its narrower scope it is the work of the moral intellect allegorizing
its view of life; and where creative genius enters into it, in the
Shakespearean sense of life in its own right, it tends to be a larger
and truer story breaking the bonds of its religious scheme. It has its
roots in Puritanism, but it is only incidentally a New England tale; its
substance is the most universal experience of human nature in religious
life, taking its forms only, its local habitation and name, from the
Puritan colony in America, and these in a merely allegorical, not
historical manner. Certain traits, however, ally it more closely to New
England Puritanism. It is a relentless tale; the characters are
singularly free from self-pity, and accept their fate as righteous; they
never forgave themselves, they show no sign of having forgiven one
another; even God's forgiveness is left under a shadow in futurity. They
have sinned against the soul, and something implacable in evil remains.
The minister's dying words drop a dark curtain over all.
"Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we
broke!--the sin here so awfully revealed!--let these alone be in thy
thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be that, when we forgot our God,--when
we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it was thenceforth
vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure
reunion."
Mercy is but a hope. There is also a singular absence of prayer in the
book. Evil is presented as a thing without remedy, that cannot change
its nature. The child, even, being the fruit of sin, can bring, Hester
and Arthur doubt, no good for others or herself. In the scheme of
Puritan thought, however, the atonement of Christ is the perpetual
miracle whereby salvation comes, not only hereafter but in the holier
life led here by grace. There is no Christ in this book. Absolution, so
far as it is hinted at, lies in the direction of public confession, the
efficacy of which is directly stated, but lamely nevertheless; it
restores truth, but it does not heal the past. Leave the dead past to
bury its dead, says Hawthorne, and go on to what may remain; but life
once ruined is ruined past recall. So Hester, desirous of serving in her
place the larger truth she has come to know, is stayed, says Hawthorne,
because she "recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and
mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed
down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow." That was
never the Christian gospel nor the Puritan faith. Indeed, Hawthorne here
and elsewhere anticipates those ethical views which are the burden of
George Eliot's moral genius, and contain scientific pessimism. This
stoicism, which was in Hawthorne, is a primary element in his moral
nature, in him as well as in his work; it is visited with few touches of
tenderness and pity; the pity one feels is not in him, it is in the
pitiful thing, which he presents objectively, sternly, unrelentingly. It
must be confessed that as an artist he appears unsympathetic with his
characters; he is a moral dissector of their souls, minute, unflinching,
thorough, a vivisector here; and he is cold because he has passed
sentence on them, condemned them. There is no sympathy with human nature
in the book; it is a fallen and ruined thing suffering just pain in its
dying struggle. The romance is steeped in gloom. Is it too much to
suggest that in ignoring prayer, the atonement of Christ, and the work
of the Spirit in men's hearts, the better part of Puritanism has been
left out, and the whole life of the soul distorted? Sin in the soul, the
scarlet flower from the dark soil, we see; but, intent on that, has not
the eye, and the heart, too, forgotten the large heavens that ensphere
all--even this evil flower--and the infinite horizons that reach off to
the eternal distance from every soul as from their centre? This romance
is the record of a prison-cell, unvisited by any ray of light save that
earthly one which gives both prisoners to public ignominy; they are
seen, but they do not see. These traits of the book, here only
suggested, have kinship with the repelling aspects of Puritanism, both
as it was and as Hawthorne inherited it in his blood and breeding; so,
in its transcendent spirituality, and in that democracy which is the
twin-brother of spirituality in all lands and cultures, by virtue of
which Hawthorne here humiliates and strips the minister who is the type
of the spiritual aristocrat in the community, there is the essence of
New England; but, for all that, the romance is a partial story, an
imperfect fragment of the old life, distorting, not so much the Puritan
ideal--which were a little matter--but the spiritual life itself. Its
truth, intense, fascinating, terrible as it is, is a half-truth, and the
darker half; it is the shadow of which the other half is light; it is
the wrath of which the other half is love. A book from which light and
love are absent may hold us by its truth to what is dark in life; but,
in the highest sense, it is a false book. It is a chapter in the
literature of moral despair, and is perhaps most tolerated as a
condemnation of the creed which, through imperfect comprehension, it
travesties.
With this book Hawthorne came into fame; but his fellow townsmen were
ill pleased to find some disrepute of their own accompanying his
success. It is surely to be regretted that this was the case; and,
effective as his sketch of the Custom House is, one feels that Hawthorne
stooped in taking his literary revenge on his humble associates by
holding them up to personal ridicule. The tone of pleasantry veils ill
feeling, which is expressed without cover in a letter he wrote to Bridge
a day or two before he left the town:--
"As to the Salem people, I really thought that I had been exceedingly
good-natured in my treatment of them. They certainly do not deserve good
usage at my hands after permitting me to be deliberately lied down--not
merely once, but at two several attacks, on two false indictments--
without hardly a voice being raised on my behalf; and then sending one
of the false witnesses to Congress, others to the Legislature, and
choosing another as the mayor.
"I feel an infinite contempt for them--and probably have expressed more
of it than I intended--for my preliminary chapter has caused the
greatest uproar that has happened here since witch-times. If I escape
from town without being tarred and feathered, I shall consider it good
luck. I wish they would tar and feather me; it would be such an entirely
novel kind of distinction for a literary man. And, from such judges as
my fellow-citizens, I should look upon it as a higher honor than a
laurel crown."
He had said his farewell in the too famous sketch, with an ill grace,
shaking the dust of his native place from his feet, and frankly taking
upon himself the character of the unappreciated genius, which is seldom
a becoming one. The passage fitly closes this chapter in which his
nativity, for better or worse, is most apparent.
"Soon my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a
mist brooding over and around it, as if it were no portion of the real
earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary
inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and
the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to
be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good
townspeople will not much regret me; for--though it has been as dear an
object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their
eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place
of so many of my forefathers--_there_ has never been, for me, the
genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the
best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and
these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well
without me."
VI.
LITERARY LABORS.
In the late spring of 1850 Hawthorne removed his family and household
goods to the little red cottage amid the Berkshire Hills which was to be
a nature's hermitage to him for the next year and a half. It was a
story-and-a-half building, rude and simple, on a great hillside,
commanding a view of a small lake below and of beautiful low mountain
horizons. Here began again that secluded happy family life which had
belonged to the Old Manse, and he was perhaps happier than he had ever
been. The home had the same internal look as of old, for he had brought
with him the relics of family furniture, the oriental objects from over
sea that were heirlooms from his father, and the Italian Madonnas, the
casts and paintings with which his wife delighted to surround the
home-life in an atmosphere of artistic adornment and suggestion; and, as
the quarters were very small, the effect was one of mingled homeliness
and refinement. Bridge soon joined them, and devoted himself in a
practical way to making things shipshape, providing necessary closets
and shelves out of packing boxes, and generally eking out the interior
arrangements with a sailor's ready ingenuity. Outside there was a
barnyard, and a two-story hencoop to be put to rights, with its brood of
pet chickens each with its name,--Snowdrop, Crown Imperial, Queenie,
Fawn, and the like decorative appellations. The two children, Una and
Julian, were in a paradise. Other friends came, too, to visit or to
call. Mrs. Hawthorne soon remarked that they seemed to see more society
than ever before. Herman Melville lived near by, at Pittsfield, and
became a welcome guest and companion, with his boisterous genuine
intellectual spirits and animal strength. Fanny Kemble made an
interesting figure on her great black horse at the gate. The Sedgwick
neighbors were thoughtful and serviceable. O'Sullivan reappeared for a
moment in all his Celtic vivacity, and Fields, Holmes, Duyckinck, and
others of the profession came and went in the summer days. Hawthorne
breathed the air of successful authorship at last, and knew its vanities
and its pleasures. The mail brought him new acquaintances, and now and
then a hero-worshiper lingered at the gate for a look. But as the warm
days went by, and the frosts came, he found himself in his old
sheltering nook, in a place removed from the world, living practically
alone with his wife and children, though the increasing sense of
friendliness in the world cheered and warmed him.
He had, however, begun to age. He was forty-six years old, and the last
year had told upon him, with its various anxieties, excitement, and hard
labor with the pen. He was more easily fatigued, he was less robust and
venturesome, less physically confident. He showed the changes of time.
On his arrival, "weary and worn," says his wife, "with waiting for a
place to be, to think, and to write in," he gave up with something like
nervous fever; "his eyes looked like two immense spheres of troubled
light; his face was wan and shadowy, and he was wholly uncomfortable."
He soon recovered tone; but though he pleaded that his mind never worked
well till the frosts brought out the landscape's autumnal colors and had
some similar alchemy for his own brain, it was a needed rest that he
enjoyed while giving and receiving these early hospitalities in a new
country. He even found the broad mountain view, with the lake in its
bosom, a distraction which made it hard for him to write in its
presence. He had always been used to narrow outlooks from his windows;
even at the Old Manse the scene was small though open. With the coming
of the fall days, however, he again took up his writing, and showed how
stimulating to his ambition and energies the first taste of popularity
had been. Indeed from this time he was more productive than at any other
period, and wrote regularly and successfully as he had never before
done. The scale of the novel gave more volume to his work of itself, and
its mere continuity sustained his effort; moreover the excitement of a
new kind of work was a strong stimulus. He now began to write novels,
differently studied and composed from his earlier stories, more akin to
the usual narrative of fiction. "The Scarlet Letter," a work of pure
imagination, was the climax of his tales, the furthest reach of his
romantic allegorizing moral art in creation; but he now undertook to
utilize his experience and observation in the attempt to delineate life
in its commoner and more realistic aspects of character and scene. He
began "The House of the Seven Gables" in September and finished it early
in January. He wrote regularly, but the story went on more slowly than
he had hoped, requiring more care and thought than "The Scarlet Letter,"
because the latter was all in one tone, while here there was variety. He
had to wait for the mood, at times; but the composition was really
rapid, and seemed slow only because he was used to the smaller scale of
effort. The book was at once sent to press and published in the spring.
[Footnote: _The House of The Seven Gables_. A Romance. By Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1851. 12mo. Pp. vi, 344.]
"The House of the Seven Gables" is a succession of stories bound
together to set forth the history of a family through generations under
the aspect of an inherited curse which inheres in the house itself. The
origin of the curse and of the plot lies in the founder of the family,
Colonel Pyncheon, whose character, wrong-doing, and death make the first
act; the second, which is no more than an illustrative episode and
serves to fill out the history of the house itself, is the tale of
Alice, the mesmerized victim of a later generation, in which the
witchcraft element of the first story is half rationalized; the third
part, which these two lead up to and explain, is the body of the novel,
and contains the working out of the curse and its dissipation in the
marriage of the descendants of the Colonel and the old wizard Maule,
from whose dying lips it had come. The curse itself, "God will give him
blood to drink," is made physical by the fact that death comes to the
successive heirs by apoplexy, an end which lends itself to an atmosphere
of secrecy, mysteriousness, and judgments; but the permanence of those
traits which made the Colonel's character harsh and harmful, his
ambition, will-power, and cruelty, gives moral probability to the curse
and secures its operation as a thing of nature. There is, nevertheless,
a lax unity in the novel, owing to this dispersion of the action; and
its somewhat thin material in the contemporary part needs the
strengthening and enrichment that it derives from the historical
elements. The series is united by the uncut thread of a vengeful
punishment that must continue until the original wrong itself shall
disappear; but when that happens, the Indian deed hidden behind the
portrait is worthless, the male line is extinct, and the house itself a
thing of the past. The presence of the past in life, both as inheritance
and environment, is the moral theme, and here it is an evil past
imparting misery to whomever it touches. The old house is its physical
sign and habitation; the inhabitants are its victims, and in the later
story they are innocent sufferers, as Alice had been in the intermediate
time.
Such a canvas is one which Hawthorne loved to fill up with the shadowed
lights, the melodramatic coloring and fantastic decorativeness of his
fancies. The characters are, as always, few. There are but five of them,
Hepzibah, Clifford, Phoebe, the daguerreotypist, and the Judge, with the
contributory figures of Uncle Venner and little Ned Higgins. They have
also the constant Hawthorne trait of great isolation, and live entirely
within the world of the story. In sketching them Hawthorne had recourse
to real life, to observation, as also in all the contemporary background
and atmosphere. The substance and attraction of the novel lie in this
fidelity to the life he knew so minutely; for the plot, the crime, the
curse, except in their own historical atmosphere, in the Colonel and in
Alice's story, interest us but little and languidly. It is, perhaps, not
refining too much to see in the novel a closer relationship to those
earlier tales and sketches which drew their matter from observation,
were less imaginative, more realistic, and belong to a less purely
creative art. If "The Scarlet Letter" was the culmination of the finer
tales, "The House of the Seven Gables" is the climax of this less
powerful, but more every-day group of the familiar aspect of country
life. It was, possibly, with some vague sense of this that Hawthorne
preferred this novel as one "more characteristic of my mind, and more
proper and natural for me to write;" it came from his more familiar
self. He was able to introduce into it that realistic detail concerning
trifles which he delighted to record in his journals; and the minute
analysis which in the great romance he gave to the feelings and inner
life of pain, he here gives rather to the elaboration of the scene, to
external things, to the surface and texture of the physical elements. He
has succeeded consequently in delineating and coloring a picture of New
England conditions with Dutch faithfulness, and this is the charm of the
work. It appeals, like life and memory themselves, to the people of that
countryside, and goes to their hearts like the sight of home. To others
it can be only a provincial study, with the attraction of such life in
any land, and for them more dependent on its romantic setting, its moral
suggestion, and general human truth. Those who have the secret and are
of kin to New England, however, find in the mere description something
that endears the book. The life of the little back street, as it revives
in Clifford's childishly pleased senses, with its succession of morning
carts, its scissor-grinder, and other incidents of the hour; the garden
of flowers and vegetables, with the Sunday afternoon in the ruinous
arbor, the loaf of bread and the china bowl of currants; the life of the
immortal cent-shop, with its queer array, and its string of customers
jingling the bell; the hens, evidently transported from the great coop
of the Berkshire cottage, but with the value of an event in the
novel,--all these things, with a hundred other features that are each
but a trifle, make up a glamour of reality that grows over the whole
book like the mosses on the house. In the characters themselves this
local realism is carried to the highest degree of truth, especially in
Hepzibah, who in her half-vital state, with her faded gentility and
gentle, heroic heart of patient love, in all her outer queerness and
grotesquely thwarted life, is the most wholly alive of all of
Hawthorne's characters; in Phoebe, too, though in a different way, is
the same truth, a life entirely real; and, on the smaller scale, Uncle
Venner is also to be reckoned a character perfectly done. Clifford is
necessarily faint, and does not interest one on his own account; he is
pitiable, but his love of the beautiful is too much sentimentalized to
engage sympathy in the special way that Hawthorne attempts, and one sees
in him only the victim of life, the prisoner whom the law mistook and
outraged and left ruined; and Holgrave is no more than a spectator,
mechanically necessary to the action and useful in other ways, but he
does not affect us as a character. There remains Judge Pyncheon, on whom
Hawthorne evidently exhausted his skill in the effort to make him
repellent. He is studied after the gentleman who was most active in the
removal of Hawthorne from the Custom House, and was intended to be a
recognizable portrait of him in the community. Perhaps the knowledge of
this fact interferes with the proper effect of the character, since it
makes one doubt the truth of it. The practice of introducing real
persons into literature as a means of revenge by holding them up to
detestation is one that seldom benefits either fiction or truth; it was
the ugliest feature of Pope's character, and it always affects one as
unhandsome treatment. In this instance it detracts from the sense of
reality, inasmuch as one suspects caricature. But taken without
reference to the original, Judge Pyncheon is somewhat of a stage
villain, a puppet; his villainy is presented mainly in his physique, his
dress and walk, his smile and scowl, and generally in his demeanor; it
is not actively shown, though the reader is told many sad stories of his
misbehaviour; even at the end, in the scene in which he comes nearest to
acting, the plot never gets further than a threat to do a cruel thing.
In other words it is a portrait that is drawn, not a character that is
shown in its play of evil power actually embodying itself in life. He is
the bogy of the house, the Pyncheon type incarnated in each generation;
and when he sits dead in the old chair, he seems less an individual than
the Pyncheon corpse. In the long chapter which serves as his requiem,
and in which there is the suggestion of Dickens not in the best phase of
his art, the jubilation is somewhat diabolic; it affects one as if
Hawthorne's thoughts were executing a dance upon a grave. The character
is too plainly hated by the author, and it fails to carry conviction of
its veracity. Yet in certain external touches and aspects it suggests
the hypocrite who everywhere walks the streets, placid, respectable,
sympathetic in salutations, but bearing within a cold, gross, cruel,
sensual, and selfish nature which causes a shudder at every casual
glimpse that betrays its lurking hideousness. The character is
thoroughly conceived, but being developed by description instead of
action, seems overdone; prosperity has made him too flabby to act, and
kills him with a fit as soon as he works himself up to play the role.
After all, the story in its contemporary phase is but a small part of
the novel, which does not much suffer even if the Judge in his youthful,
hard-hearted, cowardly crime and the victim in his aesthetic delicacy
are both ineffective in making the impression the author aimed at. The
real scene is the singularly trivial and barren life of the old house,
where nothing takes place but the purchase of a Jim Crow, a breakfast of
mackerel, a talk about chickens, gossip with Uncle Venner, and the
passing of a political procession in the street; and one too easily
forgets the marvelous art which could make such a life interesting and
stimulating and engaging to the affections, even with the aid of
Hepzibah and Phoebe in their simpleness. What makes the happiness of the
story is to be found in these details, and in the century-old atmosphere
which Hawthorne has generated about them, compounding into one element
the witchcraft memories, the foreign horizons, the curse in the house,
the threadbare gentility, the decay material and spiritual, the odor of
time, all of which he had absorbed from his Salem life; thence it came
that he was able to give to New England its only imaginative work that
has ancestral quality. All this, too, is distilled from the soil.
Hawthorne felt in his own life the weight of this past; its elements
were familiar and near to him, so that his own family legend imparts
coloring to the tale and gives him sympathy with it; and in leaving
Salem it was from such a past that he desired to be free. He expresses
himself, in these matters, through Holgrave, in his democratic new life
urging Hepzibah to abandon gentility and be proud of her cent shop as a
genuine thing in a practical and real world,--she would begin to live
now at sixty, such was his narrowness of youthful view; but the
democratic sentiment is Hawthorne's. So, too, in his rhetorical
impeachment of the past, though the passage is meant to summarize the
point of view of reform, there is an emphasis such as sincerity gives:--
"'Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?' cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. 'It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of
the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give the
matter the right word!'
"'But I do not see it,' observed Phoebe.