glare of the footlights for the sacred glow of the imagination, he
professed, at least, to introduce us to an ideal world. Later novelists
have generally abandoned the attempt, and are content to reflect our
work-a-day life with almost servile fidelity. They are not to be blamed;
and doubtless the very greatest writers are those who can bring their
ideal world into the closest possible contact with our sympathies, and
show us heroic figures in modern frock-coats and Parisian fashions. The
art of story-telling is manifold, and its charm depends greatly upon the
infinite variety of its applications. And yet, for that very reason,
there are moods in which one wishes that the modern story-teller would
more frequently lead us away from the commonplace region of newspapers
and railways to regions where the imagination can have fair play.
Hawthorne is one of the few eminent writers to whose guidance we may in
such moods most safely entrust ourselves; and it is tempting to ask,
what was the secret of his success? The effort, indeed, to investigate
the materials from which some rare literary flavour is extracted is
seldom satisfactory. We are reminded of the automaton chess-player who
excited the wonder of the last generation. The showman, like the critic,
laid bare his inside, and displayed all the cunning wheels and cogs and
cranks by which his motions were supposed to be regulated. Yet, after
all, the true secret was that there was a man inside the machine. Some
such impression is often made by the most elaborate demonstrations of
literary anatomists. We have been mystified, not really entrusted with
any revelation. And yet, with this warning as to the probable success of
our examination, let us try to determine some of the peculiarities to
which Hawthorne owes this strange power of bringing poetry out of the
most unpromising materials.
In the first place, then, he had the good fortune to be born in the most
prosaic of all countries--the most prosaic, that is, in external
appearance, and even in the superficial character of its inhabitants.
Hawthorne himself reckoned this as an advantage, though in a very
different sense from that in which we are speaking. It was as a patriot,
and not as an artist, that he congratulated himself on his American
origin. There is a humorous struggle between his sense of the rawness
and ugliness of his native land and the dogged patriotism befitting a
descendant of the genuine New England Puritans. Hawthorne the novelist
writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at
every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee protests that the very
faults are symptomatic of excellence. He is like a sensitive mother,
unable to deny that her awkward hobbledehoy of a son offends against the
proprieties, but tacitly resolved to see proofs of virtues present or to
come even in his clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like
boasting. 'No author,' he says, 'can conceive of the difficulty of
writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but
a commonplace prosperity, as is happily' (it must and shall be happily!)
'the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust,
before romance-writers may find congenial and easily-handled themes
either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic
and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy,
lichens, and wallflowers need ruins to make them grow.' If, that is, I
am forced to confess that poetry and romance are absent, I will
resolutely stick to it that poetry and romance are bad things, even
though the love of them is the strongest propensity of my nature. To my
thinking, there is something almost pathetic in this loyal
self-deception; and therefore I have never been offended by certain
passages in 'Our Old Home' which appear to have caused some irritation
in touchy Englishmen. There is something, he says by way of apology,
which causes an American in England to take up an attitude of
antagonism. 'These people think so loftily of themselves, and so
contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires more generosity than
I possess to keep always in perfectly good humour with them.' That may
be true; for, indeed, I believe that all Englishmen, whether
ostentatiously cosmopolitan or ostentatiously patriotic, have a peculiar
type of national pride at least as offensive as that of Frenchmen,
Germans, or Americans; and, to a man of Hawthorne's delicate
perceptions, the presence of that sentiment would reveal itself through
the most careful disguises. But that which really caused him to cherish
his antagonism was, I suspect, something else: he was afraid of loving
us too well; he feared to be tempted into a denial of some point of his
patriotic creed; he is always clasping it, as it were, to his bosom, and
vowing and protesting that he does not surrender a single jot or tittle
of it. Hawthorne in England was like a plant suddenly removed to a rich
soil from a dry and thirsty land. He drinks in at every pore the
delightful influences of which he has had so scanty a supply. An old
cottage, an ivy-grown wall, a country churchyard with its quaint
epitaphs, things that are commonplace to most Englishmen and which are
hateful to the sanitary inspector, are refreshing to every fibre of his
soul. He tries in vain to take the sanitary inspector's view. In spite
of himself he is always falling into the romantic tone, though a sense
that he ought to be sternly philosophical just gives a humorous tinge
to his enthusiasm. Charles Lamb could not have improved his description
of the old hospital at Leicester, where the twelve brethren still wear
the badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff. He lingers round it, and gossips
with the brethren, and peeps into the garden, and sits by the cavernous
archway of the kitchen fireplace, where the very atmosphere seems to be
redolent with aphorisms first uttered by ancient monks, and jokes
derived from Master Slender's note-book, and gossip about the wrecks of
the Spanish Armada. No connoisseur could pore more lovingly over an
ancient black-letter volume, or the mellow hues of some old painter's
masterpiece. He feels the charm of our historical continuity, where the
immemorial past blends indistinguishably with the present, to the
remotest recesses of his imagination. But then the Yankee nature within
him must put in a sharp word or two; he has to jerk the bridle for fear
that his enthusiasm should fairly run away with him. 'The trees and
other objects of an English landscape,' he remarks, or, perhaps we
should say, he complains, 'take hold of one by numberless minute
tendrils as it were, which, look as closely as we choose, we never find
in an American scene;' but he inserts a qualifying clause, just by way
of protest, that an American tree would be more picturesque if it had an
equal chance; and the native oak of which we are so proud is summarily
condemned for 'John Bullism'--a mysterious offence common to many things
in England. Charlecote Hall, he presently admits, 'is a most delightful
place.' Even an American is tempted to believe that real homes can only
be produced by 'the slow ingenuity and labour of many successive
generations,' when he sees the elaborate beauty and perfection of a
well-ordered English abode. And yet he persuades himself that even here
he is the victim of some delusion. The impression is due to the old man
which stills lurks even in the polished American, and forces him to look
through his ancestor's spectacles. The true theory, it appears, is that
which Holgrave expresses for him in the 'Seven Gables,' namely, that we
should free ourselves of the material slavery imposed upon us by the
brick-and-mortar of past generations, and learn to change our houses as
easily as our coats. We ought to feel--only we unfortunately can't
feel--that a tent or a wigwam is as good as a house. The mode in which
Hawthorne regards the Englishman himself is a quaint illustration of the
same theory. An Englishwoman, he admits reluctantly and after many
protestations, has some few beauties not possessed by her American
sisters. A maiden in her teens has 'a certain charm of half-blossom and
delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly
reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to
adorn themselves during an appreciable moment.' But he revenges himself
for this concession by an almost savage onslaught upon the full-blown
British matron with her 'awful ponderosity of frame ... massive with
solid beef and streaky tallow,' and apparently composed 'of steaks and
sirloins.' He laments that the English violet should develop into such
an overblown peony, and speculates upon the whimsical problem, whether a
middle-aged husband should be considered as legally married to all the
accretions which have overgrown the slenderness of his bride. Should not
the matrimonial bond be held to exclude the three-fourths of the wife
that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? A question not to
be put without a shudder. The fact is, that Hawthorne had succeeded only
too well in misleading himself by a common fallacy. That pestilent
personage, John Bull, has assumed so concrete a form in our
imaginations, with his top-boots and his broad shoulders and vast
circumference, and the emblematic bulldog at his heels, that for most
observers he completely hides the Englishman of real life. Hawthorne had
decided that an Englishman must and should be a mere mass of transformed
beef and beer. No observation could shake his preconceived impression.
At Greenwich Hospital he encountered the mighty shade of the
concentrated essence of our strongest national qualities; no truer
Englishman ever lived than Nelson. But Nelson was certainly not the
conventional John Bull, and, therefore, Hawthorne roundly asserts that
he was not an Englishman. 'More than any other Englishman he won the
love and admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of
qualities that are not English.' Nelson was of the same breed as
Cromwell, though his shoulders were not so broad; but Hawthorne insists
that the broad shoulders, and not the fiery soul, are the essence of
John Bull. He proceeds with amusing unconsciousness to generalise this
ingenious theory, and declares that all extraordinary Englishmen are
sick men, and therefore deviations from the type. When he meets another
remarkable Englishman in the flesh, he applies the same method. Of Leigh
Hunt, whom he describes with warm enthusiasm, he dogmatically declares,
'there was not an English trait in him from head to foot, morally,
intellectually, or physically.' And the reason is admirable. 'Beef, ale,
or stout, brandy or port-wine, entered not at all into his
constitution.' All Englishmen are made of those ingredients, and if not,
why, then, they are not Englishmen. By the same method it is easy to
show that all Englishmen are drunkards, or that they are all
teetotalers; you have only to exclude as irrelevant every case that
contradicts your theory. Hawthorne, unluckily, is by no means solitary
in his mode of reasoning. The ideal John Bull has hidden us from
ourselves as well as from our neighbours, and the race which is
distinguished above all others for the magnificent wealth of its
imaginative literature is daily told--and, what is more, tells
itself--that it is a mere lump of prosaic flesh and blood, with scarcely
soul enough to keep it from stagnation. If we were sensible we should
burn that ridiculous caricature of ourselves along with Guy Fawkes; but
meanwhile we can hardly complain if foreigners are deceived by our own
misrepresentations.
Against Hawthorne, as I have said, I feel no grudge, though a certain
regret that his sympathy with that deep vein of poetical imagination
which underlies all our 'steaks and sirloins' should have been
intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be
allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in
the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless
much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic
shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate through our outer
rind--which, to say the truth, is often elephantine enough--to the
central core of heat; and we must not complain if he was too apt to deny
the existence of what to him was unattainable. But the problem
recurs--for everybody likes to ask utterly unanswerable
questions--whether Hawthorne would not have developed into a still
greater artist if he had been more richly supplied with the diet so dear
to his inmost soul? Was it not a thing to weep over, that a man so
keenly alive to every picturesque influence, so anxious to invest his
work with the enchanted haze of romantic association, should be confined
till middle age amongst the bleak granite rocks and the half-baked
civilisation of New England? 'Among ourselves,' he laments, 'there is no
fairy land for the romancer.' What if he had been brought up in the
native home of the fairies--if there had been thrown open to him the
gates through which Shakespeare and Spenser caught their visions of
ideal beauty? Might we not have had an appendix to the 'Midsummer
Night's Dream,' and might not a modern 'Faerie Queen' have brightened
the prosaic wilderness of this nineteenth century? The question, as I
have said, is rigidly unanswerable. We have not yet learnt how to breed
poets, though we have made some progress in regard to pigs. Nobody can
tell, and perhaps, therefore, it is as well that nobody should guess,
what would have been the effect of transplanting Shakespeare to modern
Stratford, or of exiling him to the United States. And yet--for it is
impossible to resist entirely the pleasure of fruitless speculation--we
may guess that there are some reasons why there should be a risk in
transplanting so delicate a growth as the genius of Hawthorne. There are
more ways, so wise men tell us, of killing a cat than choking it with
cream; but it is a very good way. Over-feeding produces atrophy of some
of the vital functions in higher animals than cats, and the imagination
may be enfeebled rather than strengthened by an over-supply of
materials. Hawthorne, if his life had passed where the plough may turn
up an antiquity in every furrow, and the whole face of the country is
enamelled with ancient culture, might have wrought more gorgeous hues
into his tissues, but he might have succumbed to the temptation of
producing mere upholstery. The fairy land for which he longed is full of
dangerous enchantments, and there are many who have lost in it the
vigour which comes from breathing the keen air of everyday life. From
that risk Hawthorne was effectually preserved in his New England home.
Having to abandon the poetry which is manufactured out of mere external
circumstances, he was forced to draw it from deeper sources. With easier
means at hand of enriching his pages, he might have left the mine
unworked. It is often good for us to have to make bricks without straw.
Hawthorne, who was conscious of the extreme difficulty of the problem,
and but partially conscious of the success of his solution of it,
naturally complained of the severe discipline to which he owed his
strength. We who enjoy the results may feel how much he owed to the very
sternness of his education and the niggard hand with which his
imaginative sustenance was dealt out to him. The observation may sound
paradoxical at the first moment, and yet it is supported by analogy. Are
not the best cooks produced just where the raw material is the worst,
and precisely because it is there worst? Now, cookery is the art by
which man is most easily distinguished from beasts, and it requires
little ingenuity to transfer its lessons to literature. At the same time
it may be admitted that some closer inquiry is necessary in order to
make the hypothesis probable, and I will endeavour from this point of
view to examine some of Hawthorne's exquisite workmanship.
The story which perhaps generally passes for his masterpiece is
'Transformation,' for most readers assume that a writer's longest book
must necessarily be his best. In the present case, I think that this
method, which has its conveniences, has not led to a perfectly just
conclusion. In 'Transformation,' Hawthorne has for once the advantage of
placing his characters in a land where 'a sort of poetic or fairy
precinct,' as he calls it, is naturally provided for them. The very
stones of the streets are full of romance, and he cannot mention a name
that has not a musical ring. Hawthorne, moreover, shows his usual tact
in confining his aims to the possible. He does not attempt to paint
Italian life and manners; his actors belong by birth, or by a kind of
naturalisation, to the colony of the American artists in Rome; and he
therefore does not labour under the difficulty of being in imperfect
sympathy with his creatures. Rome is a mere background, and surely a
most felicitous background, to the little group of persons who are
effectually detached from all such vulgarising associations with the
mechanism of daily life in less poetical countries. The centre of the
group, too, who embodies one of Hawthorne's most delicate fancies, could
have breathed no atmosphere less richly perfumed with old romance. In
New York he would certainly have been in danger of a Barnum's museum,
beside Washington's nurse and the woolly horse. It is a triumph of art
that a being whose nature trembles on the very verge of the grotesque
should walk through Hawthorne's pages with such undeviating grace. In
the Roman dreamland he is in little danger of such prying curiosity,
though even there he can only be kept out of harm's way by the admirable
skill of his creator. Perhaps it may be thought by some severe critics
that, with all his merits, Donatello stands on the very outside verge of
the province permitted to the romancer. But without cavilling at what is
indisputably charming, and without dwelling upon certain defects of
construction which slightly mar the general beauty of the story, it has
another weakness which it is impossible quite to overlook. Hawthorne
himself remarks that he was surprised, in re-writing his story, to see
the extent to which he had introduced descriptions of various Italian
objects. 'Yet these things,' he adds, 'fill the mind everywhere in
Italy, and especially in Rome, and cannot be kept from flowing out upon
the page when one writes freely and with self-enjoyment.' The
associations which they called up in England were so pleasant, that he
could not find it in his heart to cancel. Doubtless that is the precise
truth, and yet it is equally true that they are artistically out of
place. There are passages which recall the guide-book. To take one
instance--and, certainly, it is about the worst--the whole party is
going to the Coliseum, where a very striking scene takes place. On the
way they pass a baker's shop.
'"The baker is drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon. "Do
you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge for
the desecration of her temples) had slyly poured vinegar into the batch,
if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in the
acetous fermentation."'
The instance is trivial, but it is characteristic. Hawthorne had
doubtless remarked the smell of the sour bread, and to him it called up
a vivid recollection of some stroll in Rome; for, of all our senses, the
smell is notoriously the most powerful in awakening associations. But
then what do we who read him care about the Roman taste for bread 'in
acetous fermentation?' When the high-spirited girl is on the way to meet
her tormentor, and to receive the provocation which leads to his murder,
why should we be worried by a gratuitous remark about Roman baking? It
somehow jars upon our taste, and we are certain that, in describing a
New England village, Hawthorne would never have admitted a touch which
has no conceivable bearing upon the situation. There is almost a
superabundance of minute local colour in his American Romances, as, for
example, in the 'House of the Seven Gables;' but still, every touch,
however minute, is steeped in the sentiment and contributes to the
general effect. In Rome the smell of a loaf is sacred to his
imagination, and intrudes itself upon its own merits, and, so far as we
can discover, without reference to the central purpose. If a baker's
shop impresses him unduly because it is Roman, the influence of ancient
ruins and glorious works of art is of course still more distracting. The
mysterious Donatello, and the strange psychological problem which he is
destined to illustrate, are put aside for an interval, whilst we are
called upon to listen to descriptions and meditations, always graceful,
and often of great beauty in themselves, but yet, in a strict sense,
irrelevant. Hawthorne's want of familiarity with the scenery is of
course responsible for part of this failing. Had he been a native Roman,
he would not have been so preoccupied with the wonders of Rome. But it
seems that for a romance bearing upon a spiritual problem, the scenery,
however tempting, is not really so serviceable as the less prepossessing
surroundings of America. The objects have too great an intrinsic
interest. A counter-attraction distorts the symmetry of the system. In
the shadow of the Coliseum and St. Peter's you cannot pay much attention
to the troubles of a young lady whose existence is painfully ephemeral.
Those mighty objects will not be relegated to the background, and
condescend to act as mere scenery. They are, in fact, too romantic for a
romance. The fountain of Trevi, with all its allegorical marbles, may be
a very picturesque object to describe, but for Hawthorne's purposes it
is really not equal to the town-pump at Salem; and Hilda's poetical
tower, with the perpetual light before the Virgin's image, and the doves
floating up to her from the street, and the column of Antoninus looking
at her from the heart of the city, somehow appeals less to our
sympathies than the quaint garret in the House of the Seven Gables, from
which Phoebe Pyncheon watched the singular idiosyncrasies of the
superannuated breed of fowls in the garden. The garret and the pump are
designed in strict subordination to the human figures: the tower and the
fountain have a distinctive purpose of their own. Hawthorne, at any
rate, seems to have been mastered by his too powerful auxiliaries. A
human soul, even in America, is more interesting to us than all the
churches and picture-galleries in the world; and, therefore, it is as
well that Hawthorne should not be tempted to the too easy method of
putting fine description in place of sentiment.