_The House of the Seven Gables_ has "atmosphere." The passing of the old order of the proud, bearded, black-browed Father: an order which is slowly ousted from life, and lingeringly haunts the old dark places. But comes a new generation to sweep out even the ghosts, with these new vacuum cleaners. No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner. The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is setting up in the photography line, and is just going to make a sound financial thing out of it. For this purpose all old hates and old glooms, that belong to the antique order of Haughty Fathers, all these are swept up in the vacuum cleaner, and the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect understanding under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. _Vivat Industria!_ Oh, Nathaniel, you savage ironist! Ugh, how you'd have _hated_ it if you'd had nothing but the prosperous, "dear" young couple to write about! If you'd lived to the day when America was nothing but a Main Street. The Dark Old Fathers. The Beloved Wishy-Washy Sons. The Photography Business. ? ? ? Hawthorne came nearest to actuality in the _Blithedale Romance._ This novel is a sort of picture of the notorious Brook Farm experiment. There the famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp. An old twang of the Crèvecœur instrument. Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn't stand one another. And all the music they made was the music of their quarrelling. You _can't_ idealize hard work. Which is why America invents so many machines and contrivances of all sort: so that they need do no physical work. And that's why the idealists left off brookfarming, and took to bookfarming. You _can't_ idealize the essential brute blood-activity, the brute blood desires, the basic, sardonic blood-knowledge. That you _can't_ idealize. And you can't eliminate it. So there's the end of ideal man. Man is made up of a dual consciousness, of which the two halves are most of the time in opposition to one another. And will be so as long as time lasts. You've got to learn to change from one consciousness to the other, turn and about. Not to try to make either absolute, or dominant. The Holy Ghost tells you the how and when. Never did Nathaniel feel himself more spectral--of course he went brookfarming--than when he was winding the horn in the morning to summon the transcendental labourers to their tasks, or than when marching off with a hoe ideally to hoe the turnips, "Never did I feel more spectral," says Nathaniel. Never did I feel such a fool, would have been more to the point.