Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (711 page)

The lure of the symbolic and the marvelous tempted Hawthorne constantly to the brink of the supernatural. But here his art is delicate. The old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition for modern credulity. The modern ghost is a “clot on the brain.” Recall the ghosts in Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw” — just a suspicion of evil presences. The true interpretation of that story I have sometimes thought to be, that the woman who saw the phantoms was mad. Hawthorne is similarly ambiguous. His apparently preternatural phenomena always admit of a natural explanation. The water of Maule's well may have turned bitter in consequence of an ancient wrong; but also perhaps because of a disturbance in the underground springs. The sudden deaths of Colonel and Judge Pyncheon may have been due to the old wizard's curse that “God would give them blood to drink”; or simply to an inherited tendency to apoplexy.
Did
Donatello have furry, leaf-shaped ears, or was this merely his companions' teasing? Did old Mistress Hibben, the sister of Governor Bellingham of Massachusetts, attend witch meetings in the forest, and inscribe her name in the Black Man's book? Hawthorne does not say so, but only that the people so believed; and it is historical fact that she was executed as a witch. Was a red letter A actually seen in the midnight sky, or was it a freak of the aurora borealis? What did Chillingworth see on Dimmesdale's breast? The author will not tell us. But if it was the mark of the Scarlet Letter, may we not appeal to the phenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on natural grounds — what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having become mesmerism or hypnotism in the nineteenth.

Fifty years after his death, Hawthorne is already a classic. For even Mr. Brownell allows him one masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that “The Scarlet Letter” is his
chef-d'œuvre
. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some of his inferior works; and I think he was right in preferring “The House of the Seven Gables,” as more fully representing all sides of his genius. The difference between the two is the difference between tragedy and romance. While we are riding the high horse of criticism and feeling virtuous, we will concede the superiority of the former
genre
; but when we give our literary conscience the slip, we yield ourselves again to the fascination of the haunted twilight.

The antique gabled mansion in its quiet back street has the charm of the still-life sketches in the early books, such as “Sights from a Steeple,” “A Rill from the Town Pump,” “Sunday at Home,” and “The Toll-gatherer's Day.” All manner of quaint figures, known to childhood, pass along that visionary street: the scissors grinder, town crier, baker's cart, lumbering stage-coach, charcoal vender, hand-organ man and monkey, a drove of cattle, a military parade — the “trainers,” as we used to call them. Hawthorne had no love for his fellow citizens and took little part in the modern society of Salem. But he had struck deep roots into the soil of the old witch town, his birthplace and the home of generations of his ancestors. Does the reader know this ancient seaport, with its decayed shipping and mouldering wharves, its silted up harbor and idle custom-house, where Hawthorne served three years as surveyor of the port? Imposing still are the great houses around the square, built by retired merchants and shipmasters whose fortunes were made in the East India trade: with dark old drawing-rooms smelling of sandalwood and filled with cabinets of Oriental curiosities. Hawthorne had little to do with the aristocracy of Salem. But something of the life of these old families may be read in Mrs. Stoddard's novel “The Morgesons,” — a book which I am perpetually recommending to my friends, and they as perpetually refusing to read, returning my copy after a superficial perusal, with uncomplimentary comments upon my taste in fiction.

Hawthorne's academic connections are of particular interest. It is wonderful that he and Longfellow should have been classmates at Bowdoin. Equally wonderful that Emerson's “Nature” and Hawthorne's “Mosses” should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse at Concord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and in how narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was a little country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twenty years old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among the pine stumps. Hawthorne's class — 1825 — graduated but thirty-seven strong. And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college but belonged to different sets. And twelve years afterward, when Longfellow wrote a friendly review of “Twice-Told Tales” in
The North American Review
, his quondam classmate addressed him in a somewhat formal letter of thanks as “Dear Sir.” Later the relations of the two became closer, though never perhaps intimate. It was Hawthorne who handed over to Longfellow that story of the dispersion of the Acadian exiles of Grandpré, which became “Evangeline”: a story which his friend Conolly had suggested to Hawthorne, as mentioned in “The American Note Books.” The point which arrested Hawthorne's attention was the incident in the Bayou Teche, where Gabriel's boat passes in the night within a few feet of the bank on which Evangeline and her company are sleeping.

This was one of those tricks of destiny that so often engaged Hawthorne's imagination: like the tale of “David Swan” the farmer's boy who, on his way to try his fortune in the city, falls asleep by a wayside spring. A rich and childless old couple stop to water their horse, are taken by his appearance and talk of adopting him, but drive away on hearing someone approaching. A young girl comes by and falls so much in love with his handsome face that she is tempted to waken him with a kiss, but she too is startled and goes on. Then a pair of tramps arrive and are about to murder him for his money, when they in turn are frightened off. Thus riches and love and death have passed him in his sleep; and he, all unconscious of the brush of the wings of fate, awakens and goes his way. Again, our romancer had read the common historical accounts of the great landslide which buried the inn in the Notch of the White Mountains. The names were known of all who had been there that night and had consequently perished — with one exception. One stranger had been present, who was never identified: Hawthorne's fancy played with this curious problem, and he made out of it his story of “The Ambitious Guest,” a youth just starting on a brilliant career, entertaining the company around the fire, with excited descriptions of his hopes and plans; and then snuffed out utterly by ironic fate, and not even numbered among the missing.

Tales like these are among the most characteristic and original of the author's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we call it Hawthornish. “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” is Hawthornish; so is “Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow”; or Balzac's “Peau de Chagrin”; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne, like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”; or Edward Bellamy's “Dr. Heidenhoff's Process” — a process for ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things — a modern water of Lethe. Even some of James's early stories like “The Madonna of the Future” and “The Last of the Valerii,” as well as Mr. Howells's “Undiscovered Country,” have touches of Hawthorne.

Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow townsmen for some years at Concord, and held each other in high regard. One was a philosophical idealist: the other, an artist of the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank, or its image in the stream was the more real. But they took no impress from one another's minds. Emerson could not read his neighbor's romances. Their morbid absorption in the problem of evil repelled the resolute optimist. He thought the best thing Hawthorne ever wrote was his “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,” the chapter in “Our Old Home” concerning Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare, whom Hawthorne befriended with unfailing patience and courtesy during his Liverpool consulship.

Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emerson in the introduction to “Mosses from an Old Manse,” and even paid him the honor of quotation, contrary to his almost invariable practice. I cannot recall a half dozen quotations in all his works. I think he must have been principled against them. But he said he had come too late to Concord to fall under Emerson's influence. No risk of that, had he come earlier. There was a jealous independence in Hawthorne which resented the too close approach of an alien mind: a species of perversity even, that set him in contradiction to his environment. He always fought shy of literary people. During his Liverpool consulship, he did not make — apparently did not care to make — acquaintance with his intellectual equals. He did not meet Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade, George Eliot, or any other first-class minds. He barely met the Brownings, but did not really come to know them till afterwards in Italy. Surrounded by reformers, abolitionists, vegetarians, comeouters and radicals of all gospels, he remained stubbornly conservative. He held office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaign life of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran for President. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made the gallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was a blood-stained fanatic and justly hanged.

This conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in “The Blithedale Romance,” is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in “The House of the Seven Gables,” is the scornful young radical; and both he and Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do anything directly to improve the condition of things. God will bring about amendment in his own good time. And this fatalism again is subtly connected with New England's ancestral creed — Calvinism. Hawthorne — it has been pointed out a hundred times — is the Puritan romancer. His tales are tales of the conscience: he is obsessed with the thought of sin, with the doctrines of foreordination and total depravity. In the theological library which he found stowed away in the garret of the Old Manse, he preferred the seventeenth-century folio volumes of Puritan divinity to the thin Unitarian sermons and controversial articles in the files of
The Christian Examiner
. The former, at least, had once been warm with a deep belief, however they had now “cooled down even to the freezing point.” But “the frigidity of the modern productions” was “inherent.” Hawthorne was never a church-goer and adhered to no particular form of creed. But speculatively he liked his religion thick.

The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,

The songs that dared to go

Down searching through the abyss of man,

His deeps of conscious woe —

spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberal Christianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm, not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, but attracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and by the interesting varieties of human nature there assembled: literary material which he used in “The Blithedale Romance.” He complains slyly of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows (though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only a symbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of any kind).

Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irving
plus
something of his own. The resemblances and differences between Poe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physical horror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while once only — in the story entitled “William Wilson” — Poe enters that field of ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the descriptions, cut out the reflections,
coupez vos phrases
. Hawthorne's style was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure — ”fine old leisure,” whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On the walls of his study at the “Wayside” was written — though not by his own hand — the motto, “There is no joy but calm.”