originality _always_ in view--for he is false to himself who
ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable
a source of interest--I say to myself, in the first place, “Of
the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the
intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what
one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a
novel first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it
can be best wrought by incident or tone, or the converse, or by
peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterwards looking about me
(or rather within) for such combinations of event or tone as shall
best aid me in the construction of the effect.--EDGAR ALLAN POE,
_The Philosophy of Composition_.
IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES
The value of a literary term lies in the comprehensive and precise
picture which it calls up in the mind of him who reads it. So we
must seek to limit, as well as seize upon, the meaning of this word
“impressionistic.”
The first purpose in telling a story would seem to be the pleasure
or the profit of the hearer--if we exclude the bore who tells a yarn
chiefly to please himself. But a closer scrutiny of certain stories
discloses other objects of the narrator, and these may be either
subordinate or paramount to considerations of benefit or entertainment.
The most important of these artistic purposes is to reproduce in
the hearer the full effect which a certain mood, theme, character,
situation, incident, or chain of incidents, originally made upon the
story-teller himself. When he succeeds in reproducing in others his
own feeling, by such means as we shall presently study, he does so by
impressionistic means.
Poe, writing in _Graham’s Magazine_, May, 1842, says: “A skilful
literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned
his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with
deliberate care, a certain unique or single _effect_ to be wrought
out, he then invents such incidents--he then combines such events--as
may best aid him in establishing the preconceived effect. If his very
initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he
has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be
no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to
the one preëstablished design.”
It does not seem probable that Poe meant to speak of impressionism
as constituting so much a distinct type of story as to point out its
importance as a method in all story-telling; and we must not overlook
its usefulness in this respect. Indeed, nearly all good short-stories
begin, in the mind of the author, and end, in the spirit of the reader,
with a more or less clear and unified impression. Still, certain little
fictions are, alike in theme and treatment, so decidedly conceived and
told with the purpose of leaving the reader under the spell of a mood,
a feeling, a character, or a situation, that they are IMPRESSIONISTIC
stories, rather than impressionistic STORIES.
The natural tendency for the impressionistic writer is to subordinate
incident and plot to tone--in a word, to emphasize a picture, whether
internal or external, rather than a set of happenings, which in dealing
with fiction we call the action. So an impressionistic narrative
may really tell a story of situation, crisis, and denouement, or,
as is more likely to be the case, it may tend decidedly toward the
sketch. All depends upon the nature of the theme. Thus, the _beauty of
sacrifice_ demands an action to illustrate that abnegation, and all
the accessories must serve as high-lights and shadows to bring out
this motive in strong relief; but the _tone of gloom_ may be conveyed
without even the semblance of a plot.
Now a story may produce a gloomy effect without deliberately picturing
an atmosphere of gloom--it may leave the reader with a vague,
pessimistic distaste for joy, and yet present no such picture. Or
it may marvellously delineate loneliness, without leaving that as
the final impression of the story. This is not impressionism, though
it may be very good story-telling. Impressionism is conscious art,
art prepense, and, as will be seen in the two stories presented as
examples in this section, subordinates everything to tonal effect; in
other words, the impressionistic story symbolizes in human action some
human mood or condition. For this reason such stories are often called
stories of symbolism.
HAWTHORNE AND HIS WRITINGS
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4, 1804.
His New England ancestors bore the name Hathorne, as did the author’s
sea-captain father--also a Nathaniel--who died at Surinam, Dutch
Guiana, when his son was four years old. In 1818 the family moved
to Raymond, Maine, but most of the youth’s education was gotten at
Salem, and there his family returned in 1820. The following year he
entered Bowdoin College, from which he was graduated in 1825. At
this time--when he was twenty-one--he had already begun _Twice-Told
Tales_; it was then, too, that he inserted the _w_ into his name. He
was now writing industriously, often under a pseudonym; he also did
considerable hack and editorial work. During 1839 and a part of 1840
he served in the Boston Custom House; then he joined the Brook Farm
Community in 1841, but remained there only a short time. He married
Sophia Peabody in 1842. In 1846 he returned to the Customs service,
in Salem, remaining this time about three years. In 1853 he was
appointed by his classmate, President Pierce, as United States Consul
at Liverpool. During the more than three years of his consulship he
traveled widely in Great Britain, and later spent much time in Italy,
where some of his best work was accomplished. During the last years of
his life he wrote but intermittently, being a prey to depression and
ill health. He died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, May 19, 1864, and is
buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a remarkable novelist, essayist, and
short-story writer. _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The Marble Faun_, are his
greatest novels. _The House of the Seven Gables_ is a series of related
sketches rather than a romance. Probably his best short-stories are
“The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,”
in _Mosses From An Old Manse_; “The Gray Champion,” “The Minister’s
Black Veil,” “The Gentle Boy,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “Dr. Heidegger’s
Experiment,” “The Ambitious Guest,” “Wakefield,” and “The White Old
Maid,” from _Twice-Told Tales_; and “The Great Stone Face,” “Ethan
Brand” and “The Snow-Image,” in _The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told
Tales_. These three collections contain also many charming sketches,
while _The Wonder Book_, and _Tanglewood Tales_ are rich in interest
for younger readers.
“The White Old Maid,” given herewith in full, was first published in
the _New England Magazine_ for July, 1835, and was entitled “The Old
Maid in the Winding Sheet, by the Author of The Gray Champion.”
* * * * *
Hawthorne enjoyed the distinction of winning in his day the almost
unanimous approval of critics both at home and abroad, and this in a
period when criticism was not a gentle art. Time, moreover, has only
added to his praises. As a fiction writer he had depth, breadth, and
height. Hawthorne alone among the fictionists of his era may justly be
said to have a philosophy of his own; his themes cover a wide range;
and the loftiness of his ideals is well recognized. As Longfellow
discerned, and generously announced as early as 1837, Hawthorne was a
poet who wrote prose. He knew a mood in nature to match every human
emotion, and in her multiform life he saw images to enforce a thousand
striking comparisons. He was a student of the soul, too, albeit a
gloomy one, for the most part. But while the sombreness of lives beset
by stern problems oppressed him, and but little humor brightens his
pages, one searches in vain for a pessimistic spirit--Hawthorne’s
knowledge of the human heart saddened him, but it did not make him
misanthropic. One feels the reality, the vital bearing, of the things
he writes about. It is impossible to read him appreciatively and not
realize the sincerity of the man, and the fine earnestness, the
upright though severe justness, with which he viewed life. Sweetness,
beauty--haunting beauty, indeed--and a certain airy lightness, were
not wanting in his work; but the big tones--resonant, solemn at times,
and inspiring always--were poetic insight, fervid intensity, and lofty
purpose. Hawthorne was a seer. The inside of things was disclosed to
him. That which he could not see, he felt. And with a classic purity of
style he worded the fantastic, gloomy, lightsome, or tragic pageantry
of his creations in sentences that live and live.
I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny
book.--NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, _Letter to James T. Fields_.
Soon to be all spirit, I have already a spiritual sense of human
nature, and see deeply into the hearts of mankind, discovering what
is hidden from the wisest.... My glance comprehends the crowd, and
penetrates the breast of the solitary man.--NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
_My Home Return_, in _Tales and Sketches_.
He uses his characters, like algebraic symbols, to work out certain
problems with; they are rather more, yet rather less, than flesh
and blood.--H. A. BEERS, quoted in Tappan’s _Topical Notes on
American Authors_.
Hawthorne’s style, at its best, is one of the most perfect media
employed by any writer using the English language. Dealing, as it
usually does, with an immaterial subject-matter, with dream-like
impressions, and fantastic products of the imagination, it is
concrete without being opaque,--luminously concrete, one might
say. No other writer that I know of has the power of making his
fancies visible and tangible without impairing their delicate
immateriality. If any writer can put the rainbow into words, and
yet leave it a rainbow, surely that writer is Hawthorne.--RICHARD
LE GALLIENNE, _Attitudes and Avowals_.
In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural; and though
he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact,
nowhere does he violate the laws of nature.... A brutal misuse of
the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest degradation of the
art of fiction. But “to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight,
delicate, and evanescent flavour than as any actual portion of
the substance,” to quote from the preface to the _House of the
Seven Gables_, this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of
Short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he
strays in the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.--BRANDER MATTHEWS,
_The Philosophy of the Short-story_.
Hawthorne has been called a mystic, which he was not,--and a
psychological dreamer, which he was in very slight degree. He was
really the ghost of New England. I do not mean the “spirit,” nor
the “phantom,” but the ghost in the older sense in which that term
is used, the thin, rarefied essence which is to be found somewhere
behind the physical organization: embodied, indeed, and not by any
means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly tabernacle, but yet only
half embodied in it, endowed with a certain painful sense of the
gulf between his nature and its organization, always recognizing
the gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always more or
less unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly
spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit in them.
They are ghostly writings.... I may, perhaps, accept a phrase of
which Hawthorne himself was fond,--“the moonlight of romance,”--and
compel it to explain something of the secret of his characteristic
genius.--R. H. HUTTON, _Essays in Literary Criticism_.
This, too [“The White Old Maid”], is a story, in the sense that
something happens; and yet the real story, by which I mean the
narrative which would logically connect and develop these events,
is just hinted at, and is not very important. It is subordinated,
indeed, to a new aim. “The White Old Maid” is narrative for a
purpose, and this purpose is to suggest an impression, and to leave
us with a vivid sensation rather than a number of remembered facts.
In short, it is contrived, not to leave a record of such and such
an old woman who did this or that, but rather to stamp upon our
minds the impression of a mystery-haunted house, mysterious figures
entering, strange words, and a terrible sorrow behind all. Towards
such a result the structure of the plot, every bit of description,
every carefully chosen word, directly tends.--HENRY SEIDEL CANBY,
_The Book of the Short Story_.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON HAWTHORNE
_Hours in a Library_, Leslie Stephen (1874); _Study of Hawthorne_,
George Parsons Lathrop (1876); _Life_, in the _English Men of Letters_
series, Henry James (1880); _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_, Julian
Hawthorne (1885); _Life_, in the _Great Writers_ series, Moncure D.
Conway (1890); _Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, Horatio
Bridge (1893); _Memories of Hawthorne_, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897);
_Nathaniel Hawthorne_, Anne Fields (1899); _Life_, in the _American Men
of Letters_ series, George Edward Woodberry (1902).
THE WHITE OLD MAID
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
[Sidenote: Introduction of setting, giving atmosphere of story.]
[Sidenote: FIRST PLOT SITUATION.]
The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows, and showed
a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one
lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the
ghostly light, through the other, slept upon a bed, falling between the
heavy silken curtains, and illuminating the face of a young man. But,
how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! and how like a
shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes; it was a corpse, in
its burial clothes.
[Sidenote: This uncertainty strikes the tone of the story, which
trembles constantly between the real and the fancied, the physical
and the spirit world, keeping the reader in doubt as to whether he is
witnessing a manifestation of the supernatural or is deceived by the
mysterious atmosphere of the unusual.]
[Sidenote: TWO MAIN CHARACTERS INTRODUCED.]
2. Suddenly, the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion.
Strange fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving
betwixt the dead face and the moonlight, as the door of the chamber
opened and a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion
in the moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of
triumph, as she bent over the pale corpse--pale as itself--and pressed
her living lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from
that long kiss, her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting
with its anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had
moved responsive to her own. Still an illusion! The silken curtain
had waved, a second time, betwixt the dead face and the moonlight, as
another fair young girl unclosed the door, and glided, ghostlike, to
the bedside. There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale
beauty of the dead between them. But she who had first entered was
proud and stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.
[Sidenote: Note the archaic, formal language, which sets the period in
the long ago.]
3. “Away!” cried the lofty one. “Thou hadst him living! The dead is
mine!”
[Sidenote: _Motif_ of story.]
4. “Thine!” returned the other, shuddering. “Well hast thou spoken! The
dead is thine!”
5. The proud girl started, and stared into her face with a ghastly
look. But a wild and mournful expression passed across the features of
the gentle one; and weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her
head pillowed beside that of the corpse, and her hair mingling with his
dark locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draught of sorrow had
bewildered her.
6. “Edith!” cried her rival.
[Sidenote: Note “of the heart.”]
7. Edith groaned, as with a sudden compassion of the heart; and
removing her cheek from the dead youth’s pillow, she stood upright,
fearfully encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.
8. “Wilt thou betray me?” said the latter calmly.
[Sidenote: Full statement of the _motif_, ending with ¶12. FOUNDATION
OF MAIN CRISIS.]
9. “Till the dead bid me speak, I will be silent,” answered Edith.
“Leave us alone together! Go, and live many years, and then return, and
tell me of thy life. He, too, will be here! Then, if thou tellest of
sufferings more than death, we will both forgive thee.”
10. “And what shall be the token?” asked the proud girl, as if her
heart acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.
11. “This lock of hair,” said Edith, lifting one of the dark,
clustering curls that lay heavily on the dead man’s brow.
[Sidenote: End of first part of story.]
12. The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse,
and appointed a day and hour, far, far in time to come, for their next
meeting in that chamber. The statelier girl gave one deep look at the
motionless countenance, and departed--yet turned again and trembled ere
she closed the door, almost believing that her dead lover frowned upon
her. And Edith, too! Was not her white form fading into the moonlight?
Scorning her own weakness she went forth, and perceived that a negro
slave was waiting in the passage with a wax-light, which he held
between her face and his own, and regarded her, as she thought, with
an ugly expression of merriment. Lifting his torch on high, the slave
lighted her down the staircase, and undid the portal of the mansion.
The young clergyman of the town had just ascended the steps, and bowing
to the lady, passed in without a word.
[Sidenote: Second stage.]
[Sidenote: Hawthorne’s first title for this story.]
[Sidenote: Character delineation, largely mental and moral.]
[Sidenote: Key.]
[Sidenote: Contributory incident.]
[Sidenote: Note language of symbolism.]
[Sidenote: Key.]
13. Years, many years, rolled on; the world seemed new again, so much
older was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped
their hands across the bosom of the corpse. In the interval, a lonely
woman had passed from youth to extreme age, and was known by all the
town as the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.” A taint of insanity had
affected her whole life, but so quiet, sad, and gentle, so utterly free
from violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies,
unmolested by the world, with whose business or pleasure she had nought
to do. She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight, except to
follow funerals. Whenever a corpse was borne along the street in
sunshine, rain, or snow; whether a pompous train of the rich and proud
thronged after it, or few and humble were the mourners, behind them
came the lonely woman in a long white garment which the people called
her shroud. She took no place among the kindred or the friends, but
stood at the door to hear the funeral prayer, and walked in the rear of
the procession, as one whose earthly charge it was to haunt the house
of mourning, and be the shadow of affliction, and see that the dead
were duly buried. So long had this been her custom that the inhabitants
of the town deemed her a part of every funeral, as much as the coffin
pall, or the very corpse itself, and augured ill of the sinner’s
destiny unless the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet” came gliding, like a
ghost, behind. Once, it is said, she affrighted a bridal party with her
pale presence, appearing suddenly in the illuminated hall, just as the
priest was uniting a false maid to a wealthy man, before her lover had
been dead a year. Evil was the omen to that marriage! Sometimes she
stole forth by moonlight and visited the graves of venerable Integrity,
and wedded Love, and virgin Innocence, and every spot where the ashes
of a kind and faithful heart were mouldering. Over the hillocks of
those favored dead would she stretch out her arms, with a gesture, as
if she were scattering seeds; and many believed that she brought them
from the garden of Paradise; for the graves which she had visited were
green beneath the snow, and covered with sweet flowers from April to
November. Her blessing was better than a holy verse upon the tombstone.
Thus wore away her long, sad, peaceful, and fantastic life, till few
were so old as she, and the people of later generations wondered how
the dead had ever been buried, or mourners had endured their grief,
without the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.”
[Sidenote: Third stage.]
[Sidenote: Preparation for main crisis.]
[Sidenote: Opening of MAIN PLOT INCIDENT.]
[Sidenote: Local-color.]
[Sidenote: Central setting; return to original setting.]
[Sidenote: Development of setting, and TONE OF AN EMPTY HOUSE.]
14. Still years went on, and still she followed funerals, and was not
yet summoned to her own festival of death. One afternoon the great
street of the town was all alive with business and bustle, though the
sun now gilded only the upper half of the church spire, having left
the housetops and loftiest trees in shadow. The scene was cheerful
and animated, in spite of the sombre shade between the high brick
buildings. Here were pompous merchants, in white wigs and laced
velvet; the bronzed faces of sea-captains; the foreign garb and air
of Spanish creoles; and the disdainful port of natives of Old England;
all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two back settlers,
negotiating sales of timber from forests where axe had never sounded.
Sometimes a lady passed, swelling roundly forth in an embroidered
petticoat, balancing her steps in high-heeled shoes, and courtesying
with lofty grace to the punctilious obeisances of the gentlemen. The
life of the town seemed to have its very centre not far from an old
mansion, that stood somewhat back from the pavement, surrounded by
neglected grass, with a strange air of loneliness, rather deepened than
dispelled by the throng so near. Its site would have been suitably
occupied by a magnificent Exchange or a brick block, lettered all over
with various signs; or the large house itself might have made a noble
tavern, with the “King’s Arms” swinging before it, and guests in every
chamber, instead of the present solitude. But owing to some dispute
about the right of inheritance, the mansion had been long without a
tenant, decaying from year to year, and throwing the stately gloom of
its shadow over the busiest part of the town. Such was the scene, and
such the time, when a figure unlike any that have been described was
observed at a distance down the street.
[Sidenote: First main character.]
15. “I espy a strange sail, yonder,” remarked a Liverpool captain;
“that woman in the long white garment!”
16. The sailor seemed much struck by the object, as were several
others who, at the same moment, caught a glimpse of the figure that
had attracted his notice. Almost immediately the various topics of
conversation gave place to speculations, in an undertone, on this
unwonted occurrence.
17. “Can there be a funeral so late this afternoon?” inquired some.
18. They looked for the signs of death at every door--the sexton, the
hearse, the assemblage of black-clad relatives--all that makes up the
woful pomp of funerals. They raised their eyes, also, to the sun-gilt
spire of the church, and wondered that no clang proceeded from its
bell, which had always tolled till now when this figure appeared in the
light of day. But none had heard that a corpse was to be borne to its
home that afternoon, nor was there any token of funeral, except the
apparition of the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.”
[Sidenote: Key.]
19. “What may this portend?” asked each man of his neighbor.
[Sidenote: Contrast.]
[Sidenote: Impressionism vivid.]
[Sidenote: Direct character description.]
[Sidenote: Contrast.]
[Sidenote: Character delineation by suggestion.]