第25章 HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA(1)

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women.If the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance.Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him very clumsily together again.What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.

Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which Iseemed to make.But I could not help it.Had I loved him less, I might have used him better.He and Zenobia and Priscilla--both for their own sakes and as connected with him--were separated from the rest of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of a problem which it was my business to solve.Other associates had a portion of my time; other matters amused me; passing occurrences carried me along with them, while they lasted.But here was the vortex of my meditations, around which they revolved, and whitherward they too continually tended.

In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a feeling of loneliness.

For it was impossible not to be sensible that, while these three characters figured so largely on my private theatre, I--though probably reckoned as a friend by all--was at best but a secondary or tertiary personage with either of them.

I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed.But it impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too intimate a connection with him.He was not altogether human.There was something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and sympathies and affections and celestial spirit.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose.It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle.When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims.They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience.They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait path.They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the Devil been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness.And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated, in the attempt to make it adequate.Professed philanthropists have gone far; but no originally good man, I presume, ever went quite so far as this.Let the reader abate whatever he deems fit.The paragraph may remain, however, both for its truth and its exaggeration, as strongly expressive of the tendencies which were really operative in Hollingsworth, and as exemplifying the kind of error into which my mode of observation was calculated to lead me.The issue was, that in solitude I often shuddered at my friend.In my recollection of his dark and impressive countenance, the features grew more sternly prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted it with an adamantine wrinkle.On meeting him again, I was often filled with remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow of a household fire that was burning in a cave."He is a man after all,"thought I; "his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!---not that steel engine of the Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!" But in my wood-walks, and in my silent chamber, the dark face frowned at me again.