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
I seemed 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.