The whole thing is advanced a step further
towards pure idealism, the relative proportions being maintained.
"The Blithedale Romance" is only another instance in point, and here, as
before, we find the principle admirably stated in the preface. "In the old
countries," says Hawthorne, "a novelist's work is not put exactly side by
side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to everyday
probability, in view of the improved effects he is bound to produce
thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Faery Land,
so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, we cannot well tell
the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld
through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This
atmosphere is what the American romancer needs. In its absence, the beings
of his imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category
as actually living mortals; a necessity that renders the paint and
pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible."
Accordingly, Hawthorne selects the Brook Farm episode (or a reflection of
it) as affording his drama "a theatre, a little removed from the highway
of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their
phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison
with the actual events of real lives.
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