There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with a
man who allows himself to declaim in this manner; so I dropt the
subject, and never took it up again.
But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any
amount of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I
question whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to receive
it. I began to discern that he had come among us actuated by no real
sympathy with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because we were
estranging ourselves from the world, with which his lonely and
exclusive object in life had already put him at odds. Hollingsworth
must have been originally endowed with a great spirit of benevolence,
deep enough and warm enough to be the source of as much disinterested
good as Providence often allows a human being the privilege of
conferring upon his fellows.
This native instinct yet lived within
him. I myself had profited by it, in my necessity. It was seen, too,
in his treatment of Priscilla. Such casual circumstances as were here
involved would quicken his divine power of sympathy, and make him seem,
while their influence lasted, the tenderest man and the truest friend
on earth. But by and by you missed the tenderness of yesterday, and
grew drearily conscious that Hollingsworth had a closer friend than
ever you could be; and this friend was the cold, spectral monster which
he had himself conjured up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth
of his heart, and of which, at last,--as these men of a mighty purpose
so invariably do,--he had grown to be the bond-slave. It was his
philanthropic theory.
This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it
had been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his
philanthropy. Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught his
benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so
that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love
to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments,
unless they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which he
mistook for an angel of God. Had Hollingsworth's education been more
enlarged, he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this pitfall.
But this identical pursuit had educated him. He knew absolutely
nothing, except in a single direction, where he had thought so
energetically, and felt to such a depth, that no doubt the entire
reason and justice of the universe appeared to be concentrated
thitherward.
It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life,
Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people
(among whom I include humorists of every degree), it required all the
constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing him
an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one string--such
multiform presentation of one idea! His specific object (of which he
made the public more than sufficiently aware, through the medium of
lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the construction of an
edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment.