ocular observation, in the main, and to the exterior sphere of his art.
It is in the historical tales that his imagination first acts with
seeing power; and here, too, the story by which he preferred to be
known, "The Gentle Boy," stands out, though its prominence is rather a
matter of priority than of distinction, for it is the fruit of his
sympathies more than of his imagination. The remembrance of his
ancestor's share in the persecution of the Quakers may have suggested
the theme, and specially drawn out his own gentleness in the treatment.
The singularity of the tale is partly due to the fascination of the
child's name, Ilbrahim, which brings before the mind an eastern
background, emphasizes his loneliness, and gives a suggestion of
Scriptural charm to the narrative. One almost expects to see palm-trees
growing up over him. He is, however, not individualized,--he is the
universal orphan child; nor does it require any stretch of fancy to see
in him the Christchild that St. Christopher bore over the river, for so
might that Child have come into this wilderness preaching the eternal
lesson. The pathetic story is a fable of piety, in fact, and is somewhat
nervelessly handled for reality; the figures seem to glide in their
motions, they are not quite set on the earth, they are impalpable except
in their emotions. The facts lack firmness, though the feeling is
wrought out with truth and refinement and makes an irresistible appeal
of pity. It is, however, rather in the second historical tale which
Hawthorne chose to stand as his pseudonym of authorship, "The Gray
Champion," that he finds the type whose method he afterward repeats
while developing it more richly. This tale is a picture, a scene, ending
in a tableau; the surrounding stir of life, excitement, and atmosphere
is first prepared, then the procession comes down the street, and is
arrested, challenged, and thrown back by the venerable figure of the old
Puritan who stands alone, like a prophet come back from the dead to
deliver the people. The composition, the development, the focusing are
in Scott's manner; it is from him that this dramatic presentation of
history in a single scene, as here, or by a succession of scenes
carrying on a story, is derived; partly pictorial, partly theatrical,
always dramatic, this is the method which Hawthorne applied, the art of
"The Author of Waverley," who was its great master in English fiction.
"Endicott and the Red Cross" is a small study of the same sort; and in
that sketch, and elsewhere, it is noticeable that in bearing and
language the characters resemble the Covenanters, as Scott fixed the
type in literature, more than they recall the real New England Puritans.
Hawthorne's interest in colonial history found its most complete early
expression in the "Tales of the Province House," in which he for once
succeeded in grouping a series in a natural and effective way so as to
make a larger whole. "Sir William Howe's Masquerade" is told by a
succession of scenes, quite in the manner described, and the suggestion
of mystery, the supernatural intention felt in the incident though not
explicitly present in the fact, which in this story attends the last
descending figure of the line of royal governors, as it also attended
the figure of the Gray Champion, is also in Scott's manner, though more
subtly effected. In "Edward Randolph's Portrait" the appearance of the
picture on the faded canvas is mechanically accounted for, but at the
moment of its discovery this same supernatural expectancy, as it were,
is aroused in the beholders; the incident itself recalls the appearance
of the portrait of old Lord Ravenswood at the marriage ball of "The
Bride of Lammermoor," though the analogy may very likely never have
occurred to Hawthorne. "Old Esther Dudley" is hardly more than a
character portrait,--the memory of the Province House and all it stood
for preserved in the devotion of the old servant into whose life it had
passed and whose spirit it occupied like a reliquary of old time. The
best of these four tales is "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," and it is so
because in it Hawthorne's genius passed out of the sphere of history and
touched on that universal moral world where his most original creation
was to lie. It is necessary here only to observe that in this tale he
has fully seized the power of the physical object, plainly sensible to
all as matter of fact, to serve as the medium for moral suggestion often
difficult to put into words, of that sort whose effect is rather in the
feelings than in thought; and this, without turning the object into an
express symbol. The mantle of Lady Eleanore is a garment of pride, and
also a garment of death in its dread form of pestilence; the story
continually returns to it, as its physical theme, and the imagination
fixes upon it by a kind of fascination, as through it the double aspect
of Lady Eleanore's isolation is sensibly clothed, her haughtiness and
her contagion, whose fatal bond is in this mantle, which finally seems
not only to express her life but to rule her tragedy. Here one feels a
new power, because while Hawthorne still retains the method of narration
he had adopted, he has enriched it with an art and genius distinctly his
own. In another tale,--which is provincial if not historical, and which
was one of his earlier pieces,--"Roger Malvin's Burial," there is also a
noticeable beginning in his art, for in this he uses undesigned
coincidence to give that impression of a guided accomplishment of fate,
which is so dramatically effective to the moral sense. From these few
instances it will be observed that Hawthorne reached artistic
consciousness, and a mastery of aim and method, slowly and along no one
line of development; rather his genius seemingly put forth many
tendrils, seeking direction and support and growth, and gradually in
these hundred tales he found himself and his art.
History assisted Hawthorne's imagination in its operation by affording
that firmness and distinctness of outline which was most needed in his
work; it gave body to his creations, but in his most characteristic and
original tales this body was not to be one of external fact, but of
moral thought. His genius contained a primary element of reflection, of
meditation on life, of the abstract; and while his imagination might
take its start and find an initial impulse, an occasion, in some
concrete object on which it fastened, its course in working itself out
was governed by this abstract moral intention. In dealing with life
directly, and not through history, the tales which are at the least
remove from mere observation are those that were immediately suggested
by his journeys and embody these experiences in their background if not
in the whole; such are "The Seven Vagabonds" and the two Shaker
episodes, "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and "A Shaker Bridal." His
experiments in the grotesque style, "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and
"Mrs. Bullfrog," can be left one side, for they never passed the stage
of amateurish weakness, and led to nothing. His meditation on life
sometimes centres about an individual, but this is only seeming; his
real interest was always in collective life or in the atmosphere round
about all lives. To take a simple case, but one typical of his point of
view and method, "The Haunted Mind" is a study in the night-atmosphere
of the human soul, in a certain state, and is rendered with the
vividness of personal experience. "Fancy's Show-Box" is a more
individualized variant of the same motive, and yet its substance is the
frankly abstract question of responsibility for guilt which is not acted
but only entertained; and as in this tale the story is of the sins that
hover round the soul waiting to be born, so in "David Swan" the story is
of the events that might happen to an unsuspecting man, but pass by
innocuous after merely shadowing his sleep like a threat. To this
atmosphere of life also belongs the elaborate shadow sketch, "Monsieur
de Miroir," a motive often treated in literature and here more lightly
handled than one would have anticipated, and hence more ineffectively,
for Hawthorne's power did not lie in his playfulness of fancy so much as
in its darker workings. Hawthorne let his mind brood over these
possibilities of life, these half-vital acts, thoughts, and beings, like
fears in an anxious mind, things that have only partial being, but are
real enough at times to trouble the mind's eye. A touch of this
atmosphere of unreality is found, also, in such a tale as "Wakefield,"
the story of the man who disappeared from his place in life though he
remained in the neighborhood unknown; the main theme is rather the man
cut off from life, which Hawthorne so often recurred to, but the element
of life's contingency, the nearness of an event that might happen but
never does, is what makes the strangeness of this curious study.
In approaching life itself in its individual forms, the slightness of
Hawthorne's attempt in the earlier pieces is very marked. A good example
of it is "The Wives of the Dead." Two wives, who suppose their husbands
have been lost at sea, are told separately at different hours of the
night, in the house they occupy together, that the lost has been saved;
each believing the other a widow leaves her to sleep. Here are merely
two dramatic moments described and opposed, a perfect example of
likeness in difference on a small scale, done with great truth to
nature; the sketch is finely wrought, and gains by its intense
condensation of situation and its brief single mood. Two such moments,
in his simpler tales, Hawthorne was accustomed to take, and treat by
opposition; the power lies in the contrast. Such, to give examples, are
"The White Old Maid," "Edward Fane's Rosebud," and with less
distinctness, "The Wedding Knell," where the contrast goes back to lost
youth for effect. In the very artificial fable, which has elements of
the fairy story in it, "The Three-fold Destiny," there is this simple
construction, and it is found also in "The Prophetic Pictures," though
that tale is primarily a study in the idea of fate, a subject seldom
touched by Hawthorne, the notion of an inevitable destiny foreseen by
the painter's intuition and forecast on the canvas, but implicit from
the beginning in character. In all these tales scene, situation, and
character, as well as the dialogue, are handled with little variation;
pictorial and dramatic effects are sought, and the slight plot is
developed, by the means usual to Hawthorne's hand. The allegorizing
method, it should be observed, though it appears with greater or less
influence, is not employed with any exclusiveness, but takes its place
with other resources of his art. In "The Great Carbuncle," however, and
in "The Man of Adamant," the allegory is predominant and absorbs the
tale. Perhaps it is as an offshoot of this allegorizing mood that the
tales of pure fancy should be regarded, those masque-like inventions, "A
Select Party" and "The Hall of Fantasy," together with "The Intelligence
Office" and "A Virtuoso's Collection," also remnants of old-fashioned
ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that
play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque;
oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as
far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive rather than
sympathetic.
Of collective life, frankly so treated, Hawthorne wrote frequently,--the
group is an important one. The crowd attracted him by its polarity to
his own solitude, and it is curious to observe how fond he was of the
processional in his work. The simple illustration of this sort is "The
Procession of Life;" here he marshals mankind, as with the power of a
magician's rod, in hordes. In "The New Adam and Eve" he reviews society
in its institutions and its garniture of civilization; and the
conception is a happy device by which to obtain the requisite distance
and wholeness for a single point of view. "Earth's Holocaust," though
superficially different, is a variant of the same theme, presenting the
product of life in masses; its inclusion of the indestructibility of the
good is noticeable as a philosophical idea such as he rarely introduced
in an explicit way. The felicitous allegory of "The Celestial Railroad"
satirizes human nature without bitterness; but, while the universality
of Bunyan's emblems is strikingly shown by the ease with which they are
adapted to the new age of steam, the tale is, as it were, music
transposed; the cleverness is Hawthorne's, but Bunyan wrote the piece.
These four tales, admirable as they are in breadth, are nevertheless
essentially reflective. The imaginative group of the same scope is of a
higher rank. In it the general life is set forth with more
individuality, though life in the abstract still occupies the
foreground. To set aside such a moral parable as "The Lily's Quest," or
such an illustration of the power of love to raise a man above himself
temporarily as "Drowne's Wooden Image," or such a study of isolation as
"The Man of Adamant," in all of which the didacticism is rather nakedly
felt, there are two tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr.
Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the
ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the
guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of
our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily
death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and
so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from
which we had parted in thought. "The Christmas Banquet" is one of the
most artistically conceived of all the tales, though its subject repels
us; the wretchedness of life is shown in the persons of numerous guests
through a succession of years, with the effect of a multiplicity of
instances; yet at the end it is found that the worst wretch of all is
the constant guest with the cold, unfeeling heart,--the climax of misery
is not to have lived at all. The tale is carefully composed, especially
in those points of keeping, balance, and contrast in which Hawthorne was
expert, yet by some misadventure it fails to interpret itself clearly.
In proportion, however, as imagination enters into these stories under
the impulse of the artistic faculty, it will be seen that they lend
themselves less readily to such definite classification as has thus far
been attempted; the various elements of Hawthorne's genius and art draw
together and combine, and in the group that remains to be noticed his
originality is most conspicuous, and this requires a more flexible
treatment, though without exception these tales fall under the head of
the general life set forth reflectively in the forms of concrete
imagination.
Probably in no one point is Hawthorne's peculiarity so obviously marked
as in the persistency with which he clings to a physical image, vividly
impressing it upon the mind, like a text which gathers atmosphere and
discloses significance under the special treatment of the preacher. It
is said that he had, artistically, the allegorizing temperament, and he
in fact did use all those forms of imagery--the fable, apologue,
parable--which belong to this mode of presentation; but in his most
effective work the allegory is more subtly embodied,--it exists in
suggestion, and its appeal is as much emotional as didactic. The nucleus
of this new mystery is the physical object that he seizes upon and in
which his imagination works as if it were clay, recreating it so that it
becomes more than pure symbol, as has been illustrated in "Lady
Eleanore's Mantle;" and sometimes it is almost vitalized into a life of
its own. This power of such an object to become the medium of thought
and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually
discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by
its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the
vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in
his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole,
might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in
which he dreaded to dwell altogether.
Such an object is, at all events, a necessity for him in his greater
work. A crude form of it is the snake, in the tale of "The Bosom
Serpent," one of those "allegories of the heart" which he apparently
meant to write in a series of which he never found the key. The idea is
an old one; the man with a snake in his bosom is a hypochondriac, who by
centring his thoughts on himself has developed this fancy and is
tortured by it. The cure is wrought when he forgets himself in returning
to the love of his wife. The almost physical dismissal of the serpent
into the fountain, which is neither averred nor denied, like a devil
cast out as in old times, is puerile; but Hawthorne was, in other tales,
not averse to a naturalistic explanation of his mysteries, as if a basis
of matter of fact, however irrelevant essentially, gave more
plausibility to their truth. If the snake is "egotism," if it is the
torture of self in a man, if its cure is the loss of self in love, then
making the snake real and physical is absurdity; medicine and morals are
confounded; the scientific fact has nothing to do with the artistic
meaning and is a concession to the gross senses of the reader. The story
illustrates the method, rather than its successful application; for the
physical horror is really greater here than the moral revulsion. In "The
Minister's Black Veil" the object is more happily dealt with. It is to
be noticed that Hawthorne did not invent these objects, he found them;
and, in this case, he has used the tradition of an old Puritan minister
of the past age. He uses the veil to typify man's concealment of himself
from others, even the nearest; and while it visibly isolates the
minister among his fellow-men, it finally unites him with them in a
single lot; for to the mind's eye, educated by this image to a new power
of seeing, all men wear this veil; humanity is clothed with it in life,
and moulders away beneath it in the grave, whither its secrets are
carried. The seeming exception is found to be the rule; the horror
attaching to the one unseen face is now felt in all faces; the race is
veiled, and the bit of crape has fallen like the blackness of night upon
all life, for life has become a thing of darkness, a concealment. Here
the moral idea is predominant, and in it the symbol issues into its full
life.
Hawthorne's art became always, not only more vividly symbolized, but
more deeply moralized. The secrecy of men's bosoms was a matter that
interested him very much; the idea had a fascination for him. It is the
substance of the tale of "Young Goodman Brown," who goes to the witches'
Sabbath in the Essex woods and there sees those who have taught him
religion, the righteous and the good, men and women, and his own
wife,--sees them or their devil-brewed phantasms; he calls on heaven,
and finds himself suddenly alone; but when he returns to the village,
and looks again on the venerable fathers and mothers of his childhood
and his own tender and loving wife, he cannot free his mind from the
doubt,--were they what they seemed or had he indeed beheld them there in
the woods at their orgy? It is as if for him the veil were lifted, and
he alone saw, like omniscience, into the bosoms of all. Suspicion,
arising from his own contact with evil, though he escaped, has imparted
the look of hypocrisy to all life; this is his bedevilment. Here the
place of the physical object is taken by the incident of the woods, and
the moral idea is less clearly stated; the story is one of those whose
significance is felt to contain mystery which Hawthorne meant to remain
in its dark state.
In "The Birthmark" the physical object is again found as the initial
point of the tale and the guiding clue of the imagination in working it
out. The situation presents the opposition of the love of science to
human love, but no conflict is described, because the first is the
master passion from the beginning, and, being indulged, leads to the
loss of the second in the death of the wife, who perishes in having the
birthmark removed. The moral idea, as not unfrequently happens, seems to
flake off from the tale, like the moral of the old fable, and is to the
effect that imperfection belongs to mortal life, and if it is removed
wholly mortality must go with it; and the lesson is of the acceptance of
imperfection in what men love, as a permanent condition, and indeed
almost as the humanizing feature, of earthly life. It is noticeable that
the clergyman, the physician, and the artist are the only specific types
that attracted Hawthorne; he held them all romantically, and science he
conceived as alchemy. This same predisposition appears in "Rappaccini's
Daughter;" she was the experiment of her father in creating a live
poison-woman, a vitalized flower, the Dryad as it were of the
poison-tree humanized in mortal shape; the physical object is here the
flowering tree, with its heavy fragrance; and the plot lies only in the
gradual transformation of the young man by continuous and unconscious
inoculation until he is drawn into the circle of death to share the
woman's isolation as a lover, both being shut off from their kind by the
poison atmosphere that exhales from them; the catastrophe lies in the
moral idea that for such poison there is no antidote but death, and the
lady dies in drinking the draught that should free her. The fact that
Hawthorne, when writing the story, said he did not know how it would
end, is interesting as indicating that his literary habit was to let the
story tell itself from within according to its impulses, and not to
shape it from without by his own predetermined purpose; a pure
allegorist, it may be observed, would have followed naturally the latter
method. This may account for the indefiniteness and mystery of effect
often felt, as well as for the inartistic didacticism in the concluding
sentences, frequently to be observed, where it appears as one or more
afterthoughts possibly to be drawn from the story, but not exhausting
its moral significance. In this case, powerful as the tale is, the moral
intention is left vague, though except as a parable the invention is
meaningless.
In the last story to be instanced, "The Artist of the Beautiful," the
lucidity of the parable is complete. The physical object is the
butterfly; on its wings the tale moves, and perishes in its destruction.
The moral idea lies in the exposition of achievement as a freeing of the
artist's soul so that his work has become a thing of indifference to
him, let its fortunes be what they will,--it is the dead chrysalis from
which he has escaped; and the isolation of the artist's life is set
forth pathetically but with no suggestion of evil in it, for though the
world has rejected him he lives in his own world in the calm of victory.
No tale is so delicately wrought as this; in it the symbolism, which is
carried out in minute and precise detail, the moral significance, which
is as clear as it is deep, and the presence of a spiritual world in life
for which a visible language is found, are all present, in harmonious
blending; and it has the added and rare charm of happiness without loss
of truth. It is unique; and if one were to choose a single tale, best
representing Hawthorne's powers, methods, and successes, technically and
temperamentally as well as in imaginative reach and spiritual appeal, it
is by this he should be known.