Page:Americans (1922).djvu/151

 nity at Brook Farm, an adventure commemorated in his Blithedale Romance. His sojourn among these interesting Utopians seems to have dispelled the hope and to have confirmed his instinctive deep-seated individualism. It is significant that Cloverdale even at Brook Farm retreats from his socialistic brethren to a hermitage in a circumjacent wood—"It symbolized my individuality, and aided me in keeping it inviolate." "The real Me," Hawthorne declared later, "was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself." The effort to externalize felicity and to make of it common property impressed him on the whole as a failure, renewing in him the old passion for seclusion in which "to think, to feel, to dream." His cutting private judgment of Margaret Fuller, the Zenobia of The Blithedale Romance, represents his mature conviction that beauty and perfectness of character result from the gradual unfolding of some innermost germ of divine grace, and are unattainable by mechanical means and local applications. As this passage illustrates forcibly an aspect of Hawthorne ordinarily little emphasized, his occasionally severe and penetrating critical faculty, it