A MAN UNDER ENCHANTMENT
ISAT down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment.” So Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his own visionary youth, and, truth to tell, the spell lasted through life.
The wayside itself was not conducive to dreams. It was a busy thoroughfare. Eager traffickers jostled one another, and there was much crying up of new wares. Many important personages went noisily along. There was a fresh interest in all sorts of good works and many improvements on the roadway. There were not many priests or Levites passing by on the other side, for ecclesiasticism was not in fashion, but there were multitudes of Good Samaritans, each one intent on his own brand-new device for universal helpfulness. There were so many of them that the poor man who fell among philanthropists often sighed for the tender mercies of the thieves. The thieves, at least, when they had done their work would let him alone. Fromtime to time there would come groups of eager reformers, advance agents of the millennium. At last there came down the road troops hurrying to the front, and there was the distant sound of battle.
It was a stirring time, the noon of the nineteenth century; and the stir was nowhere more felt than in New England. It was a ferment of speculation, a whirl of passion, a time of great aspiration and of no mean achievement.
But if you would get a sense of all this, do not turn to the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ardor of Transcendentalism, the new spirit of reform, the war between the States,—these were noted, but they made no very vivid impression on the man who sat under enchantment. There was an interval between these happenings and his consciousness that made them seem scarcely contemporaneous.
It is a fashion in literary criticism to explain an author by his environment. With Hawthorne this method is not successful. It is not that his environment was not interesting in itself. His genius was essentially aloof. It was a plant that drew its nourishment from the air rather than fromthe soil. There are some men who have the happy faculty of making themselves at home wherever they happen to be. Hawthorne, wherever he had been born, would have looked upon the scene with something of a stranger’s eye. Indeed, when we think about it, the wonder is that most of us are able to take the world in such a matter-of-fact way. One would suppose that we had always been here, instead of being transient guests who cannot even engage our rooms a day in advance.
It is perhaps a happy limitation which makes us to forget our slight tenure, and to feel an absolute ownership in the present moment. We are satisfied with the passing experience because it appears to us as permanent.
To the man who sat by the wayside the present moment did not stand in the sunshine sufficient unto itself. It did not appear, as it did to the man of affairs, an ultimate and satisfying reality. He was not unobservant. He saw the persons passing by. But each one, in the present moment, seemed but a fugitive escaping from the past into the future. Futile flight! unavailing freedom! for in the Future the Past stands waiting for it. As he looked at each successive action it was as one whowatches the moving shadow of an old deed, which now for some creature has become doom.
Did I say that Hawthorne was little influenced by his environment? It would be truer to say that the environment to which he responded was that to which most men are so strangely oblivious. He felt what another Salem mystic has expressed:
Around us ever lies the enchanted landIn marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
Around us ever lies the enchanted landIn marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
Around us ever lies the enchanted landIn marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
Around us ever lies the enchanted land
In marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
The true-born Yankee has always persisted, in spite of the purists, in using “I guess” as equivalent to “I think.” To his shrewd good-humored curiosity, all thinking resolves itself into a kind of guesswork; and one man has as good a right to his guess as another.
It is a far cry from the talk of the village store to Emerson and Hawthorne, but to these New Englanders thinking was still a kind of guessing. The observer looks at the outward show of things, which has such an air of finality, and says, “I guess there’s something behind all this. I guess it’s worth while to look into it.”
Such a mind is not deterred by the warnings of formal logic that there is “no thoroughfare.” When it leaves the public road and sees the sign“Private way, dangerous passing,” it says, “that looks interesting. I guess I’ll take that.”
And from our streets and shops and newspapers, from our laboratories and lecture rooms and bureaus of statistics, it is, after all, such a little way to the border-land of mystery, where all minds are on an equality and where the wisest can but dimly guess the riddles that are propounded.
Hawthorne belonged to no school or party. To the men of his generation he was like the minister of whom he writes who preached with a veil over his face.
Nor is his relation in thought to his ancestry more intimate than that to his contemporaries. Born to the family of New England Puritanism, we think we recognize the family likeness—and yet we are not quite sure. There are traits that suggest a spiritual changeling.
When we enter into the realm of Hawthorne’s imagination we are conscious of sombre realities.
Is not this a survival of the puritanic spirit, with its brooding mysticism, its retributive predestination, its sense of the judgment to come? It was said of Carlyle that he was a Calvinist whohad lost his creed. May not the same be said of Hawthorne? The old New England theology had in him become attenuated to a mere film, but through it all may we not see the old New England conscience?
Doubtless there is much of this transmitted influence. Hawthorne himself insisted upon it. Speaking of “the stern and black-browed Puritan ancestors,” he said, “Let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.”
But it is possible to exaggerate such likenesses. In Hawthorne’s case there is danger of argument in a circle. We say that there is something in Hawthorne’s imagination, in its sombre mysticism, in its brooding sense of destiny, which is like that of the spirit of the inhabitants of Salem and Boston in the old days when they walked through the narrow streets and through the shadowy woodland ways pondering the fatal sequences of life.
But how do we see these old Puritans? We see them through Hawthorne’s eyes. His imagination peoples for us the old houses. Was Hawthorne’s genius tinged with Puritanism, or are ourconceptions of the Puritan character largely Hawthornesque? It is not necessary to argue this matter; it might be better to answer “Yes” to both questions.
It is the privilege of a creative genius to imprint his own features upon his forbears. It is difficult here to determine which is cause and which is effect. How marvelously Rembrandt gets the spirit of the Dutch Burgomeisters! It was fortunate for him that he had such subjects,—stalwart men with faces that caught the light so marvelously. Yes, but had it not been for Rembrandt, who would have told us that these Dutch gentlemen were so picturesque?
The subject of a good artist is accurately figured; the subject of a great artist is transfigured. We cannot separate the historic reality from the transfiguring light.
But however Hawthorne may have been influenced by his Puritan inheritance, it would be hard to find one whose habitual point of view was further removed from what we are accustomed to call the “New England conscience.” It is the characteristic of that type of conscience that it has an ever-present and sometimes oppressivesense of personal responsibility. It is militant and practical rather than mystical. To it evil is not something to be endured but something to be resisted. If there is a wrong it must be righted, and with as little delay as possible.
The highest praise a Puritan could give his pastor was that he was “a painful preacher.” Jonathan Mitchell, writing of the beginnings of the church in Cambridge, says that the people of Cambridge “were a gracious, savory-spirited people, principled by Mr. Sheperd, liking an humbling, heart-breaking ministry and spirit.”
The Puritan theology was based on predestination, but the Puritan temper was not fatalistic. When that latter-day Puritan, Lyman Beecher, was expounding the doctrines of the divine decrees, one of his sons asked him, “Father, what if we are decreed to be lost?” The answer was, “Fight the decrees, my boy!”
The Calvinistic spirit was exactly opposite to the fatalistic acquiescence which shifts the responsibility from the creature to the Creator. To be sure the fall of man took place a long time ago, but we cannot say that it was none of our business. It was not an hereditary misfortune to beborne with fortitude; it was to be assumed as our personal guilt. “Original sin” means real sin. Adam sinned as the typical and representative man, and every man became a sinner. No individual could plead analibi. The “conviction of sin” was not the acquiescence in a penalty,—it was the heartbreaking consciousness of the “exceeding sinfulness of sin.”
“In Adam’s fallwesinned all.” When they said that, they were thinking not of Adam, but of themselves.Theydid it; it was the guilt that was imputed to them. Sensitive consciences were tortured in the attempt fully to realize their guilt.
The real inheritors of this type of conscience were to be found among many of the radical reformers and agitators who were Hawthorne’s contemporaries and with whom he had little in common. When their formal creed had fallen off, there remained the sense of personal guilt for original sin. The sin of the nation and of the whole social order weighed heavily upon them and tortured them, and they found relief only in action.
All this was foreign to Hawthorne’s mind. In his treatment of sin there is always a sense ofmoral detachment. We are not made to see, as George Eliot makes us see, the struggle with temptation,—the soul, like a wild thing, seeing the tempting bait and drawing nearer to the trap. Hawthorne begins after the deed is done. He shows us the
wild thing taken in a trapWhich sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
wild thing taken in a trapWhich sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
wild thing taken in a trapWhich sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
wild thing taken in a trap
Which sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
Of what is the trap made? It is made of a deed already done. Whence comes the ghostly trapper? He is no stranger in the wood. There is no staying his advance as he makes his fatal rounds.
In the preface to the “House of the Seven Gables” the author gives the argument of the story,—“the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”
This is the theme of the Greek tragedy—Nemesis. The deed is done and cannot be undone; the inevitable consequences must be endured.
In the “Scarlet Letter,” when Hester and Roger Chillingworth review the past and peer into thefuture, Hester says, “I said but now that there can be no good event for him or thee or me who are wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path.”
But is the present stumbling guilt or is it merely misery? The old man replies, “By the first slip awry thou didst plant the germ of evil, but since that moment it has been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion, neither am I fiend-like who have snatched a fiend’s office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may.”
Strange words to come from one who had sat in a Puritan meeting-house! It is such comment as the Greek Chorus might make watching the unfolding of the doom of the house of Agamemnon. And when the tale of the “Scarlet Letter” has been told, how does the author himself look upon it? How does he distribute praise and blame?
“To all these shadowy beings so long our near acquaintances—as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions—we would fain be merciful. Itis a curious subject of observation and inquiry whether love and hatred be not the same thing at bottom. Each in its utmost development supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for his spiritual life on another; each leaves the passionate lover or the no less passionate hater forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of its subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the passions seem essentially the same except that one happens to be seen in celestial radiance and the other in a dusky lurid glow.” This is not the Puritan Conscience uttering itself. It is an illusive and questioning spirit.
If in his attitude toward human destiny Hawthorne was in some essential respects un-Puritan, so also was he un-modern. There is a characteristic difference between antique and modern symbols for those necessary processes, beyond the sphere of our own wills, by which our lives are determined. The ancients pictured it with austere simplicity. Life is a simple thread. The Fates spin it. It is drawn out on the distaff and cut off by the fatal shears.
Compare this with the phrase Carlyle loved toquote, “the roaring loom of Time.” Life is not a spinning-wheel, but a loom. A million shuttles fly; a million threads are inextricably interwoven. You cannot long trace the single thread; you can discern only the growing pattern. There is inevitable causation, but it is not simple but complex. The situation at the present moment is the result not of one cause but of innumerable causes, and it is in turn the cause of results that are equally incalculable. We are a part of
the web of being blindly woveBy man and beast and air and sea.
the web of being blindly woveBy man and beast and air and sea.
the web of being blindly woveBy man and beast and air and sea.
the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and air and sea.
Men of science show us how the whole acts upon each part and each part acts upon the whole. Modern novelists attempt, not always successfully, to give the impression of the amazing complexity of actual life, where all sorts of things are going on at the same time.
Whether we look upon it as his limitation or as his good fortune, Hawthorne adhered to the spinning-wheel rather than the loom. We see the antique Fates drawing out the thread. A long series of events follow one another from a single cause.
A part of the power of Hawthorne over ourimagination lies in his singleness of purpose. In “The Marble Faun” we are told, “The stream of Miriam’s trouble kept its way through this flood of human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside.”
We are made to see the dark streams that do not mingle nor turn aside, and we watch their fatal flow.
But is this real, normal life? In such life do not the streams mingle? Are not evil influences quickly neutralized, as noxious germs die in the sunshine? No one would more readily acknowledge this than Hawthorne. He says: “It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under the microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him clumsily together again. What wonder, then, that we be frightened at such a monster, which,after all—though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage—may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.”
The critic of Hawthorne could not describe better the limitation of his stories as pictures of real life. His characters, however clearly conceived, are insulated from many of their real relations, and their peculiarities are magnified.
In the preface to “The Scarlet Letter” he says that the tale “wears to my eye a stern and sombre aspect, too much ungladdened by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of Nature and real life, and which undoubtedly should soften every picture of them.”
One who would defend Hawthorne the Author against Hawthorne the Critic must point out the kind of literature to which his work belongs. When we judge it by the rule of the romance or of the realistic novel, we fail to do justice to its essential quality. The romancer, the story-teller pure and simple, is attracted by the swift sequence of events. His nimble fancy follows a plot as a kitten follows a string. Now it happens that in a world constituted as ours is the sequence of events follows a moral order. A good story has alwaysin it an element of poetic justice. But the romancer does not tell his story for the sake of the moral. He professes to be as much surprised when it is discovered as is the most innocent reader. In like manner the realistic novel, in proportion as it is a faithful portrayal of life, has an ethical lesson. But the writer disclaims any purpose of teaching it. His business is to tell what the world is like. He leaves the rest to your intelligence.
But there is another kind of literature; it is essentially allegory. The allegorist takes a naked truth and clothes it with the garments of the imagination. Frequently the clothes do not fit and the poor truth wanders about awkwardly, self-conscious to the last degree. But if the artist be a genius the abstract thought becomes a person.
Hawthorne’s work is something more than allegory, but his mind worked allegorically. His characters were abstract before they became concrete. He was not a realist aiming to give a comprehensive survey of the actual world. He consciously selected the incidents and scenes which would illustrate his theme.
In his conclusion of “The Marble Faun,” whenthe actors have withdrawn, the Author comes before the curtain and says that he designed “the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere that some laws and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged. The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it and becomes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity if we bring it into the actual light of day.” This is not realism.
It is a mood in which the bounds between romance and allegory fade away; persons become symbols and symbols have breathed into them the breath of life. The story and the truth it shadows are one.
The mood is common in poetry. Poets like Dante and Spenser and Shelley from it have given us
Wise and lovely songsOf fate and God and chance and chaos old,And love.
Wise and lovely songsOf fate and God and chance and chaos old,And love.
Wise and lovely songsOf fate and God and chance and chaos old,And love.
Wise and lovely songs
Of fate and God and chance and chaos old,
And love.
There is a point where “dreams begin to feel the truth and stir of day,” where the incidents of existence assume a dream-like character, and wheredreams become transparent symbols of reality. There are moods in which our familiar world seems strange to us, and we walk in it as on some bewildered shore.
In such moods to meet Hawthorne is a great experience. He is no longer shy and aloof, but he opens to us his heart, and with friendly zeal points out each object of interest—for in this border-land he is at home.