In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 3 Hawthorne’s Sermon H awthor n e’s car eer as a preacher was somewhat shorter than Emerson’s; understandably, the collected sermons of Nathaniel Hawthorne have received considerably less critical attention. Of course, depending upon how broadly one might define the “sermon” genre, Hawthorne’s sermonic output might be deemed quite substantial. In one sense, much of his writing may be said to belong to the “art of prophesying,” as the New England divines once termed their craft, but Hawthorne’s parables and allegories tend to exceed the bounds of this technical category. For the traditional ministers, to “prophesy” had meant to expose biblical truth for the benefit of the flock. Hawthorne instead claims for his fiction an inspired status as “a new revelation.”1 And even in those instances when his writing might be brought into didactic alignment with the preexisting biblical record, he could not literally be said to have preached any of his tales or sketches. Unlike Emerson, he did not cultivate a public audience of listeners to complement his readership.2 In the narrower sense of nonfictional sermon making for oral delivery, Hawthorne himself appears to have mentioned only one instance of giving a sermon—and the content of that performance he preserved only indirectly. But he did in fact preach, and he testified to the act in the last book published in his lifetime. In Our Old Home (1863), he recounts among his “Consular Experiences ” in England having received a visit from one reverend doctor of divinity, “a perfect model of clerical propriety, scholar-like, yet with the air of a man of the world rather than a student, though overspread with the graceful sanctity of a popular metropolitan divine” (CE 5:25). Hawthorne learns of this American preacher that “he was somewhat distinguished in his own region for fervor and eloquence in the pulpit, but was 82 writing beyond prophecy now compelled to relinquish it temporarily for the purpose of renovating his impaired health by an extensive tour of Europe” (5:25). Hawthorne makes plans to dine with this gentleman, but a collision (intimated by Hawthorne’s layered description) between the man’s “sanctity” and “the world” intervenes. The appointed hour comes and goes with no sign of the minister; the subsequent day passes without word of explanation or apology. Within a few days Hawthorne has put the matter out of mind, until he receives a concerned visit from a Captain Emerson, upon whose ship the minister had arrived from America.3 No one has heard from the minister, his personal belongings seemingly abandoned aboard ship. Despite the captain’s state of alarm, Hawthorne decides not to go to the police. To a large degree, his decision is one of patriotic diplomacy: “At home, in our native country, I would have looked to the Doctor’s personal safety and left his reputation to take care of itself. . . . But in scornful and invidious England, on the idea that the credit of the sacred office was measurably entrusted to my discretion, I could not endure, for the sake of American Doctors of Divinity generally, that this particular Doctor should cut an ignoble figure in the police-reports of the English newspapers ” (5:26). As this explanation suggests, the question of American honor is but one dimension of Hawthorne’s sense of loyalty. In determining to handle the manner with all due discretion, Hawthorne also begins a process of identifying himself with the clergy: “The clerical body, I flatter myself, will acknowledge that I acted on their own principle” (5:26). This acting upon clerical principle connects loosely with a self-consciously constructed “hereditary” (5:28) Puritanism that recurs throughout Our Old Home. For example, in a gesture toward filiopiety, Hawthorne makes a pilgrimage to England’s “Old” Boston, where he imagines himself in the place of John Cotton: “The tower of Saint Botolph’s looked benignantly down; and I fancied it was bidding me farewell, as it did Mr. Cotton, two or three hundred years ago, and telling me to describe its venerable height, and the town beneath it, to the people of the American city” (CE 5:166). In this reverie, Hawthorne’s imagined identification with Cotton in England becomes projected, somewhat whimsically, into the responsibility of bearing witness to a New England audience. But the dramatic scene that follows the mysterious disappearance of the latter-day American preacher provides the occasion for Hawthorne’s much more clear-cut performative identification with...

Share