monarchy is simply a further refinement of an order built upon hereditary rank. As Montesquieu argued: \u201cthe nobility is of the essence of monarchy.\u201d Once the notion of rank is discredited, monarchy cannot sustain itself. To escape the smoke and smell of the burning purple wardrobes, the narrator and his acquaintance move to the other side of the bonfire, where another facet of \u201cthe general and systematic measures of reform\u201d is underway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cvotaries of temperance\u201d have collected \u201cthe whole world\u2019s stock of spirituous liquors\u201d and offered them to the \u201cinsatiable thirst of the fire fiend.\u201d Once again, \u201cthe multitude gave a shout as if the broad earth were exulting in its deliverance from the curse of ages.\u201d However, \u201cthe joy was not universal.\u201d In fact, there were \u201cmany\u201d who \u201cdeemed that human life would be gloomier than ever.\u201d The \u201clast toper\u201d steps forth as their spokesman:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is this world good for … now that we can never be jolly any more? What is to comfort the poor man in sorrow and perplexity? How is he to keep his heart warm against the cold winds of this cheerless earth? And what do you propose to give him in exchange for the solace that you take away? How are old friends to sit together by the fireside without a cheerful glass between them? A plague upon your reformation! It is a sad world, a cold world, a selfish world, a low world, not worth an honest fellow\u2019s living in, now that good fellowship is gone forever!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Despite the \u201cgreat mirth\u201d of the bystanders at this harangue, the narrator \u201ccould not help commiserating the forlorn condition of the last toper\u201d who had indeed lost his \u201cboon companions.\u201d He had also managed to \u201cfilch a bottle of fourth-proof brandy that fell beside the bonfire\u201d \u2014 the first concrete act of resistance. The reformers don\u2019t notice, however. In their moralistic \u201czeal,\u201d they are casting tea, coffee, and tobacco \u201cupon the heap of inutility.\u201d The assault on tobacco, in particular, startles and provokes \u201can old gentleman\u201d who declares: \u201cEvery thing rich and racy \u2014 all the spice of life \u2014 is to be condemned as useless. Now that they have kindled the bonfire, if these nonsensical reformers would fling themselves into it, all would be well enough!\u201d Earlier, the fallen nobleman was told to count himself lucky to have lost his pedigree rather than his life to the fire. Now, the reformers themselves are at least passively wished into the pyre. The final word, however, goes to \u201ca stanch conservative\u201d who seems to warn against such wishes. With grim irony, he predicts the course of the holocaust\u2019s relentless logic: \u201cBe patient … it will come to that in the end. They will first fling us in, and finally themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator\u2019s attention shifts again, \u201cfrom the general and systematic measures of reform\u201d to \u201cthe individual contributions.\u201d There is a purely personal animus toward the past. The jilted and the bored toss their love letters, disappointed professionals throw in the tools of their trade (including the false teeth of \u201ca hack politician\u201d defeated for office), and, most striking to the narrator, \u201ca number of ladies, highly respectable in appearance,\u201d propose \u201cto fling their gowns and petticoats into the flames, and assume the garb, together with the manners, duties, offices, and responsibilities, of the opposite sex.\u201d As the feminist slogan of the 1960s expressed it: \u201cthe personal is political.\u201d Before the narrator can witness the outcome of this moment in which female dissatisfaction is annealed into feminism, a \u201cpoor, deceived, and half-delirious girl\u201d attempts to throw herself into the fire and is rescued by \u201ca good man\u201d who counsels \u201cpatience.\u201d He attempts to instruct her in the difference between what is fit for the fire \u2014 \u201cthings of matter and creations of human fantasy\u201d \u2014 and what is not \u2014 \u201ca living soul\u201d meant for \u201ceternity.\u201d Insisting, however, that \u201cthe sunshine is blotted out,\u201d she only sinks from \u201cfrenzy\u201d to \u201cdeep despondency.\u201d While it is possible that a particular reform has driven her mad (say, the one contemplated by the respectable ladies), it seems more likely from the textual evidence that she embraces the fire as a final solution to some earlier trauma (thus, she had rushed toward it, \u201cexclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead\u201d). Her attempted suicide demonstrates the difficulty of setting any bounds to the fire\u2019s destructive use. Regret can extend well beyond yesterday\u2019s feelings and actions, well beyond the conventions and choices of the past, to one\u2019s very essence and existence. The flame of modernity attracts and consumes the flighty moth of \u201cthe self.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Elliott Banfield<\/cite><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>The scene shifts dramatically back to politics proper, both foreign and domestic, with the next two reforms targeting the weapons of war and the instruments of capital punishment. Disarmament, the prelude to the abolition of war itself, occasions \u201cgreat diversity of opinion,\u201d with \u201cthe hopeful philanthropist\u201d greeting the millennium, while those \u201cin whose view mankind was a breed of bulldogs, prophesied that all the old stoutness, fervor, nobleness, generosity, and magnanimity of the race would disappear.\u201d Despite the doubters, the reform proceeds apace: \u201cIt was wonderful to behold how these terrible instruments of slaughter melted away like playthings of wax.\u201d Commentary, in this case, is provided by a \u201cveteran commander\u201d and a man identified only by his \u201csneer.\u201d The commander believes that \u201call this foolery has only made more work for the armorers and cannon founders.\u201d Since \u201cthe battle field is the only court\u201d where suits between nations can be tried, the \u201cnecessity of war\u201d will return. The narrator speaks up on behalf of universal peace, suggesting that a transnational tribunal of \u201cReason and Philanthropy\u201d will be constituted. In effect, there will be a new sovereign; international law will replace national sovereignty. In the midst of the discussion between the commander and the narrator, the man with the sneer interjects a comment that reaches deeper than the debate over whether rearmament will occur: \u201cWhen Cain wished to slay his brother, he was at no loss for a weapon.\u201d The problem is man\u2019s heart, not his arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While God dealt with Cain in his own way, the descendants of Cain \u2014 Cain, remember, was the founder of the first city and the forefather of Noah \u2014 have instituted their own method: capital punishment. The reformers, after bringing the whole world under juridical control, seek to make human judgment milder. In casting \u201cthose horrible monsters of mechanism\u201d \u2014 the headsmen\u2019s axes and halters, the guillotine and gallows \u2014 into the blaze, they correct \u201cthe long and deadly error of human law.\u201d Not surprisingly, the executioner, \u201can ill-looking fellow,\u201d defends his livelihood \u201cwith brute fury.\u201d However, the narrator notes that men consecrated to the benevolent guardianship of society also took \u201cthe hangman\u2019s view of the question.\u201d One of this class declares:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are misled by a false philanthropy; you know not what you do. The gallows is a Heaven-ordained instrument. Bear it back, then, reverently, and set it up in its old place, else the world will fall to speedy ruin and desolation!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The reformers prevail when one of their leaders counters: \u201cHow can human law inculcate benevolence and love while it persists in setting up the gallows as its chief symbol?\u201d In a pattern that has become familiar, this \u201ctriumph of the earth\u2019s redemption\u201d is hedged about with doubts. Although the narrator declares the act \u201cwell done,\u201d the \u201cthoughtful observer\u201d is more cautious: \u201cwell done, if the world be good enough for the measure. Death, however, is an idea that cannot easily be dispensed with in any condition between the primal innocence and that other purity and perfection which perchance we are destined to attain.\u201d Still, he thinks \u201cthe experiment\u201d is worth trying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next rash of moral reforms serves as a verdict of sorts on the experiment. With the most fearsome bulwark of society gone, the crowd is caught up in more radical measures: burning marriage certificates, currency, title deeds, statute books, and written constitutions. The narrator himself finally balks at this assault on the institutions of marriage, private property, and government. The growth of radicalism can be seen by comparing the first phase of \u201cindividual contributions\u201d to the bonfire to this second phase. Earlier, disappointed lovers rejected the past, burning old \u201cbundles of perfumed letters and enamoured sonnets.\u201d Now, in burning \u201ctheir marriage certificates\u201d and other instruments of fixed commitments, they are in some sense burning the future, or at least the link between present and future. Each of these institutions depends on a present promise (or agreement or contract) that binds and determines the shape of the future. Such promises, however voluntary, can be experienced as a restriction on freedom. Accordingly, the very notions of promise-keeping and law-abidingness must be abolished, so that each moment will be left radically undetermined. The \u201cgood people around the bonfire\u201d are pursuing a powerfully antinomian version of autonomy. For the self to be absolutely sovereign, it must be above all law, even those laws that it gives to itself. The arbitrary self scorns the rigors of self-government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly, the reformers expect not only the fullest freedom but the widest fellowship as well. Free love will yield \u201ca higher, holier, and more comprehensive union\u201d; once property claims are destroyed, \u201cthe whole soil of the earth [will] revert to the public.\u201d Belonging will be universal rather than exclusive or specific. In a \u201cconsummated world,\u201d freedom and fraternity will be conjoined. Departing from his usual practice, Hawthorne does not provide any expressions of doubt or debate on these reforms, other than the narrator\u2019s opening remark that \u201cI was hardly prepared to keep them company.\u201d Perhaps he assumes that most readers \u2014 even relatively na\u00efve ones like the narrator \u2014 will part company with the enthusiasts at this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator\u2019s attention is now drawn to matters that \u201cconcerned my sympathies more nearly.\u201d The book burning has begun. \u201cThe world\u2019s entire mass of printed paper, bound or in sheets\u201d is to be consigned to the fire. It is not just written law that oppresses, but the written word of all types. \u201cA modern philosopher\u201d heartily approves, since we need to \u201cget rid of the weight of dead men\u2019s thought.\u201d There follows a delightful excursus upon literature, as the narrator is able to judge the quality of each author\u2019s (or nation\u2019s or genre\u2019s) writing by how it burns. Some authors generate \u201ca brilliant shower of sparkles\u201d (Voltaire, for instance); others \u201csmouldered away to ashes like rotten wood\u201d (the class of commentators); the Germans emit \u201ca scent of brimstone\u201d; while \u201cthe English standard authors made excellent fuel, generally exhibiting the properties of sound oak logs.\u201d Special mention is made of Milton (\u201ca powerful blaze\u201d) and Shakespeare, from whom<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there gushed a flame of such marvellous splendor that men shaded their eyes as against the sun\u2019s meridian glory; nor even when the works of his own elucidators were flung upon him did he cease to flash forth a dazzling radiance from beneath the ponderous heap. It is my belief that he is still blazing as fervidly as ever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The burning of Shakespeare occasions a debate between the narrator and \u201ca critic\u201d \u2014 doubtless a follower of Emerson \u2014 about poetic originality and the anxiety of influence. The critic favors self-reliance, whereas the narrator argues for standing on the shoulders of ancient giants: \u201cIt is not every one that can steal the fire from heaven like Prometheus; but when once he had done the deed, a thousand hearths were kindled by it.\u201d Appropriately, the narrator goes on to praise humble works like \u201cMother Goose\u2019s Melodies,\u201d \u201cthe single sheet of an old ballad,\u201d and \u201can unregarded ditty of some nameless bard,\u201d which he observes burn brighter and longer than many more acclaimed works. As in \u201cFire Worship,\u201d Hawthorne links the poetic and the prosaic; the Promethean genius Shakespeare lights the way for more homely, domesticated writers. This fire of imagination, whether heavenly or hearthly, is profoundly different from the bonfire of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cFire Worship,\u201d Hawthorne spoke of the fiendish, riotous form of fire \u201cto whose ravenous maw, it is said, the universe shall one day be given as a final feast.\u201d Here the narrator fears that the apocalypse may be the next item on the reform agenda: \u201cUnless we set fire to the earth itself, and then leap boldly off into infinite space, I know not that we can carry reform to any farther point.\u201d His friend, however, realizes there is still fuel to come \u201cthat will startle many persons who have lent a willing hand thus far.\u201d The fresh fuel turns out to be the accoutrements of religion: surplices, mitres, crosses, baptismal fonts, everything from the \u201cundecorated pulpits\u201d of New England to the \u201cspoils\u201d of St. Peter\u2019s. Despite the narrator\u2019s initial \u201castonishment,\u201d he reconciles himself to this latest reformation with the thought that the purging of external emblems may render faith \u201cmore sublime in its simplicity\u201d and that \u201cthe woodpaths shall be the aisles of our cathedral \u2014 the firmament itself shall be its ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reform, however, is not complete. There is a final consummation. The Bible, which we learn had been spared during the \u201cgeneral destruction of books,\u201d is now sacrificed by \u201cthe Titan of innovation.\u201d Reform is its own religion. Hawthorne describes the apotheosis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the Titan of innovation, \u2014 angel or fiend, double in his nature, and capable of deeds befitting both characters, \u2014 at first shaking down only the old and rotten shapes of things, had now, as it appeared, laid his terrible hand upon the main pillars which supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual state. The inhabitants of the earth had grown too enlightened to define their faith within a form of words or to limit the spiritual by any analogy to our material existence. Truths which the heavens trembled at were now but a fable of the world\u2019s infancy. Therefore, as the final sacrifice of human error, what else remained to be thrown upon the embers of that awful pile except the book which, though a celestial revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere as regarded the present race of man? It was done!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Church Bible, family Bible, and bosom Bible are all flung in. As in \u201cFire Worship,\u201d the institutional structures of society are linked. Tearing down one prepares the way for the demolition of others. The titanic spirit of reform, which is hostile to tradition qua<\/em> tradition, is incapable of making distinctions between unsound and sound, between the superannuated and the timeless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his easygoing way, the narrator has adjusted to most of the reforms, arguing for instance that the general book-burning would open \u201can enviable field for the authors of the next generation\u201d and counseling \u201cthe desperate bookworm\u201d to consider whether \u201cNature\u201d is not \u201cbetter than a book.\u201d At the Bible-burning, however, he grows pale. Somewhat surprisingly, his distress \u2014 and the distress of the other onlookers \u2014 is not shared by the man who has been at his side throughout. With \u201csingular calmness,\u201d the unnamed man assures him that \u201cthere is far less both of good and evil in the effect of this bonfire than the world might be willing to believe.\u201d The culture-warriors on both sides of the reform question are apparently mistaken. Perplexed, the narrator wonders how the world will continue with \u201cevery human or divine appendage of our mortal state\u201d gone. His \u201cgrave friend\u201d claims that in the morning \u201cyou will find among the ashes every thing really valuable…. Not a truth is destroyed nor buried so deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last\u201d \u2014 a proof of which is already visible in the pages of Holy Scripture, which had not \u201cblackened into tinder\u201d but instead \u201cassumed a more dazzling whiteness.\u201d The narrator leaps to the happy conclusion that the fire purifies. If so \u2014 \u201cif only what is evil can feel the action of the fire\u201d \u2014 then the fire must have been \u201cof inestimable utility.\u201d The philosophic observer, however, directs him to \u201clisten to the talk of these worthies\u201d \u2014 a distinctive group gathered in front of the pile \u2014 to learn \u201csomething useful.\u201d The \u201cprofundity of moral truth\u201d that the narrator had sought in the fire\u2019s illumination is to be found instead in the conversation of a party formed by the hangman, the last thief, the last murderer, and the last toper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are despondent, passing the filched bottle of spirits. The hangman offers to dispatch them all, including himself, from the nearest tree (no fiery death for them). A new figure joins them: \u201ca dark-complexioned personage\u201d whose eyes \u201cglowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire.\u201d He confidently informs them that they \u201cshall see good days yet\u201d since the conflagration begun by \u201cthese wiseacres\u201d amounts to \u201cjust nothing at all.\u201d This figure, whom the narrator dubs \u201cthe evil principle,\u201d has spent the entire evening laughing at the reform project, since it overlooked \u201cthe human heart\u201d \u2014 \u201cthat foul cavern\u201d from which \u201cwill reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery…. O, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator has been helped to the thought \u2014 \u201chow sad a truth\u201d \u2014 that \u201cman\u2019s agelong endeavor for perfection\u201d is fundamentally misguided, since it is a project of \u201cthe intellect\u201d that doesn\u2019t reach \u201cthe heart … the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong.\u201d Hawthorne does not suggest how (or whether) one could \u201cpurify the inward sphere.\u201d Certainly, the strategy of \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust\u201d applied to human beings themselves \u2014 tried in the last century by the most zealous of purging reformers, both fascist and communist \u2014 does not work. Hawthorne\u2019s teaching is anti-millenarian and anti-utopian. There is a hint that the revealed word \u2014 or even a human \u201cpen of inspiration\u201d like Shakespeare\u2019s \u2014 can touch the Heart. But politics can never be reformative in the deep sense. With sadness rather than glee, Hawthorne joins the Devil in his dismissal of ideological agendas. Political expectations need to be moderated. Hawthorne is not a movement conservative any more than he is a movement liberal. His message, however, circles back around to defend the traditional institutions of the social order (family and property, even war and capital punishment). He defends them not as fine accomplishments, but rather as somewhat unfortunate necessities, themselves involving cruelty, hypocrisy, and corruption. Yet, they serve as restraints upon the worst of us and the worst in each of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E<\/span>arth\u2019s Holocaust\u201d closes with the devil\u2019s laughter; \u201cEthan Brand\u201d opens with a disconcerting \u201croar of laughter\u201d and closes with a \u201cfearful peal of laughter\u201d from another fiendish figure. The last of Hawthorne\u2019s fire tales is an inquiry into the perversion of the Intellect in a man who starts with \u201clove and sympathy for mankind\u201d but finishes \u201ca cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment.\u201d The prediction of the \u201cstanch conservative\u201d in \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust\u201d \u2014 that those who fed the bonfire would ultimately fling themselves into it \u2014 comes to pass in \u201cEthan Brand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The setting for the story \u2014 which with a protagonist, a plot, and third-person narration is more of a story than either \u201cFire Worship\u201d or \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust\u201d \u2014 is a lime-kiln, a special kind of furnace. There, Brand conceives his unique quest for the Unpardonable Sin \u2014 some human act that will, Brand believes, extend \u201cman\u2019s possible guilt beyond the scope of Heaven\u2019s else infinite mercy.\u201d There, too, after an eighteen-year pursuit, Brand returns, having discovered within himself what he sought, intent on completing his mission by suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are told that tending a lime-kiln is a lonesome occupation and, for those few so inclined, like Ethan Brand, \u201can intensely thoughtful\u201d one. From \u201cFire Worship\u201d we know the sympathetic power of fire to reflect the inner man. In Brand\u2019s case that communion produced \u201cthe Idea<\/span>.\u201d His already \u201cdark thoughts\u201d were \u201cmelted\u201d into \u201cthe one thought that took possession of his life\u201d: a quest for the Unpardonable Sin. The kiln, of course, has nothing of the forgiving quality of a hearth-fire. Indeed, Hawthorne, with reference to Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em>, compares the kiln to \u201cthe private entrance to the infernal regions, which the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to pilgrims.\u201d When Bartram \u2014 the ordinary, unthinking man who now serves as lime-burner \u2014 keeps watch upon the fire, he does so \u201cturning his face from the insufferable glare.\u201d Brand, however, immediately upon returning from his impious pilgrimage, \u201cfixed his eyes \u2014 which were very bright \u2014 intently upon the brightness of the furnace, as if he beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of note within it.\u201d Later in the story, he \u201cbent forward to gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce glow.\u201d Later still, he \u201csat looking into the fire, as if he fancied pictures among the coals.\u201d Just as Brand is transfixed by the \u201clurid blaze,\u201d so little Joe \u2014 the sensitive son of the insensitive Bartram \u2014 is transfixed by Brand\u2019s face, which mirrors the kiln. (Brand\u2019s eyes \u201cgleamed like fires within the entrance of a mysterious cavern.\u201d) Wisely, the child begs his father to shut the furnace door to break the spell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the \u201cdull and torpid\u201d Bartram, unconsciously reminded of his own sins, begins to sense the horror of Brand\u2019s \u201cMaster Sin.\u201d Bartram\u2019s fears take a conventionally supernatural shape, as he remembers the stories told about Ethan Brand: how he \u201cconversed with Satan himself\u201d and summoned a fiend from the furnace \u201cto share in the dreadful task\u201d of finding the sin that surpasses God\u2019s understanding. What Bartram fails to understand is that Brand now regards himself as beyond good and evil. Thus, Brand rebukes him, saying: \u201cwhat need have I of the devil? I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners as you that he busies himself.\u201d Whereas Bartram had been frightened by a heartfelt kinship based on universal human sinfulness, Brand denies the connection. On his reckoning, his sin is not of the same \u201cfamily.\u201d Asked by Bartram what \u201cthe Unpardonable Sin\u201d is, he answers: \u201cThe sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!\u201d Brand speaks \u201cwith the pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp\u201d \u2014 a textual indication that Brand\u2019s sin is perhaps not as special as he believes. His pride may indeed be the \u201cMaster Sin\u201d (or the original sin), without being the \u201cUnpardonable Sin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, there is a sense in which Brand\u2019s sin, especially his self-murder, is unpardonable. One suspects that, for Brand, self-murder was a feasible substitute for the murder of all mankind. His interactions with the townspeople who assemble on the forlorn hillside on the news of his return indicate as much. Calling them \u201cbrute beasts,\u201d he commands them to \u201cGet ye gone!\u201d To the \u201cJew of Nuremberg\u201d \u2014 the traveling showman who tellingly mocks the nihilism of Brand\u2019s quest \u2014 his instruction is more explicit: \u201cget thee into the furnace yonder!\u201d Through suicide, Brand murders the world he despises, along with the self. Moreover, suicide is a form of murder by which he willfully removes himself from the realm of remorse and redemption. Perhaps because it was understood as a declaration of the most profound and radical alienation, suicide was long punished under the civil law, and suicides were denied the solace of the church graveyard, populated with fellow sinners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not surprisingly, \u201cBrand\u201d is a name rich in religious significance. There are Old Testament references to Israel being \u201ca brand plucked from the burning\u201d (Zechariah 3:2 and Amos 4:11). In America, the phrase was made famous by Cotton Mather in his books about redeeming women from witchcraft, A Brand Pluck\u2019d Out of the Burning<\/em> and Another Brand Pluckt Out of the Burning<\/em>, and then by John Wesley, who adopted the Biblical phrase as a description of his own deliverance from danger (he was rescued from an arsonist\u2019s blaze as a child) and as a metaphor for spiritual salvation. Wesley requested the phrase \u201cA brand plucked out of the burning\u201d as his epitaph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Hawthorne\u2019s version, there is no plucking out, no rescue, no redemption. The narrative convention is aborted or reversed; hence the subtitle of the story: \u201cA Chapter from an Abortive Romance.\u201d Hawthorne\u2019s Brand, claiming to have fulfilled his impious quest for the \u201cUnpardonable Sin,\u201d triumphantly throws himself into the flames. His first name \u201cEthan\u201d means \u201csteadfast,\u201d and he does indeed hold to his world-obliterating intention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Elliott Banfield<\/cite><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/span>How did Ethan Brand arrive at this paroxysm of misanthropy? Hawthorne suggests a surprising genealogy, tracing the development of misanthropy out of philanthropy. We are told that Brand began with \u201clove and sympathy for mankind,\u201d and more especially with \u201cpity for human guilt and woe.\u201d Like the reformers of \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust,\u201d he sought to free men from their burdens. In Brand\u2019s case, it was human guilt in particular that he wanted to assuage or remove. The quest for the unpardonable sin was conceived as instrumental to that goal. While Hawthorne does not reveal the precise steps in Brand\u2019s reasoning, we might speculate that Brand was led to the thought that men will be plagued by guilt so long as they believe in the need for divine pardon. If there were an unpardonable act, one might move beyond guilt, beyond good and evil, beyond God. What Hawthorne does tell us is that Brand\u2019s quest (initially entered upon with reluctance) triggered a \u201cvast intellectual development\u201d that \u201cdisturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart.\u201d He becomes \u201ca cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.\u201d Whatever their crimes, they pale in comparison to Brand\u2019s. It is he, the manipulator, who becomes \u201ca fiend.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his ruthlessness and monomania, Ethan Brand is similar to Hawthorne\u2019s other experimenters and men of science. Aylmer in \u201cThe Birth-mark\u201d and Dr. Rappaccini in \u201cRappaccini\u2019s Daughter\u201d both put science before all else, conducting lethal experiments upon those dearest to them \u2014 a wife in one case, a daughter in the other. The only experiment of Brand\u2019s about which we learn any details involved a girl whom Brand \u201chad made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.\u201d In these men of science, even erotic and paternal love is subordinated to libido sciendi<\/em>. As Hawthorne describes in the opening paragraph of \u201cThe Birth-mark,\u201d such ardent intellects believe that their pursuit \u201cwould ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself.\u201d While \u201cThe Birth-mark\u201d and \u201cRappaccini\u2019s Daughter\u201d trace the course of the experiments and the disastrous effects on the research subjects, \u201cEthan Brand\u201d offers a more interior look at the consequences of \u201cfaith in man\u2019s ultimate control over Nature.\u201d What does this ardency of intellect do to the scientist himself? As a result of the shift in perspective, one feels a compassion for Ethan Brand that one does not feel for Aylmer or Rappaccini. When Bartram and his son retire for the evening, leaving Brand to watch the fire, the boy \u201clooked back at the wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man had enveloped himself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The climax confirms the boy\u2019s intuition. As the atheistic descendant of the Puritans, Brand embraces the hell-fire of the lime-kiln as the only element that will receive him. He no longer belongs to the human or natural order. The earth is no longer his \u201cmother.\u201d His \u201cframe\u201d will not return to ashes and dust within her bosom. He no longer shares brotherhood with the rest of mankind. The \u201cstars of heaven\u201d no longer draw him \u201conward and upward.\u201d The next morning, when the lime-burner checks his kiln, fearing that five-hundred bushels of lime have been spoilt by Brand\u2019s dereliction, he finds instead that \u201cthe marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime,\u201d and \u201con its surface … , \u2014 snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime, \u2014 lay a human skeleton\u201d with \u201cthe shape of a human heart\u201d visible \u201cwithin the ribs.\u201d Although perplexed that a man could have a marble heart, the practical Bartram judges that Brand\u2019s heart was \u201cburnt into what looks like special good lime\u201d and that he is \u201chalf a bushel the richer for him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawthorne has chosen Brand\u2019s ironic fate carefully. The furnace has processed Brand into lime, one of mankind\u2019s oldest chemicals and a key ingredient in the manufacture of bricks. Brand has become the matter of technological production, rather than its master.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W<\/span>hile fire has always been associated with the arts and sciences, it took on new significance at the start of the modern scientific revolution. Descartes, for instance, reflects on the nature of fire and its role in creation in his Discourse on Method<\/a><\/strong><\/em>. In the Biblical account, ashes are transmuted into Adam by means of \u201cthe breath of life\u201d; in Descartes\u2019 account, the breath of life is understood in purely mechanical terms as \u201cheat\u201d or energy. Thus, God \u201ckindled in the man\u2019s heart one of those fires without light which I had already explained and which I did not at all conceive to be of a nature other than what heats hay when it has been stored before it is dry, or which makes new wines boil when they are left to ferment after crushing.\u201d According to Descartes, we have been cooked up like compost or fermented like a nice glass of bubbly \u2014 processes that would seem to be comprehendible and reproducible by man himself. There may be a slight problem with the analogies, however, since the damp hay is decomposing, as are the grapes. Can animal life really be understood on the model of heat-generating rot? This may explain why medicine is for Descartes (and modern science in general) the \u201cindispensable\u201d science; we must learn to regulate the heat within. According to Descartes, \u201cthe animal spirits\u201d are \u201clike a very pure and lively flame\u201d and the body a kind of furnace whose pilot light could perhaps be re-engineered to be perpetual. Accordingly, Descartes demands a practical (or technological) rather than a speculative science, pursuing \u201cthe invention of an infinity of devices,\u201d directed principally at human health and comfort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Descartes\u2019 famous method, which culminates in the project that Joseph Cropsey dubbed a \u201cMechanical Jerusalem,\u201d was conceived, by Descartes\u2019 own testimony, while he spent a winter day confined in a po\u00eale<\/em> or stove-heated room. It would not have surprised Nathaniel Hawthorne to learn that this audacious project to make men \u201cthe masters and possessors of nature\u201d was concocted by a solitary man cooped up with only caged fire for company. Fire without light yields overheated plans that lose sight of human limitations and deeper human needs. Remember Hawthorne\u2019s warning in \u201cFire Worship\u201d about the distorted lucubrations of stove-warmed scholarship. It is but a short step from the modern scientific project to the various modern political projects, on display in \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust,\u201d that abstract from the human heart in their inflamed rush to improve the human lot. In \u201cEthan Brand,\u201d Hawthorne shows us the surprising terminus of this hypertrophy of the intellect (visible already in Descartes\u2019 cogito ergo sum<\/em>). The unmoored mind becomes radically alienated from human life. What emerged from the furnace is ultimately consumed by it. In his three fire tales, Hawthorne exposes the limitations of our modern votaries of science and technology. In \u201cFire Worship\u201d he uncovers the human costs of technological advance, in \u201cEarth\u2019s Holocaust\u201d he shows the fallacy of the utopian belief in universal enlightenment, and in \u201cEthan Brand\u201d he reveals the nihilism of the autarchic intellect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we become too glum, however, we should remember that \u201cEthan Brand\u201d ends happily. Hawthorne provides a brief sketch of an alternative vision of man, nature, and providence in his description of a restored and refreshed world on the morning after Brand\u2019s suicide:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Bartram] issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast hold of his father\u2019s hand. The early sunshine was already pouring its gold upon the mountain-tops; and though the valleys were still in shadow, they smiled cheerfully in the promise of the bright day that was hastening onward. The village, completely shut in by hills, which swelled away gently about it, looked as if it had rested peacefully in the hollow of the great hand of Providence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible; the little spires of the two churches pointed upwards, and caught a fore-glimmering of brightness from the sun-gilt skies upon their gilded weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the old, smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath the stoop. Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream to look at it.<\/p>

To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while echo caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each contributing a strain of airy sweetness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here, instead of a man-made tower (or Cartesian project) to assault the heavens, we have a natural stairway to heaven amid the clouds and hills. Ascent is accomplished by poetic imagination rather than construction or dominion. The human world with its institutions \u2014 family, village, churches (note the plural), and tavern (complete with smokers) \u2014 fits within an encompassing natural order. Post-Babel, the communities of men have indeed been scattered, but they are in communication with one another \u2014 hence, the stage-coach. Men are not without devices and appliances, but they work in concert with nature, establishing a \u201crich and varied and elaborate harmony.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diana Schaub reads three Hawthorne tales on the flames of progress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14308,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[2266,5032],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22635,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10335\/revisions\/22635"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10335"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10335"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}