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Alchemy and Hawthorne's Elixir of Life Manuscripts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Charles Swann
Charles Swann
Affiliation:
Department of American Studies, University of Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, England.
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Extract

Thoreau first told me about this predecessor of mine;…that here…dwelt, in some long past time, in this man who resolved never to die…

It gave me a stronger interest in this spot; and according to my custom, I mused and meditated, and thought within myself, and tried to make out what manner of man this might be, that deemed it within his power to subvert the usual conditions of humanity. …Had he discovered …the great secret philosophers used to seek for?

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 1988 , pp. 371 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Elixir of Life ManuscriptsGoogle Scholar, Davidson, Edward H., Simpson, Claude M., and Smith, L. Neal, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 13, (Ohio State University Press, 1977), 499–500.Google Scholar All subsequent references will be placed parenthetically in the text. Fuller, Thomas, The Worthies of England, edited and with an introduction by Freeman, John (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952), 506–07.Google Scholar

2 I have used the Library of America edition of the Tales and Sketches, 764.Google Scholar Subsequent references will be placed parenthetically in the text. There has been some debate about Aminadab's name. It may be the result of reading too much about the secret writing of the alchemists — but I would suggest tentatively that it should be read backwards — i.e. Bad Anima.

3 Stoehr, Taylor, Hawthorne's Mad Scienists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth Century Life and Letters (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1978).Google Scholar The subtitle doesn't give him an entirely adequate alibi for not mentioning alchemy — as one can find reputable scientists in the nineteenth century who certainly did not dismiss alchemy's aims out of hand. My censorious tone about Stoehr would have been better justified (and this piece improved) had I read these two articles: Reid, Alfred S., “Hawthorne's Humanism: ‘The Birthmark’ and Sir Kenelm Digby,” American Literature, 38 (1966), 337–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Van Leer, David, “Aylmer's Library: Transcendental Alchemy in Hawthorne's ‘The Birthmark,’” ESQ, 22. (1976), 211–20.Google Scholar

4 Waite, Arthur Edward, Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers (London: George Redway, 1888), 17.Google Scholar See also the admirable book, Holmyard, E. J., Alchemy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican, 1957)Google Scholar, passim. He provides ample evidence of the connections between morals and success in experiments – or, rather, evidence of the belief that there was an essential connection.

5 Fuller, Thomas, 406.Google Scholar I regret that the only edition available to me was in modern spelling.

6 Ashmole, Elias, Theatrum Chemicum Brifannicam: Containing Severall Poeticall Pieces of our Famous English Philosophers, who have written the Hermetique Mysteries in their owne Ancient Language. A Reprint of the London Edition, 1652, with a new Introduction by Debus, Allen G. (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), 437.Google Scholar

7 See Holmyard, , 114–19Google Scholar, and also Debus: “It is significant that Bacon connected the search for the prolongation of life with alchemy. He felt that there was really little doubt that man's life could be lengthened. The Holy Scriptures attest to the fact that at one time men lived to an age close to one thousand years. Gradually this time span had been shortened due to the corruption of the human race and Bacon was able to cite only a few examples of extreme longevity in recent times. The most noteworthy of these was the alchemical author Artephius, who claimed to have reached the age of 1025” (xix–xx)

8 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1651, Part 2, Sect. 2, Memb. 4.Google Scholar

9 In Felton, Hawthorne refers to Delia Bacon at the moment Septimius finds the final clue that enables him to decode the document: “[S]uddenly he remembered the blotted and imperfect hieroglyphical passage in the recipe; he thought, an instant, and was convinced that was the full expression and outwriting of that crabbed little mystery; and that here was part of that secret writing for which, as my poor friend Miss Bacon discovered to her cost, the age of Elizabeth was so famous and so dexterous. His mind had a flash of light upon it; and from that moment, he was enabled to read not only the recipe, but the rules, and all the rest of that mysterious document, in a way which he had never thought of before; to discern that it was not to be taken literally and simply, but had a hidden process involved in it that made the whole thing infinitely deeper than he had hitherto deemed it to be” (XIII, 163). Delia Bacon was the American woman whom Hawthorne befriended when in England – befriended to the extent of paying over £200 for the publication of her book – a remarkably generous action for a man who was not at all well off. Hawthorne confesses in Our Old Home that he had not read the whole book but this passage from his preface indicates why her work came to his mind: “[T]he author's researches led her to a point where she found the plays claimed for Lord Bacon and his associates - not in a way that was meant to be intelligible in their own perilous times, - but in characters that only became legible, and illuminated as it were, in the light of a subsequent period.

“The reader will soon perceive that the new philosophy, as here demonstrated, was of a kind that no professor could have ventured openly to teach in the days of Elizabeth and James. The concluding chapter of the present work makes a powerful statement of the position which a man, conscious of great and noble aims, would then have occupied; and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all methods of secret communication, and of hiding thought beneath a masque of conceit or folly. Applicable to this subject I quote a paragraph from a manuscript of the author's, not intended for present publication.

“It was a time when authors, who treated of a scientific politics and of a scientific ethics internally connected with it, naturally preferred this more philosophic, symbolic method of indicating their connection with their writings, which would limit the indication to those who could pierce within the veil of a philosophic symbolism. It was the time when the cipher, in which one could write ‘omnia per omnia’ was in such request, and when ‘wheel ciphers’ and ‘doubles’ were not thought unworthy of philosophic notice.… It was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles, were not good for sport and child's play merely: when they had need be close; when they had need be solvable, at least, only to those who should solve them.'” (Bacon, Delia, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded With a Preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857), ix–x.Google Scholar

10 Ashmole, Elias, 447–48.Google Scholar

11 Josipovici, Gabriel, The World and the Book (London: Macmillan, 1971), 155.Google Scholar

12 Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, (New York: Norton, 1973), 171–72.Google Scholar Subsequent references will be placed parenthetically in the text.

13 Howard, David, “The Fortunate Fall and Hawthorne's The Marble Faun,” in Fletcher, Ian, ed., Romantic Mythologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 99.Google Scholar