much as Henry Adams was to suggest in our own time. He inherits from Irving the essayist's attitude. After him, no important story-teller has it. Hawthorne is the last, because Poe was to determine, for better or for worse, the technical grooves in which the short story was to move in the future. His great advance upon Irving was his discovery of the subjective method for psychological fiction. Irving had dealt with manners, and Poe was to deal with passions. Hawthorne was solely preoccupied with the drama of conscience. Regarding him from our present standpoint, the discovery may seem commonplace enough, but it was new and almost entirely untried when he published the first series of Twice-Told Tales. Like Poe, Hawthorne is a scientist of the mind, dissecting motive. Unlike Poe, his eye is always upon the moral values, but he keeps them subdued to his atmospheric background, and he is dispassionate in his presentation of them. Amiel and Senancour are the nearest parallels, and if he had not married and left the old attic-room in Salem, we may suppose that he would have left us journals similar to theirs, and little else. As it was, he profited by his early seclusion in so far as it taught him how to isolate action and motive, and to make his men and women stand out against a clouded eternal sky. In a household where conversation must have been limited, words also came to have a rare personal quality for him, and to become charged with significance, as if they had separate emotions of their own, and could evoke by sug gestion great elemental powers. This quality of evocation is wedded to a subtle sense of rhythm and movement, in which force is not often sacrificed to charm, and charm is everywhere present. The elaborately interwoven rhythms are admirably sustained, and there is an even power in them which achieves gradually increasing momentum. The power is spiritual, and its texture has its warp and woof in the contrast between the mental complexity of New England puritanism, and its outward monotony of daily event. Hawthorne would conceal this complexity of pattern, and the effort called successfully for a masterly power of suggestive implication for which the necessary symbols were by no means immediately at hand. That he found them we know, although we are sometimes conscious of his effort and realize that he has the common defect of the metaphysical Caroline poets, an occasional love of conceits for their own sake. Had he lived in England during the first half of the seventeenth century, he would have been a close associate, though hardly perhaps a disciple, of Donne. The life he pictures is most frequently one in which we suffer for the sins of our ancestors, and he would almost seem to value suffering as the philosopher's stone. He felt evil and profited by the knowledge without paying the usual spiritual price for his experience, as most unhappy mortals are compelled to do. He was, in fact, a connoisseur rather than an adept of life. To him outward events are strange and restless allegories of an inner world across the borderland of living, about which he is passionately curious. As Arthur Ransome has admirably said, "Hawthorne's finest stories are a Dance of Death, in which Death is no mere end of a blind alley, but a dividing of the ways. Those dim people he found in his own soul are important to us by their chances of salvation or damnation. Their feet 'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slung, 1 From a poem by Lascelles Abercrombie. The fortunes of Hawthorne's characters are shaping for Eternity." " 1 It is true that he was content with simple nutriment and ascetic in his choice of material. He established a kind of harmony between himself and the sterile complacency of New England at the expense of foregoing the richer experiences whose acceptance made Herman Melville the greater, though still the less popular, writer. The fact is that Hawthorne was limited to a degree by his New England conscience. We find him interested in texture rather than in strain, and suspect that lofty and passionate emotions would have exhausted his powers of resistance. He was a consummate etcher rather than a master of dynamic line. If we examine his work closely, we find that The seldom draws character in the round, but emphasizes one aspect at the expense of others. His tendency is to draw types rather than individuals, and he frequently depends upon the twilight atmosphere and a certain processional dignity of manner to obscure the defect. It is almost as if he were a poet manqué, overshadowed in his shyness by Longfellow, Lowell, and other inferiors, as Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville were also 1 A History of Story-Telling, 1909, p. 263. overshadowed. New England does not always recognize prophets and poets in its midst. The chief subject of Hawthorne's chronicle is the Puritanism that was dying in New England in his own day and that is dead now. He foreshadows the sterile and inbred New England life of our time with its record of lonely hill farms, brooding spinsters, and degeneracy. His sensitivity rendered him acutely conscious of this process of decay amid whose autumn pageantry he loved to linger, and his family life before his marriage must have brought it significantly, though not unkindly, home. Even Barrett Wendell, to whom New England was America, wrote: "To him Puritanism was no longer a motive of life; in final ripeness it had become a motive of art. When any human impulse has thus ripened, we may generally conclude it historically a thing of the past." 1 The study of Hawthorne which Henry James contributed as a young man to the English Men of Letters Series is perhaps chiefly valuable as a key to Henry James, though it contains much subtle and considered appreciative criticism. Frequent allusions, however, have been made by later commenators to the charge of provincialism which he makes 1 A Literary History of America, 1901, p. 433. |