Hawthorne's Short Stories (2 page)

It happens that we can follow part way the process of his art; from an early period Hawthorne, like James and Chekhov after him, had had the habit of keeping notebooks, and on these, when he came to write his tales, he constantly drew. We often find in them, therefore, what James would call the “germs” or “seeds” from which the stories, in their own good season, unfolded. We find, too, the seeds from which they did not unfold: the observations of real people, queer or humorsome or even ordinary individuals who, unlike those in Chekhov, rarely reappear in the tales; the overheard or communicated fragments of “true” stories out of real lives which, unlike those in James, almost never made the transition from hearsay to art. The germ of a typical Hawthorne tale is not a “real” individual or an actual and firsthand story—his imagination needed a further withdrawal from things than that—but either some curious passage that had quickened his fancy in his reading or some abstractly phrased idea, moral or psychological, that he had arrived at in his endless speculative reveries.

He had been struck, to take an example of the first of these, by an anecdote about Gilbert Stuart which William Dunlap tells in his history of the fine arts in America. Stuart, according to Dunlap, had been commissioned by Lord Mulgrave to paint the portrait of his brother, General Phipps, on the eve of the General’s sailing for India. When the portrait was finished and Mulgrave, for the first time, examined it, he broke out with an exclamation of horror: “What is this?—this is very strange!” “I have painted your brother as I saw him,” said Stuart, and Mulgrave rejoined: “I see insanity in that face.” Some time later the news reached England that Phipps, in India, had indeed gone mad and taken his own life by cutting his throat. The great painter, as Dunlap adds, had seen into a deeper reality behind the man’s outward semblance, and with the insight of genius had painted that. Upon this hint Hawthorne wrote, and the result was “The Prophetic Pictures.”

Consider, however, what he ends by doing with the hint. An anecdote, strange enough in itself and told for the sake of its deeper meaning, but naked and meager in circumstance and shape, has been worked over into an enriched and molded narrative, in which the original suggestion is only barely recognizable. Back into a remoter past goes the time of the action; back into a past which, as James would say, was “far enough away without being too far”; not the too recent past, at any rate, of Stuart himself, who had died less than ten years before and whose memory was much too fresh in men’s minds. The tone of time is to count, but it is the tone of a dimmer time; and Hawthorne, with a few touches of his delicate, poetic erudition, evokes for us, only just fully enough, the simpler Boston of the mid-colonial day. The painter himself remains nameless and a little mythical; he has no actual counterpart in history—not in Smibert, certainly, nor Blackburn—and of course he could have none. As for his sitter, that sitter has become, to deepen the interest, two people, a young man and his bride: two lives, not merely one, are to be darkened and destroyed. The premonitions of madness, as in Dunlap, are to be detected in Walter Ludlow’s countenance, but so too are the premonitions of passive suffering and all-enduring love in Elinor’s. The painter himself, indeed, is to be involved in a way that did not hold for Stuart, but meanwhile the gloomy sequence of incidents moves from its natural prologue (the ordering of the portraits) to its first and second “acts” (the painting and then the displaying of them) through its long interval of latency (the years of the painter’s absence) to its scene of violent culmination (the painter’s return and the onset of Walter’s madness). Such was the form—carefully pictorial, narratively deliberate, in a derived sense dramatic—that Hawthorne worked out for himself in his most characteristic tales.

Dunlap’s anecdote, however, has undergone a still more revealing metamorphosis. The “moral” of Hawthorne’s actual story is not, as Dunlap’s was, the great painter’s power of seeing beyond the physical countenance into the mind and heart of the sitter, though Hawthorne does, with a deliberate turn of the ironic screw, put just that thought into Walter Ludlow’s mouth. What interested him was not so much the sitters and their tragedy as the artist and his: for him the artist’s power was always a potential and here an actual curse; his art might so easily become “an engrossing purpose” which would “insulate him from the mass of humankind,” as this painter’s does, and transform him indeed from the mere reader of men’s souls into an agent of their destinies. Hawthorne’s portraits here—like Hoffmann’s in “Doge and Dogaressa,” which he might have known, or like Gogol’s in “The Portrait,” which he certainly did not know—become the symbols not only of the artist’s clairvoyance but of a malignant fatality of which he may be the guilty medium. Certainly Hawthorne shared with several of his contemporaries—Poe and Balzac are other examples—their delight in the use of paintings as poetic symbols.

The earliest seeds of his tales, in any case, were sometimes of an almost metaphysical abstractness. This is true, for example, of “The Birthmark,” which seems to have germinated in his imagination for six or seven years before it was ready to be hatched. It came to him first in the fleshless form of a mere “idea”: “A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.” A few years later this vague “something” had become a human being, and the ruin to be wrought had made itself specific in the idea of death: “A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and holily.” Even now, however, the idea was still too intangible, too unripe, for embodiment. It was only after a year or two that Hawthorne, turning the pages of a recent work on physiology, lighted upon the palpable image he had been groping for—the image of a gifted and learned young chemist who, according to this writer, aiming at the discovery of some great new scientific principle, had shut himself up in his laboratory for several days on end and, resorting to various means of artificial excitation, had endeavored to whip up his mind to the highest pitch of activity, with the result that he had ended by driving himself insane.

No such fate, of course, overtakes Aylmer in the tale; Hawthorne already had his own tragic denouement, the death of Georgiana, and all he needed to borrow from Combe was the nature of Aylmer’s pursuits, the setting of a laboratory, and a touch or two like the “penetrating odors” of the perfume that Aylmer displays to his beloved. The imperfection to be rooted out must clearly be a physical one, though as free as possible from grossness, and one that a pretty fanciful “chemistry” might conceivably eliminate; the image of Georgiana’s tiny birthmark must have come very lightly and naturally to Hawthorne. When, for the sake of a moral set-off, he had added the character of Aminadab, Aylmer’s brutal assistant, he had all that was essential for his tale. What remained was to compose it—to send the reader’s fancy vaguely back to “the latter part of the last century,” to bring his young chemist on the scene, to evoke Georgiana’s all-but-perfect beauty as if he were giving “instructions to a painter,” to let the sense of Aylmer’s mad intention grow upon us forebodingly, to
work in
the richly expressive physical details (the “gorgeous curtains,” the “perfumed lamps, emitting flames of various hues,” the “soft, impurpled radiance,” and the like), and to advance the allegorical little drama from scene to scene, from one abortive experiment to another, until its pitiful culmination is reached. “Every word
tells,
” as Poe said of another tale of Hawthorne’s, “and there is not a word which does not tell.”

I have just used the word “allegorical,” and however inaccurate it may be, it points to another aspect of Hawthorne’s manner that no reader can ever have ignored. “Allegories of the Heart” was the title that he himself seems to have planned to use for a whole group of his stories, and he frankly recognized in his work what he called “an inveterate love of allegory.” It has thrown off a good many readers, from Poe onward, and certainly it sometimes takes a form that is chillingly mechanical and bare. But it would be superficial to make very much of the mere word, or to see in Hawthorne’s “allegory” only a piece of conscious literary machinery. He may have inherited from his boyhood favorites, Spenser and Bunyan, the habit of a somewhat more explicit and more tangible moral imagery than most of his contemporaries found natural. But he is no allegorist in the older sense: his “moralities,” after all, at his most characteristic, are far too completely dramatized, too iridescent psychologically, for that; and the fact is he shared deeply the general impulse of his time, among writers, to discern a transcendental meaning in physical objects, or to make physical objects the means for expressing what would otherwise be inexpressible.

“You know,” says one of his characters, “that I can never separate the idea from the symbol in which it manifests itself.” It was a way of describing the instinctive movements of his own, and indeed any poet’s, imagination. If Hawthorne had lived a generation later, in Europe, he would have counted as a symbolist, though as it was he stopped short, at some point not easy to specify, of being a
symboliste
in the strictest sense: he trusts too little, for that, the suggestiveness of his symbols themselves, when left without commentary, and he yields himself far too little to the dark drift of the irrational. The truth is he is neither quite an allegorist nor quite a symbolist, but a writer
sui generis
who occupies a beautiful terrain of his own between these two artistic modes; it is tempting to catch up another word he often used, and call him an “emblematist,” with a certain reliance on the old meaning—the partly pictorial, partly edifying meaning—of the word “emblem.” He had inherited, at any rate, the old Puritan love of emblems and tokens and allegories, and he gave it vent as only a poet of his own romantic generation could do.

His favorite symbols tell us much, of course, about the deepest grain of his nature, but there is no space here for a detailed account of them. Two or three remarks will have to be enough. It is bound to strike any reader, sooner or later, how often this descendant of the Puritans, this provincial Yankee, this aesthetically unsophisticated and personally rather ascetic writer—how often Hawthorne instinctively makes use of the imagery of the fine arts (pictures, as we have seen, and statues), or of the minor arts (jewelry in particular), or of dress and costume (a black veil, an embroidered mantle, the finery of a dandy): it suggests, but only among other things, how much more sensuous his temperament was than it outwardly appeared to be. We are certain to be struck, moreover, by the recurring imagery of disease or physical affliction—not, as in Poe, in its more shocking and macabre forms, but in the comparatively less frightful forms of slow dissolution, of ravaging plague, of a tainted physical system, of a birthmark or a scar or a twisted mouth: only in such symbols could Hawthorne’s sense of a radical moral obliquity in human nature adequately express itself. And, finally, it is extremely revealing how constantly this shy and solitary recluse found himself dealing in the imagery of social life—the imagery of a banquet or a masquerade, of a state ball or a wedding, of a merrymaking or a fireside gathering: his fancy was haunted, in his solitude, as if by tantalizing mirages, by images of social pomp or gregarious good cheer.

It was not haunted, as Poe’s was, by images of cruelty, of torture, of claustrophobia and hypsophobia and phobophobia itself; and this is eloquent of the great differences between the two men as artists, between the more deeply psychoneurotic but also more intense and hallucinatory writer and the cooler, more purely meditative one. A quite different contrast suggests itself between Hawthorne and Melville in these terms: the symbols of a trackless sea, of violent tempests, of waterspouts and tornadoes, of the monstrous animal life of the ocean, of hunting, combat, and slaughter—these symbols, utterly unnatural to Hawthorne, are wonderfully expressive of Melville’s wilder, more passionate, more deeply demoniac nature. The very vocabularies of these three contemporaries are revealingly unlike one another. Who can have failed to be conscious, in reading Poe, how bitterly and compulsively there keep recurring, as in a verbalized nightmare, the words
terror, anxiety, horror, anguish
, and
fear
? Who can have missed the meaning of Melville’s talismanic language, of the telltale words
wild, barbarous
, and
savage; vengeful, cunning
, and
malignant; noble, innocent
, and
grand; inexorable, inscrutable
, and
unfathomable
? Compare with these the palette of Hawthorne’s vocabulary: the favorite adjectives,
dusky, dim
, and
shadowy
, or
cold, sluggish
, and
torpid;
the favorite verbs,
separate, estrange
, and
insulate;
the favorite nouns,
pride
and
egotism, guilt
and
intellect, heart
and
sympathy
. They tell us everything about his sensibility, his imagination, and the creative idiosyncrasy of his human insight.

They tell us, for example, that, unlike the realistic novelists of his day (some of whom he particularly admired and enjoyed), Hawthorne was not interested, as a writer, in the great social and worldly spectacle of manners and affairs; what concerned him was what he himself once called “psychological romance,” a phrase that suggested to him something much more serious—indeed, more tragic—than it may suggest to us. He cared, as James said, for “the deeper psychology”; and his tales, like his novels, are the expression of his burrowings, to use his own words again, “into the depths of our common nature.” What he found there was something that, more often than not, saddened him—when it did not, as it sometimes did, appal him. What he found made it impossible for Hawthorne to share the great glad conviction of his age that, as Emerson had told it, “love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things”; he came closer to feeling that guilt and wrong are inevitable; that, at any rate, they are terribly deeply meshed in the texture of human experience. His sense of the heights to which human beings can rise was an intermittent one; his sense of the depths to which they can fall, of the maze of error in which they can wander, was steady and fascinated. What it means to be in harmony with things and with oneself—of this he had his own intuition, and there are gleams of it on his pages. For him, however, it was a far more characteristic intuition, a far more continuous experience, to understand what it means to
be in the wrong
. That is the moral nucleus of most of his tales.