And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form of dementia. A thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche. Dementia.
_Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius._
Watch these Pearls, these Pearls of modern women. Particularly American women. Battening on love. And fluttering in the first bat-like throes of dementia.
You _can_ have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.
Hawthorne's other books are nothing compared to _The Scarlet Letter._
But there are good parables, and wonderful dark glimpses of early Puritan America, in _Twice Told Tales._
_The House of the Seven Gables_ has "atmosphere." The passing of the old order of the proud, bearded, black-browed Father: an order which is slowly ousted from life, and lingeringly haunts the old dark places. But comes a new generation to sweep out even the ghosts, with these new vacuum cleaners. No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner.
The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is setting up in the photography line, and is just going to make a sound financial thing out of it. For this purpose all old hates and old glooms, that belong to the antique order of Haughty Fathers, all these are swept up in the vacuum cleaner, and the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect understanding under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. _Vivat Industria!_
Oh, Nathaniel, you savage ironist! Ugh, how you'd have _hated_ it if you'd had nothing but the prosperous, "dear" young couple to write about! If you'd lived to the day when America was nothing but a Main Street.
Hawthorne came nearest to actuality in the _Blithedale Romance._ This novel is a sort of picture of the notorious Brook Farm experiment. There the famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp. An old twang of the Crèvecœur instrument.
Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn't stand one another. And all the music they made was the music of their quarrelling.
You _can't_ idealize hard work. Which is why America invents so many machines and contrivances of all sort: so that they need do no physical work.