'The prophecy of autumn': Hawthorne's Augustan sensibility (Samuel Johnson)

The significance of Nathaniel Hawthorne's interest in the eighteenth-century Augustan Age has not received the critical attention it deserves. Hawthorne does not merely borrow from the Augustans; rather, Hawthorne is himself, for his time and for his country, the embodiment of the Augustan sensibility. As an Augustan-American man of letters, Hawthorne imparts to his contemporaries those qualities of the moral imagination that may avert the rise of an Empire of Dullness in America; through his work, the American Renaissance remained, at least partially, the Age of Johnson.; Of the Augustans, Samuel Johnson figures most prominently in Hawthorne's imagination. Both writers are especially sensitive to the imminence of death, Johnson referring to the “honour of the last” and Hawthorne to the “prophecy of autumn” and the “moral of time's vicissitude.” In responding to societal revolution and decay, Hawthorne employs an architectural motif the Custom-House and the “upstart modern building” usurp the authority of the Old Manse and the Province-House, respectively. A powerful concept of home and inheritance stands behind Hawthorne's treatment of the Augustan sensibility in conflict with the turbulence of American democracy. Contrary to those “hobgoblins of flesh and blood” who are engaged in the “morbid activity” of impractical reform movements, Hawthorne insists that all pursuits of happiness must be conducted in the context of a fallible and fallen human nature.; Hawthorne is closest to Augustan social criticism when he addresses reform as his divided sympathies in works such as “Legends of the Province-House” and The Blithedale Romance attest, Hawthorne's treatment of America's political reform movements is more ambivalent. This dissertation concludes, however, that although Hawthorne the citizen endorses certain chapters of America's democratic, revolutionary history, Hawthorne the literary artist remains devoted to the Augustan understanding of the imagination. Hawthorne thus establishes himself as the most influential exception to a literary trend of progressivism that flourished during the American Renaissance.