tradition. ‘The Gray Champion’ is an incident of the tyranny of Andros.
‘The Maypole of Merry Mount’ celebrates the madcap revelries of the
first settlers at Wollaston. In ‘Endicott and the Red Cross’ Hawthorne
records a dramatic incident in the history of his native town, and
introduces, by the way, a motive that later was to develop into his
masterpiece.
The ‘Legends of the Province House’ (‘Howe’s Masquerade,’ ‘Edward
Randolph’s Portrait,’ ‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,’ and ‘Old Esther
Dudley’) have their warp of historical truth, but the imaginative
element is dominant. ‘The Gentle Boy’ is Hawthorne’s sympathetic
tribute to the persecuted sect of the Quakers. ‘Sunday at Home,’
‘Snow-Flakes,’ ‘Sights from a Steeple,’ ‘Footprints on the Seashore,’
represent a type of literature which former generations enjoyed, and
which modern magazine editors would decline with energy and quite
perfunctory thanks.
There are stories of horror and psychological mystery. The author of
‘Markheim’ might have chosen a theme like that treated in ‘Wakefield,’
or in ‘The Prophetic Pictures.’ His handling would have been different.
We do not gladly suffer an obvious moral in these days. No one would
now dare to put ‘A Parable’ for the explanatory title of his narrative,
as Hawthorne has done in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ or advise the
reader that the experiences of David Swan (if experiences those can be
called where a man sleeps and things _do not_ happen to him) argue ‘a
superintending Providence.’
In _Mosses from an Old Manse_ Hawthorne’s gain in power is marked. He
still ‘moralizes’ his legends; but the force of the conception and the
richness of the imagery drive the philosophy into the background. The
grim and uncanny humor of which Hawthorne had a masterful command is
displayed to the full in this book. No better illustration can be cited
than the scene where the old witch Mother Rigby exhorts the scarecrow,
she had so cunningly fashioned, to be a man. It is a grotesque, a
gruesome, and a mirth-provoking scene.
Hawthorne had brooded long over the superstitious past with which
his own history was so singularly linked. Among the fruit of these
meditations was the story of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ Like the minister
in the fearful narrative of ‘Thrawn Janet,’ Goodman Brown had been in
the presence of the powers of evil; but unlike the minister, he no
longer believed in virtue.
_Mosses from an Old Manse_ also includes odd conceits such as ‘The
Celestial Railroad,’ a new enterprise built from the famous City of
Destruction, a ‘populous and flourishing town,’ to the Celestial City.
The dreamer in this modern Pilgrim’s Progress takes the journey under
the personal conduct of Mr. Smooth-it-away and notes with interest
the improvements in methods of transportation since Bunyan’s time.
Less ingenious but no less amusing are ‘The Hall of Fantasy,’ ‘The
Procession of Life,’ and ‘The Intelligence Office.’ Monsieur de
l’Aubépine loved an allegorical meaning.
Between the _Twice-Told Tales_ and the _Mosses_ Hawthorne published
a group of children’s stories. _Grandfather’s Chair_ and the two
succeeding volumes consist of little narratives of colonial history,
in which our national exploits are celebrated in the tone of confident
Americanism so much deplored by Professor Goldwin Smith. There are
‘asides’ for grown people, as when Grandfather tells the children that
Harvard College was founded to rear up pious and learned ministers,
and that old writers called it ‘a school of the prophets.’
‘Is the college a school of the prophets now?’ asked Charley.
‘You must ask some of the recent graduates,’ answered Grandfather.
The _Wonder-Book_ and its sequel, the _Tanglewood Tales_, contain new
versions of old classical myths, the Gorgon’s Head, the Minotaur,
the Golden Fleece, and nine more. Here the adult reader has a chance
to feel the magic of Hawthorne’s art in a form where it seems most
tangible but is no less elusive. He will be astonished at the air of
reality given these old legends.
The perfect example of his work in this genre (the child’s story) is
the initial fantasy of _The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales_.
Such complete interweaving of the imaginative and the realistic is
little short of marvellous. And yet there are people who say that
perfect art cannot subsist in company with a moral. They may be
commended to the account of the common-sensible man who in the goodness
of his heart brought the odd, glittering, little snow-fairy into the
house and put her down in front of the hot stove.
V
THE GREAT ROMANCES
_SCARLET LETTER_, _HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES_, _BLITHEDALE ROMANCE_,
_MARBLE FAUN_
In addition to being an engrossing narrative and in every way a supreme
illustration of Hawthorne’s art, _The Scarlet Letter_ is a study in
will power. Of the four human lives involved in this tragedy, that of
Hester Prynne is the most absorbing, as her character is the loftiest.
Carried to the place of shame, her dark Oriental beauty irradiates all
about her, and she bears herself like a queen. Her punishment is her
own, she will ask none to share it. Her sacrifice has been infinite,
but it asks nothing in return. She bears with regal patience slight
and insult, and that worst punishment of all, the wondering terror of
little children, who flee her approach as of an evil thing.
Hawthorne has brought out with infinite skill the dreariness of the
years following the public disgrace when Hester has no longer the help
of a rebellious pride such as carried her almost exultantly through
the first crises of the dungeon and the pillory. With a refinement of
art the author adds one last bitter drop to Hester Prynne’s cup of
bitterness in the wasting away of her superb beauty. But as the lines
of her face hardened and the natural and external graces disappeared,
the great soul waxed greater, more capable of love and pity and
tenderness. She became a ministering angel whose coming was looked for
as if she had indeed been sent from Heaven.
It was a singular fancy of Hawthorne’s to give Hester a child like
Pearl, precocious, fitful, enigmatic, a will-o’-the-wisp, more akin
to the ‘good people’ of legendary lore than to the offspring of human
men and women. This too was a part of Hester’s discipline, that this
_un_-human, elf-like creature should have sprung from her, with a power
transcending that of other children to mix pain with pleasure in a
mother’s life.
Looking at Roger Chillingworth as he appears in his ordinary life, one
sees only the wise, benevolent physician, infinitely solicitous for the
welfare of his young friend Arthur Dimmesdale. Surprise him when the
mask of deep-thoughted benevolence is for the moment laid aside and it
is the face of a demon that one beholds.
Without a grain of pity for his victim he probes the minister’s soul.
Morbidly eager, he welcomes every sign that makes for his theory of
a hidden, a mental rather than a physical sickness. He gloats with
malignant joy over the discovery that this spiritually minded youth
has inherited a strong animal nature. Here is a deep and resistless
undercurrent of passion which has led to certain results. An
unflinching and cruel analysis will make clear what those results have
been. Suspicion becomes certainty, but proof is still wanting.
For terrible suggestiveness there are but few scenes in American
fiction comparable with that where Chillingworth bends over the
sleeping minister in his study and puts aside the garment that always
closely covered his breast. The poor victim shuddered and slightly
stirred. ‘After a brief pause, the physician turned away. But with what
a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as
it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and
therefore bursting through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making
itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which
he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the
floor! Thus Satan might have comported himself when a precious human
soul is lost to heaven and won into his kingdom. But what distinguished
the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!’
Dimmesdale is the deeply pathetic figure in this tragedy of souls.
Seven years of hypocrisy might well bring the unhappy man to the
pitiable condition in which he is found when the lines of interest
in the story draw to a focus. Day by day, month by month, his was a
life of lies. No course of action seemed open to the wretched minister
which did not involve piling higher the mountain of falsehood. To lie
and to scourge himself for lying--this was his whole existence. We
praise Hester Prynne’s courage. Not less extraordinary was Dimmesdale’s
wonderful display of will power. A weaker man would have confessed at
once, or fled, or committed suicide. The minister may not be accused of
stubbornly holding to his course from fear. He feared but one thing:
the shock to the great cause for which he stood, the shame that the
revelation of his guilt would bring upon the church, the loss of his
power to do good, the spectacle, for the eyes of mocking unbelievers,
of the ‘full-fraught man and best indued’ proved the guiltiest. This
were indeed ‘another fall of man.’
Incomparable as _The Scarlet Letter_ undoubtedly is, there are admirers
of Hawthorne’s genius who have pronounced _The House of the Seven
Gables_ the better story of the two. The judgment may be erroneous, it
is at least not eccentric.
In handling the genealogical details of the first chapter, Hawthorne
showed a deft touch. The descendants of the proud old Colonel Pyncheon
are as clearly defined as if the name and station of each had been
enumerated. With no less ease does one follow the fortunes of the
humble house of Matthew Maule. This progenitor of an obscure race had
been executed for witchcraft. All of his descendants bore the stamp
of this event. They were ‘marked out from other men.’ In spite of an
exterior of good fellowship, there was a circle about the Maules,
and no man had ever stepped foot inside of it. Unfortunate in its
early history, this family was never other than unfortunate. It had
an inheritance of sombre recollections, which it brooded upon, though
unresentfully.
Its life was linked with that of the proud house whose visible mansion
was founded on property wrested from the old martyr to superstition.
For Colonel Pyncheon had shown acrimonious zeal in the witchcraft
persecutions, and unbecoming speed in seizing on the wizard’s little
plot of ground with its spring of soft and pleasant water. Inseparable
as substance and shadow, wherever there was a Pyncheon there was also
a Maule. An endless chain of dark events depended from that crime
of witchcraft days. On the scaffold the condemned wizard prophesied
concerning his accuser: ‘God will give him blood to drink.’ Men shook
their heads when Colonel Pyncheon built the House of the Seven Gables,
on the site of Matthew Maule’s hut. They had not long to wait for the
fulfilment of the prophecy. The spring became bitter, and on the day
when the stately dwelling was first opened to guests Colonel Pyncheon
was found dead in his study, with blood-bedabbled ruff and beard.
Against this tragedy of old colonial days as a background Hawthorne
projects the later story of _The House of the Seven Gables_.
In its simplest aspect the narrative concerns the persecution of
an unfortunate and weak representative of the Pyncheon family by a
powerful and unscrupulous representative. At intervals through the
centuries the spirit of the great Puritan ancestor made its appearance
in the flesh, as if the Colonel ‘had been gifted with a sort of
intermittent immortality.’ Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon stands as a modern
reincarnation of the old persecutor of witches. Clifford, his cousin,
is a victim of the law at one of those moments when the law seems
to operate almost automatically. Suspected of murder, he might have
been cleared had Jaffrey but told what he knew, the real manner of
their uncle’s death. This were to disclose certain of his own moral
delinquencies, and Jaffrey keeps silent. And thus it happens that, both
being in their young manhood, the one is incarcerated and the other
enters on a path leading to influence, wealth, and good repute.
To the ‘somber dignity of an inherited curse’ the Pyncheons added yet
another dignity in the form of a shadowy claim to an almost princely
tract of land in the North. The connecting link, some parchment signed
with Indian hieroglyphics, had been lost when the Colonel died; but the
poorest of his race felt an accession of pride as he contemplated that
possible inheritance. And the richest of modern Pyncheons, the Judge,
was not proof against ambitious dreams excited by the same thought.
Affecting to believe that Clifford knows where the lost document is
hidden, the Judge tries to force himself on his victim, who, made
almost an imbecile by long imprisonment, is now, after his release,
harbored in the House of the Seven Gables and cared for by his aged
sister Hepzibah and his fair young cousin Phœbe. And while the Judge
is waiting, watch in hand, for the terror-stricken Clifford to come to
him, Death comes instead. Maule’s curse is fulfilled in yet another
generation. The suspicion that would have fallen anew on Clifford is
averted by Holgrave. But Holgrave, as he chooses to call himself, is
the last living representative of the family of Maule the wizard. And
it was for one of the persecuted race to save the unhappiest member
of the family by which his own had suffered. Holgrave marries Phœbe
Pyncheon and the blood of the two families is united.
Holgrave’s sole inheritance from his wizard ancestor, as he laughingly
explained, was a knowledge of the hiding-place of the now worthless
Indian deed. For this secret a Pyncheon had bartered his daughter’s
life and happiness in former years.
The Judge Pyncheon of the story has been pronounced ‘somewhat of a
stage villain, a puppet.’ This may possibly be due less to Hawthorne’s
handling of the character than to the inherent weakness of the
hypocrite as presented in fiction or drama. The patrician old woman
turned shop-keeper is so perfect a study that praise of the delineation
is almost an impertinence. And there is the great silent but living and
breathing House of the Seven Gables, in the creation of which Hawthorne
expended the wealth of his powers. It will always be a question whether
in the spiritual significance he attaches to or draws from some
physical fact this great literary artist does not show his highest
power. And many a time one finishes the reading of this particular
book with the feeling that the House of the Seven Gables is the real
protagonist of the drama.
In respect that it is a beautiful example of Hawthorne’s art _The
Blithedale Romance_ is deserving of all the praise lavished upon
it; in respect that it is a picture of Brook Farm it is naught. The
author himself freely admitted that he chose the socialist community
merely as a theatre where the creatures of his brain might ‘play their
phantas-magorical antics’ without their being exposed to the rigid test
of ‘too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives.’
The antics played are such as we witness daily when human puppets
are swayed by various passions of love, jealousy, self-will, pride,
humility, the instinct for art, or the instinct for reform. The bearded
Hollingsworth, whose ‘dark shaggy face looked really beautiful with its
expression of thoughtful benevolence,’ was, without being conscious
of it, a brutal egoist, capable of bending all people and all things
to the accomplishment of his idea. He illustrates the weakness of
strength, as Priscilla, so frail, nervous, and impressionable,
illustrates the strength of weakness.
That Hawthorne intended to show in Coverdale the insufficiency of
the profession of minor poet to make anything of a man, we shall not
pretend; but his distrust of the worth of literature is well known.
Coverdale’s failure was no greater than Hollingsworth’s, and he at
least never played with hearts.
Zenobia is at once the most human, the most attractive, and the most
pathetic figure in the drama. ‘But yet a woman,’ and too much woman, so
that her imperial beauty and grace, her wealth, her skill to command,
her magnetic charm, and her intellectual gifts were insufficient to
save her. No less regal in endowment than was Hester Prynne, she sank
under a burden infinitely lighter than Hester’s. Her nature was strong
but impulsive, and impulsiveness was Zenobia’s ruin.
Rome is the scene of _The Marble Faun_, the longest of Hawthorne’s
romances, and in his opinion the best. The author professed to have
seen, in the studio of an American sculptor, Kenyon, an unfinished
portrait bust, certain traits of which led him to ask the history of
the original. This face, of a beautiful youth, might have been mistaken
for a not fortunate attempt to reproduce the roguish countenance
of the Faun of Praxiteles. The resemblance was external merely; the
beholder presently detected something inscrutable in the eyes, in
the whole expression, as if powers of the soul hitherto dormant were
awaking, and with the awakening had come anxiety, longing, grief,
remorse, in short a knowledge of good through a sudden apprehension of
evil.
It was the portrait of a young Count of Monte Beni (known as
Donatello), whose family, an ancient one, was believed to have sprung
from the union of one of those fabled woodland creatures, half
animal, half god, and an earthly maiden. At long intervals the traits
defining the origin of the race were accentuated in a member of the
family. He was said to be ‘true Monte Beni.’ He lived on the border
line between two worlds, fearless and happy, but also unthinking, a
creature incapable of doing wrong because his life was free, natural,
instinctive. Such was Donatello.
The idea of a creature who should unite the characteristics of the wild
and the human fascinated Hawthorne. The charm is elusive, and must be
elusive or it is no longer charming. Hawthorne warns us against letting
the idea harden in our grasp or grow coarse from handling. For this
reason (and not for the sake of petty mystification) Hawthorne will not
disclose the one physical trait which would have completed Donatello’s
resemblance to the Faun, the pointed, furry ears. The youth himself
will jest with his friends on the subject, but no more; the thick brown
curls are never brushed aside.
So in Donatello’s attachment to Miriam, the mysterious beauty of the
story, there is something animal-like, at once pathetic and fierce.
Love does not awaken the intellect, however; the youth remains a child
until the wrathful moment when he holds the mad Capuchin, Miriam’s
persecutor, over the edge of the precipice, and reads in the girl’s
consenting eyes approval of the deed he is about to commit. At this
point Donatello’s real life begins.
The crime is far-reaching in its consequences, blighting for weary
months the happiness of the gentle Hilda, a terrified eye-witness;
but is most sinister in its effect on Donatello, whose dumb agony and
remorse Hawthorne has painted with a strong but subdued touch. Perhaps
the most striking of the incidents at Monte Beni is that where the
wretched Donatello tries to call the wild creatures of the wood to him
as he had been used to do in the days of his innocence, and finds his
power gone, only some loathsome reptile coming at his bidding.
Hilda is one of the triumphs of Hawthorne’s art. By what necromancy did
he contrive to invest a character so ethereal with life and interest?
For the type is by no means one that invariably attracts, and the
mere symbolism of the shrine, the doves, together with an innocence
which carries its own safeguard, might have been used unsuccessfully a
thousand times before being wrought by Hawthorne’s subtile power into
enduring form.
Kenyon is a proof of the instinct Hawthorne had for avoiding the
realistic fact. One would fancy this a character which would take on
realism of its own accord, a character which could be depended on to
become human and bohemian, to smoke, swear, tell emphatic stories, and
yet be gentle and high-minded withal, like Bret Harte’s angel-miners.
But Kenyon is almost as shadowy as Hilda.
Miriam with her rich dark beauty (making her in contrast with Hilda as
Night to Day) is the one strong human character, capable of infinite
pity and infinite devotion, a woman to die for--if the need were, and
such need is not uncommon in romances. The shadow of a nameless crime
hangs over her, from which, though innocent, she cannot escape. She
has warned Donatello of the fatality that attends her. She holds his
love in esteem so light as to be almost contempt until the moment when
he shows the force to grapple with her enemy; then love flames up in
her own heart. For her Donatello stains his hands with blood, suffers
agony indescribable, and then ‘comes back to his original self, with an
inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain.’
And as Miriam contemplates him on the day before he gives himself up
to justice, she asks whether the story of the fall of man has not been
repeated in the romance of Monte Beni.
The deficiencies and excesses of _The Marble Faun_ have been often
pointed out. The superabundance of guide-book description which
disturbed Sir Leslie Stephen was noted by Hawthorne as a defect and
apologized for in the preface. It is astonishing how it fits into place
when, after an interval of several years, one comes to re-read the
story. _The Marble Faun_ is a magical piece of work, its very enigmas,
mysteries, and its inconclusiveness tending to heighten the effect. And
it does not in the least detract from the enjoyment that one cannot
follow the author to the extent of believing it his best work.
VI
LATEST AND POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS
_OUR OLD HOME_, _NOTE-BOOKS_, _DOLLIVER ROMANCE_
_Our Old Home_ is a volume of twelve chapters on English life and
experiences. Acute, frank, sympathetic, modestly phrased, abounding
in humor, it may fairly be accounted one of the best of Hawthorne’s
works. The English are said to have been disturbed by a number of the
comments on their character and manners. If so, they must be as touchy
as Americans. _Our Old Home_ contains nothing that should offend,
unless indeed it be an offence to speak of one’s neighbor in any terms
not those of unmitigated eulogy. Hawthorne noted certain differences
between the national types of the two countries and gave an account of
them. But of any disposition to laud his own people at the expense of
their British cousins, the book contains not a trace.
_Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne_ is the
raw material out of which was fashioned such a charming and perfect
literary study as _Our Old Home_. It is idle to dispute over the
question whether the fragmentary journalizings of an eminent author
should or should not be given to the public. They will always be given
to the public, and the public will always be grateful for them, even
though it has no deeper cause for gratitude than that involved in
satisfaction of mere curiosity. At all events, the passion for looking
into the work-shop of a great artist cannot be overcome. Perhaps this
most trivial form of hero-worship deserves countenance.
The _Note-Books_ (English, Italian, and American) bear the same
relation to _Our Old Home_ that a man talking with his most trusted
friend bears to that same man when talking with an agreeable chance
acquaintance. In the one case he is wholly unguarded, in the other he
keeps himself in check even at the moment he seems most frank and
expansive.