Today's TRO presents, in its entirety, Eli Siegel's great, critical essay, "Hawthorne's 'Man of Adamant'" — because of its tremendous relevance to current happenings, and to the self of every person. 

     Aesthetic Realism is the study, in the strictest and fullest sense, of good will; and there is an immediate, crying necessity for this study in an America in which ill will and coldness now permeate every aspect of life; between husband and wife; landlord and tenant; boss and worker. It is coldness and the disinclination to see what another person feels, that have made for federal cutbacks in education, in school lunches for children, in health care. Aesthetic Realism can change this; it can make for a kind, warm America. That is why the coldness of the press in its continuing boycott of Aesthetic Realism, must end.

     In Chapter 10 of Eli Siegel's Self and World, there are sentences which comment on the present TRO:

     All through Hawthorne's work, there is the admonition: "Do not be alone in concealed glory. Do not separate yourself from the rest of things, so that, darkly, you can establish yourself in another world." We know that Hawthorne himself had to meet this temptation. Often he was described as seclusive, remote, Olympian in the shades. Henry James, Senior, went so far as to think of Hawthorne as some malefactor being pursued. James's words, in a letter to Emerson of 1860, are: "He had the look all the time, to one who doesn't know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives." 

     Indeed, a meaning never absent from Hawthorne's writing is that being alone makes for pride, but it also makes for an unresting sense of iniquity within and a sense of hardening that is also corruption. Perhaps Hawthorne never said this so plainly, so unmistakably, so compactly as he does in "The Man of Adamant."

     The man who has hardened himself is Richard Digby. There are two kinds of persons who are aloof in Hawthorne's works: one is the man like Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, who, religious, is apart from men; the other is exemplified by Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, who is aloof not so much because he is religious, but because he is uncaring, rather calm; he may want to be excited but he can't be. In Richard Digby we can see both kinds of unmoved men: the religion in Richard Digby is accented, but we can also feel the voluptuous pride, the sense of sequestrated comfort that the more secular non-participant may have. 

     We can see this quite early in the story. Richard Digby in the first sentence of the story — or "apologue," to use Hawthorne's own word — is described as "the gloomiest and most intolerant of a stern brotherhood." But there is something else in a later sentence:

     As the story goes on, the religious uniqueness is accented: however, the feeling of secular satisfaction is never absent. Digby gets a triumph out of having nothing to do with men: he is a thorough biblical snob.

     Digby is vanity made portentous and terrible in the following sentence about his desire to put men away from him:

So Richard Digby took an axe, to hew space enough for a tabernacle in the wilderness, and some few other necessaries, especially a sword and gun, to smite and slay any intruder upon his hallowed seclusion; and plunged into the dreariest depths of the forest.

     The great triumph in being alone is given powerfully here, along with a quick sense of motion in a deep forest:

     Mary Goffe comes to where Richard Digby is, and she tries to show him he is wrong. She is "so delicate a creature," and her "golden hair" is "dishevelled by the boughs." She, in her lightness, is like Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, and other feminine or childlike beings Hawthorne uses to oppose and set off the heavy, self-contained troubledness or sternness of males like Dimmesdale or Chillingworth. Even while Mary tries, Richard Digby changes the world to what his hardness, coldness and vanity want it to be. As he reads the Bible, he transforms the kind to the unkind:

The shadow had now grown so deep where he was sitting, that he made continual mistakes in what he read, converting all that was gracious and merciful to denunciations of vengeance and unutterable woe on every created being but himself.

No sooner had he spoken these dreadful words, than Richard Digby's heart ceased to beat; while — so the legend says — the form of Mary Goffe melted into the last sunbeams, and returned from the sepulchral cave to heaven.

     Hawthorne is much taken with the idea of persons becoming inanimate. We can see this in "Ethan Brand"; in a story like "Drowne's Wooden Image." The notion of persons losing their human animation and mobility is big in folklore and imagination generally. The relation of stone to humanity is a large matter in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, from which I have quoted.

     Hawthorne saw the losing of one's life, or liveliness, in some manner, even while one is still alive in the ordinary sense, as a constant, deep, and subtle danger. As we have seen, he saw spiritual hardening, separation, or unconcern as having its physiological side. Is it possible that the trend of Hawthorne's thought (and fear) has a relation to some of our most feared physical calamities? 

     Hawthorne is imaginative, certainly, when at the end of his story he says of Richard Digby, "The Man of Adamant":