shed over the American scenery, so provokingly raw and deficient in
harmony? A similar problem was successfully solved by a writer whose
development, in proportion to her means of cultivation, is about the
most remarkable of recent literary phenomena. Miss Brontë's bleak
Yorkshire moors, with their uncompromising stone walls, and the valleys
invaded by factories, are at first sight as little suited to romance as
New England itself, to which, indeed, both the inhabitants and the
country have a decided family resemblance. Now that she has discovered
for us the fountains of poetic interest, we can all see that the region
is not a mere stony wilderness; but it is well worth while to make a
pilgrimage to Haworth, if only to discover how little the country
corresponds to our preconceived impressions, or, in other words, how
much depends upon the eye which sees it, and how little upon its
intrinsic merits. Miss Brontë's marvellous effects are obtained by the
process which enables an 'intense and glowing mind' to see everything
through its own atmosphere. The ugliest and most trivial objects seem,
like objects heated by the sun, to radiate back the glow of passion with
which she has regarded them. Perhaps this singular power is still more
conspicuous in 'Villette,' where she had even less of the raw material
of poetry. An odd parallel may be found between one of the most striking
passages in 'Villette' and one in 'Transformation.' Lucy Snowe in one
novel, and Hilda in the other, are left to pass a summer vacation, the
one in Brussels and the other in pestiferous Rome. Miss Snowe has no
external cause of suffering but the natural effect of solitude upon a
homeless and helpless governess. Hilda has to bear about with her the
weight of a terrible secret, affecting, it may be, even the life of her
dearest friend. Each of them wanders into a Roman Catholic church, and
each, though they have both been brought up in a Protestant home, seeks
relief at the confessional. So far the cases are alike, though Hilda,
one might have fancied, has by far the strongest cause for emotion. And
yet, after reading the two descriptions--both excellent in their
way--one might fancy that the two young ladies had exchanged burdens.
Lucy Snowe is as tragic as the innocent confidante of a murderess;
Hilda's feelings never seem to rise above that weary sense of melancholy
isolation which besieges us in a deserted city. It is needless to ask
which is the best bit of work artistically considered. Hawthorne's style
is more graceful and flexible; his descriptions of the Roman Catholic
ceremonial and its influence upon an imaginative mind in distress are
far more sympathetic, and imply a wider range of intellect. But Hilda
scarcely moves us like Lucy. There is too much delicate artistic
description of picture-galleries and of the glories of St. Peter's to
allow the poor little American girl to come prominently to the surface.
We have been indulging with her in some sad but charming speculations,
and not witnessing the tragedy of a deserted soul. Lucy Snowe has very
inferior materials at her command; but somehow we are moved by a
sympathetic thrill: we taste the bitterness of the awful cup of despair
which, as she tells us, is forced to her lips in the night-watches; and
are not startled when so prosaic an object as the row of beds in the
dormitory of a French school suggests to her images worthy rather of
stately tombs in the aisles of a vast cathedral, and recall dead dreams
of an elder world and a mightier race long frozen in death. Comparisons
of this kind are almost inevitably unfair; but the difference between
the two illustrates one characteristic--we need not regard it as a
defect--of Hawthorne. His idealism does not consist in conferring
grandeur upon vulgar objects by tinging them with the reflection of deep
emotion. He rather shrinks than otherwise from describing the strongest
passions, or shows their working by indirect touches and under a
side-light. An excellent example of his peculiar method occurs in what
is in some respects the most perfect of his works, the 'Scarlet Letter.'
There, again, we have the spectacle of a man tortured by a life-long
repentance. The Puritan Clergyman, reverenced as a saint by all his
flock, conscious of a sin which, once revealed, will crush him to the
earth, watched with a malignant purpose by the husband whom he has
injured, unable to summon up the moral courage to tear off the veil, and
make the only atonement in his power, is a singularly striking figure,
powerfully conceived and most delicately described. He yields under
terrible pressure to the temptation of escaping from the scene of his
prolonged torture with the partner of his guilt. And then, as he is
returning homewards after yielding a reluctant consent to the flight, we
are invited to contemplate the agony of his soul. The form which it
takes is curiously characteristic. No vehement pangs of remorse, or
desperate hopes of escape, overpower his faculties in any simple and
straightforward fashion. The poor minister is seized with a strange
hallucination. He meets a venerable deacon, and can scarcely restrain
himself from uttering blasphemies about the Communion-supper. Next
appears an aged widow, and he longs to assail her with what appears to
him to be an unanswerable argument against the immortality of the soul.
Then follows an impulse to whisper impure suggestions to a fair young
maiden, whom he has recently converted. And, finally, he longs to greet
a rough sailor with a 'volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and
heaven-defying oaths.' The minister, in short, is in that state of mind
which gives birth in its victim to a belief in diabolical possession;
and the meaning is pointed by an encounter with an old lady, who, in the
popular belief, was one of Satan's miserable slaves and dupes, the
witches, and is said--for Hawthorne never introduces the supernatural
without toning it down by a supposed legendary transmission--to have
invited him to meet her at the blasphemous Sabbath in the forest. The
sin of endeavouring to escape from the punishment of his sins had
brought him into sympathy with wicked mortals and perverted spirits.
This mode of setting forth the agony of a pure mind, tainted by one
irremovable blot, is undoubtedly impressive to the imagination in a high
degree; far more impressive, we may safely say, than any quantity of
such rant as very inferior writers could have poured out with the
utmost facility on such an occasion. Yet it might possibly be mentioned
that a poet of the highest order would have produced the effect by more
direct means. Remorse overpowering and absorbing does not embody itself
in these recondite and, one may almost say, over-ingenious fancies.
Hawthorne does not give us so much the pure passion as some of its
collateral effects. He is still more interested in the curious
psychological problem than moved by sympathy with the torture of the
soul. We pity poor Mr. Dimmesdale profoundly, but we are also interested
in him as the subject of an experiment in analytical psychology. We do
not care so much for his emotions as for the strange phantoms which are
raised in his intellect by the disturbance of his natural functions. The
man is placed upon the rack, but our compassion is aroused, not by
feeling our own nerves and sinews twitching in sympathy, but by
remarking the strange confusion of ideas produced in his mind, the
singularly distorted aspect of things in general introduced by such an
experience, and hence, if we please, inferring the keenness of the pangs
which have produced them. This turn of thought explains the real meaning
of Hawthorne's antipathy to poor John Bull. That worthy gentleman, we
will admit, is in a sense more gross and beefy than his American cousin.
His nerves are stronger, for we need not decide whether they should be
called coarser or less morbid. He is not, in the proper sense of the
word, less imaginative, for a vigorous grasp of realities is rather a
proof of a powerful than a defective imagination. But he is less
accessible to those delicate impulses which are to the ordinary passions
as electricity to heat. His imagination is more intense and less mobile.
The devils which haunt the two races partake of the national
characteristics. John Bunyan, Dimmesdale's contemporary, suffered under
the pangs of a remorse equally acute, though with apparently far less
cause. The devils who tormented him whispered blasphemies in his ears;
they pulled at his clothes; they persuaded him that he had committed the
unpardonable sin. They caused the very stones in the streets and tiles
on the houses, as he says, to band themselves together against him. But
they had not the refined and humorous ingenuity of the American fiends.
They tempted him, as their fellows tempted Dimmesdale, to sell his soul;
but they were too much in earnest to insist upon queer breaches of
decorum. They did not indulge in that quaint play of fancy which tempts
us to believe that the devils in New England had seduced the 'tricksy
spirit,' Ariel, to indulge in practical jokes at the expense of a nobler
victim than Stephano or Caliban. They were too terribly diabolical to
care whether Bunyan blasphemed in solitude or in the presence of human
respectabilities. Bunyan's sufferings were as poetical, but less
conducive to refined speculation. His were the fiends that haunt the
valley of the shadow of death; whereas Hawthorne's are to be encountered
in the dim regions of twilight, where realities blend inextricably with
mere phantoms, and the mind confers only a kind of provisional existence
upon the 'airy nothings' of its creation. Apollyon does not appear armed
to the teeth and throwing fiery darts, but comes as an unsubstantial
shadow threatening vague and undefined dangers, and only half-detaching
himself from the background of darkness. He is as intangible as Milton's
Death, not the vivid reality which presented itself to mediæval
imaginations.
This special attitude of mind is probably easier to the American than to
the English imagination. The craving for something substantial, whether
in cookery or in poetry, was that which induced Hawthorne to keep John
Bull rather at arm's length. We may trace the working of similar
tendencies in other American peculiarities. Spiritualism and its
attendant superstitions are the gross and vulgar form of the same phase
of thought as it occurs in men of highly-strung nerves but defective
cultivation. Hawthorne always speaks of these modern goblins with the
contempt they deserve, for they shocked his imagination as much as his
reason; but he likes to play with fancies which are not altogether
dissimilar, though his refined taste warns him that they become
disgusting when grossly translated into tangible symbols. Mesmerism, for
example, plays an important part in the 'Blithedale Romance' and the
'House of the Seven Gables,' though judiciously softened and kept in the
background. An example of the danger of such tendencies may be found in
those works of Edgar Poe, in which he seems to have had recourse to
strong stimulants to rouse a flagging imagination. What is exquisitely
fanciful and airy in Hawthorne is too often replaced in his rival by an
attempt to overpower us by dabblings in the charnel-house and prurient
appeals to our fears of the horribly revolting. After reading some of
Poe's stories one feels a kind of shock to one's modesty. We require
some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting
images; whereas Hawthorne's pure and delightful fancies, though at times
they may have led us too far from the healthy contact of everyday
interests, never leave a stain upon the imagination, and generally
succeed in throwing a harmonious colouring upon some objects in which we
had previously failed to recognise the beautiful. To perform that duty
effectually is perhaps the highest of artistic merits; and though we
may complain of Hawthorne's colouring as too evanescent, its charm
grows upon us the more we study it.
Hawthorne seems to have been slow in discovering the secret of his own
power. The 'Twice-Told Tales,' he tells us, are only a fragmentary
selection from a great number which had an ephemeral existence in
long-forgotten magazines, and were sentenced to extinction by their
author. Though many of the survivors are very striking, no wise reader
will regret that sentence. It could be wished that other authors were as
ready to bury their innocents, and that injudicious admirers might
always abstain from acting as resurrection-men. The fragments which
remain, with all their merits, are chiefly interesting as illustrating
the intellectual development of their author. Hawthorne, in his preface
to the collected edition (all Hawthorne's prefaces are remarkably
instructive) tells us what to think of them. The book, he says,
'requires to be read in the clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it
was written; if opened in the sunshine it is apt to look exceedingly
like a volume of blank pages.' The remark, with deductions on the score
of modesty, is more or less applicable to all his writings. But he
explains, and with perfect truth, that though written in solitude, the
book has not the abstruse tone which marks the written communications of
a solitary mind with itself. The reason is that the sketches 'are not
the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart, but his attempts
... to open an intercourse with the world.' They may, in fact, be
compared to Brummel's failures; and, though they do not display the
perfect grace and fitness which would justify him in presenting himself
to society, they were well worth taking up to illustrate the skill of
the master's manipulation. We see him trying various experiments to hit
off that delicate mean between the fanciful and the prosaic, which
shall satisfy his taste and be intelligible to the outside world.
Sometimes he gives us a fragment of historical romance, as in the story
of the stern old regicide who suddenly appears from the woods to head
the colonists of Massachusetts in a critical emergency; then he tries
his hand at a bit of allegory, and describes the search for the mythical
carbuncle which blazes by its inherent splendour on the face of a
mysterious cliff in the depths of the untrodden wilderness, and lures
old and young, the worldly and the romantic, to waste their lives in the
vain effort to discover it--for the carbuncle is the ideal which mocks
our pursuit, and may be our curse or our blessing. Then perhaps we have
a domestic piece--a quiet description of a New England country scene
touched with a grace which reminds us of the creators of Sir Roger de
Coverley or the Vicar of Wakefield. Occasionally there is a fragment of
pure _diablerie_, as in the story of the lady who consults the witch in
the hollow of the three hills; and more frequently he tries to work out
one of those strange psychological problems which he afterwards treated
with more fulness of power. The minister who, for an unexplained reason,
puts on a black veil one morning in his youth, and wears it until he is
laid with it in his grave--a kind of symbolical prophecy of Dimmesdale;
the eccentric Wakefield (whose original, if I remember rightly, is to be
found in 'King's Anecdotes'), who leaves his house one morning for no
particular reason, and though living in the next street, does not reveal
his existence to his wife for twenty years; and the hero of the 'Wedding
Knell,' the elderly bridegroom whose early love has jilted him, but
agrees to marry him when she is an elderly widow and he an old bachelor,
and who appals the marriage party by coming to the church in his
shroud, with the bell tolling as for a funeral--all these bear the
unmistakable stamp of Hawthorne's mint, and each is a study of his
favourite subject, the border-land between reason and insanity. In many
of these stories appears the element of interest, to which Hawthorne
clung the more closely both from early associations and because it is
the one undeniably poetical element in the American character.
Shallow-minded people fancy Puritanism to be prosaic, because the laces
and ruffles of the Cavaliers are a more picturesque costume at a masked
ball than the dress of the Roundheads. The Puritan has become a grim and
ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest. But the
genuine old Puritan spirit ceases to be picturesque only because of its
sublimity: its poetry is sublimed into religion. The great poet of the
Puritans fails, as far as he fails, when he tries to transcend the
limits of mortal imagination--
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble as they gaze,
He saw: but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
To represent the Puritan from within was not, indeed, a task suitable to
Hawthorne's powers. Carlyle has done that for us with more congenial
sentiment than could have been well felt by the gentle romancer.
Hawthorne fancies the grey shadow of a stern old forefather wondering at
his degenerate son. 'A writer of story-books! What kind of business in
life, what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in
his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler!' And yet the old strain remains, though
strangely modified by time and circumstance. In Hawthorne it would seem
that the peddling element of the old Puritans had been reduced to its
lowest point; the more spiritual element had been refined till it is
probable enough that the ancestral shadow would have refused to
recognise the connection. The old dogmatical framework to which he
attached such vast importance had dropped out of his descendant's mind,
and had been replaced by dreamy speculation, obeying no laws save those
imposed by its own sense of artistic propriety. But we may often
recognise, even where we cannot express in words, the strange family
likeness which exists in characteristics which are superficially
antagonistic. The man of action may be bound by subtle ties to the
speculative metaphysician; and Hawthorne's mind, amidst the most obvious
differences, had still an affinity to his remote forefathers. Their
bugbears had become his playthings; but the witches, though they have no
reality, have still a fascination for him. The interest which he feels
in them, even in their now shadowy state, is a proof that he would have
believed in them in good earnest a century and a half earlier. The
imagination, working in a different intellectual atmosphere, is unable
to project its images upon the external world; but it still forms them
in the old shape. His solitary musings necessarily employ a modern
dialect, but they often turn on the same topics which occurred to
Jonathan Edwards in the woods of Connecticut. Instead of the old Puritan
speculations about predestination and free-will, he dwells upon the
transmission by natural laws of an hereditary curse, and upon the
strange blending of good and evil, which may cause sin to be an
awakening impulse in a human soul. The change which takes place in
Donatello in consequence of his crime is a modern symbol of the fall of
man and the eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. As an
artist he gives concrete images instead of abstract theories; but his
thoughts evidently delight to dwell in the same regions where the daring
speculations of his theological ancestors took their origin. Septimius,
the rather disagreeable hero of his last romance, is a peculiar example
of a similar change. Brought up under the strict discipline of New
England, he has retained the love of musing upon insoluble mysteries,
though he has abandoned the old dogmatic guide-posts. When such a man
finds that the orthodox scheme of the universe provided by his official
pastors has somehow broken down with him, he forms some audacious theory
of his own, and is perhaps plunged into an unhallowed revolt against the
Divine order. Septimius, under such circumstances, develops into a kind
of morbid and sullen Hawthorne. He considers--as other people have
done--that death is a disagreeable fact, but refuses to admit that it is
inevitable. The romance tends to show that such a state of mind is
unhealthy and dangerous, and Septimius is contrasted unfavourably with
the vigorous natures who preserve their moral balance by plunging into
the stream of practical life. Yet Hawthorne necessarily sympathises with
the abnormal being whom he creates. Septimius illustrates the dangers of
the musing temperament, but the dangers are produced by a combination of
an essentially selfish nature with the meditative tendency. Hawthorne,
like his hero, sought refuge from the hard facts of commonplace life by
retiring into a visionary world. He delights in propounding much the
same questions as those which tormented poor Septimius, though, for
obvious reasons, he did not try to compound an elixir of life by means
of a recipe handed down from Indian ancestors. The strange mysteries in
which the world and our nature are shrouded are always present to his
imagination; he catches dim glimpses of the laws which bring out strange
harmonies, but, on the whole, tend rather to deepen than to clear the
mysteries. He loves the marvellous, not in the vulgar sense of the word,
but as a symbol of perplexity which encounters every thoughtful man in
his journey through life. Similar tenants at an earlier period might,
with almost equal probability, have led him to the stake as a dabbler in
forbidden sciences, or have caused him to be revered as one to whom a
deep spiritual instinct had been granted.
Meanwhile, as it was his calling to tell stories to readers of the
English language in the nineteenth century, his power is exercised in a
different sphere. No modern writer has the same skill in so using the
marvellous as to interest without unduly exciting our incredulity. He
makes, indeed, no positive demands on our credulity. The strange
influences which are suggested rather than obtruded upon us are kept in
the background, so as not to invite, nor indeed to render possible, the
application of scientific tests. We may compare him once more to Miss
Brontë, who introduces, in 'Villette,' a haunted garden. She shows us a
ghost who is for a moment a very terrible spectre indeed, and then, very
much to our annoyance, rationalises him into a flesh-and-blood lover.
Hawthorne would neither have allowed the ghost to intrude so forcibly,
nor have expelled him so decisively. The garden in his hands would have
been haunted by a shadowy terror of which we could render no precise
account to ourselves. It would have refrained from actual contact with
professors and governesses; and as it would never have taken bodily
form, it would never have been quite dispelled. His ghosts are confined
to their proper sphere, the twilight of the mind, and never venture into
the broad glare of daylight. We can see them so long as we do not gaze
directly at them; when we turn to examine them they are gone, and we are
left in doubt whether they were realities or an ocular delusion
generated in our fancy by some accidental collocation of half-seen
objects. So in the 'House of the Seven Gables' we may hold what opinion
we please as to the reality of the curse which hangs over the Pyncheons
and the strange connection between them and their hereditary
antagonists; in the 'Scarlet Letter' we may, if we like, hold that there
was really more truth in the witch legends which colour the imaginations
of the actors than we are apt to dream of in our philosophy; and in
'Transformation' we are left finally in doubt as to the great question
of Donatello's ears, and the mysterious influence which he retains over
the animal world so long as he is unstained by bloodshed. In 'Septimius'
alone, it seems to me that the supernatural is left in rather too
obtrusive a shape in spite of the final explanations; though it might
possibly have been toned down had the story received the last touches of
the author. The artifice, if so it may be called, by which this is
effected--and the romance is just sufficiently dipped in the shadow of
the marvellous to be heightened without becoming offensive--sounds, like
other things, tolerably easy when it is explained; and yet the
difficulty is enormous, as may appear on reflection as well as from the
extreme rarity of any satisfactory work in the same style by other
artists. With the exception of a touch or two in Scott's stories, such
as the impressive Bodach Glas, in 'Waverley,' and the apparition in the
exquisite 'Bride of Lammermoor,' it would be difficult to discover any
parallel.