XVHAWTHORNE

Hawthorne is the only American admitted into the English Men of Letters Series. This may be partly accidental, and due to the fact that it was possible to get so fine a critic as Henry James to write about him. It also suggests, however, that in 1879 Hawthorne was held in higher esteem than he is held to-day. There are several American writers about whom we are nowadays more curious. Emerson does not soar at quite such an altitude as he once did, but he is still an indubitable figure of genius on the sunny side of the clouds. Thoreau, with the challenge of his sardonic simplicity, will interest us so long as there is a society to protest against. Poe, after we have refined him in the fiercest fires of criticism, remains gold of the most precious. Whitman holds us as the giant aborigine of democracy as well as the rhapsodist of brotherhood and death. Washington Irving,on the other hand, has disappeared except from the schoolbooks, and Oliver Wendell Holmes has ceased to be read by people under fifty. Longfellow has become an exiguous contributor to an anthology except in so far as he is taught, like Irving, to schoolchildren, and Lowell is oftener quoted by politicians than by critics of letters. There is no need to discuss just now whether this waning of reputations is likely to be permanent. It is enough to note that Hawthorne, though he has not waned to the extent that Longfellow has, has ceased for most readers to be a star of the first or second magnitude. How many critics would now place him, as he was once placed, among the great masters of English prose? How many editors of a series of lives of great writers would unhesitatingly include in it a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne?

Hawthorne may nevertheless justly be regarded as a classic, and there have been few writers whose short stories would bear re-reading so well as Hawthorne’s three-quarters of a century after their first appearance. The prose, as anyone may see by dipping into Mr. Carl van Doren’s admirable selection fromTwice-told Tales,Mosses from an Old Manse, andThe Snow Image, is beautiful prose, even if it falls short of supreme greatness. It flows with arhythm at once charming and forceful. It is transparent, and through it we can see life as Hawthorne’s imagination played on it like sunlight refracted through water. He is a music-maker rather than a phrase-maker in his use of words. Movement is more to him than metaphor, though he can combine them attractively, as in the opening sentence ofThe Seven Vagabonds:

Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of three directions.

You may turn Hawthorne’s pages almost at random, and you can scarcely help noticing example after example of this characteristic rhythm of his. It is noticeable even in such a simple narrative sentence as that with whichThe Artist of the Beautifulopens:

An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop.

And, again, we find it in a meditative passage such as:

I saw mankind, in this weary old age of the world, either enduring a sluggish existence amid the smokeand dust of cities, or, if they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had darkened the sunshine of to-day.

This all flows with something of the noble ease of hexameters, yet without falling into the vices of pseudo-poetic prose. The mere sound of his sentences gives Hawthorne’s prose a wonderful momentum that keeps us interested even when at times we begin to wonder if his subject-matter is quite as interesting as it ought to be. This grave and equable momentum is one of his greatest technical qualities. It is a quality that cannot be adequately illustrated in single sentences or detached passages, because its success is not the success of occasional felicities but of something sustained and pervasive. It may even be imputed as a fault to Hawthorne that he can never, or almost never, escape from the equable rhythm of his prose. He seldom ends a story with the slightly different momentum due to an ending. It is not merely, however, that his stories end quietly: he is like a rider who rides beautifully but does not know how to dismount. He maintains his graceful ease of motion until the last moment, and then he slides off as best he can.

But it would be folly to regard Hawthorne’srhythm as wholly—or even mainly—a technical quality. The rhythm of prose is never that, and it is in vain to play the sedulous ape to the great masters if nothing but their style is imitated. It is not an accident that the greatest English prose is to be found in the Bible. The rhythm of the greatest prose seems at times the rhythm of the spirit of man as it contemplates the life of men in the light of eternity. The rhythm to a Plato, a Milton, a Sir Thomas Browne, is inevitably of a kind that a Jane Austen or a Thackeray, with all their genius, could never achieve. It is the echo of the emotion felt by men to whom time and place are fables with another meaning besides that which appears on the surface. The realists can never write the greatest prose, because to them the world they see is not fabulous but a hard fact. The greatest writers all see the world as fabulous. Their men and women are inhabited by angels or devils, or, on a lower plane, have something of the nature of ghosts or fairies or goblins. If Othello were not a fable as well as a man, he would be no better than a criminal lunatic. If King Lear were not a fable as well as man, he would be a subject for the psychoanalyst. Imagine either of them as a modern Englishman, putting his case before a judge and jury, and you will see how the artist, even thoughhis characters as a rule are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.

Hawthorne was a writer extremely conscious of this second world within and about the world. He had abandoned the Puritanical orthodoxy of his people, but none the less he was haunted like them by a sense of a second meaning in life beyond the surface meaning of the day’s work and the day’s play. Many of his stories are stories in which, as inYoung Goodman Brown, everyday reality passes into fable and back again as swiftly as though the two worlds were but different stages in a transformation scene. His genius turned more naturally to allegory than any other writer’s since Bunyan. This is generally counted a defect, and, indeed, if, instead of alternating the everyday world with the fabulous world, he had interwoven them in such a way that the world never became less real on accountof the fable it bore within it like an inner light, Hawthorne would have been a greater writer. At the same time, it is better that he should have sacrificed observation than that he should have sacrificed imagination. He lived in an atmosphere in which it must have been extraordinarily difficult to stand sufficiently remote from everyday life to see it not merely with the eye but with the imagination. To the eye, there must have been little enough of fantasy in the narrow lives of the men and women about him. “Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region,” he wrote of the Custom-house in which he passed so many years and that made “such havoc of his wits.” He had to transform his surroundings into a strange land into which a bird of Paradise might enter. He did this by the invention of a sort of moral fairyland, into which he could project his vision of the mystery of human life. He often offends our sense of reality, but he never leaves us in doubt of the reality of this moral fairyland as the image of all he knew and felt about human life. It is a Puritanical fairyland into which sin has come. But, strong though his sense of sin is, Hawthorne does not always in his view of sin agree with the Puritans. He is more Christian, and he condemns the sin of self-righteousness more thanthe sins of the flesh. Even so, his imagination is very close to that of the Puritans, who believed in witches and in men possessed by the Devil. The difference is that Hawthorne was inclined to believe that the good church-going people were also witches and men possessed by the Devil. Unless I misunderstandYoung Goodman Brown, Hawthorne is here telling us how he was tempted to believe this, and reproaching himself for having given way to temptation. InThe Scarlet Letter, the egoism of the vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That Hawthorne’s imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown by the fact thatThe Scarlet Letterstill holds us under its spell in days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast; they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne’s novel survives—a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like that of Hans Andersen,because, not only does it carry the burden of morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he has left no successors in his kind.

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