Page images
PDF
EPUB

as an ideal portrait-painter. He does not, like Thackeray, sketch so many representative characters, illustrative at once of the specialties of the age and of the general human types to which they belong, and connect them by a narrative so slight, a train of events so uneventful, that the story seems little else than a thread to string such picture-beads on. He neither gives a detailed and many-sided portraiture, setting forth, as fully as that may be done, the complete individuality; nor, as is more the special power and practice of the great satirist we have named, a representation of one or two broad and distinctive traits, that form, as it were, the key-note to the character, -a dominating phase that gives tone and colour to all the rest, but still a partial and onesided view, which, as it is left to stand for the whole, is in truth but a caricature. His forte rather is to delineate the most opposing and contradictory sides of a man, in all their contrasting struggling action and reaction. He displays, with the skill, and almost with the coolness, of an anatomist, the most intricate and conflicting passions and tendencies, as these are called forth by some critical event and its consequences. The characters presented to us by most of the novelists who aim chiefly at portraiture are for the most part stereotyped. They are shown in numerous combinations and surroundings, both to impress the leading qualities on the reader's attention, and to exhibit these qualities forcibly and fully in varied manifestation. But they are always the same; the quality may be displayed under altered circumstances, and again with more ramified operation, but is in itself to the end unmodified, and the closing manifestation, so far as it forms an element of the portrait, might as well have been the first. There is no progress, no growth. The task Hawthorne selects for himself is rather the development of the effects on character of some great absorbing interest. Not only does he subordinate the external conditions to the inner movements of life, as we have already pointed out; he represents the play of the mental mechanism less in the typal forms of definite classes, epochs, and localities, than in peculiar and strongly individualized cases unfolding under the influence of special, and often critical cir

-

mances." His personages do not generally come before us with that force and air of actuality that form the charm of our more realistic writers of fiction. They and their doings are shadowy, remote, and beyond the sphere of habitual experience. Yet all is felt to be profoundly true not only what might be, but what in its essential nature is, within the heart and conscience. The embodying forms may be intangible shades, phantasmagoria, but the inner life they express finds within us the unhesitating responsive recognition of kindred. They are veritable human souls, though dwelling in a far-off world of cloud-land and moonshine.

With all this strongly ideal character consists a power, not unfrequently exercised, of most faithful and minute realistic painting. For example, the delightful picture of the old "Custom House" at Salem, which introduces The Scarlet Letter. How vividly reproduced are the old inspector and collector! One cannot read it without being affected by the sleepy, gossiping, superannuated character of the whole place. The very atmosphere seems somniferous. Or, again, in the chapter of Transformation entitled "Scenes by the Way," his exquisite description of rural scenes and manners in Tuscany, and of the villages and small ancient walled towns of northern Italy. Still, even his most telling and minutely detailed pictures of real life, with the truthfulness of a photograph, and the life-likeness of a portrait, are seen, as it were, through an ideal atmosphere. He sees everything through the halo of a poetic medium. All is real, but it is an old-world realness, quaint and mellow with age. The present is too hard, rigid, and unplastic for him. True American as he is, he finds himself straitened and out of his element amid the newness, the clearness of outline, the resistance to the modifying and moulding power of the imagination, of everything in the New World. There is no hoary tradition, no twilight history, no fabled antiquity, nothing picturesque or romantic. He has no play for his peculiar power. We trace this in his choice of subjects, as well as in his mode of dealing with them. He has a predilection for the farthest back times of New England life, the days of the Puritans, of trial for witchcraft; for old nooks crumbly An effect of those characteristics of his and moss-grown, rusty parchments, a mouldproductions to which we have been refer- ering rag with traces of embroidery, of ring, is the withdrawal of the whole scene which "the stitch gives evidence of a now from the atmosphere of actual life. Thus forgotten art, not to be recovered even by one of the most pervading and conspicuous the process of picking out the threads;" qualities of his works is their highly ideal for relics of a bygone age, antiquated habcharacter. They are rightly named "Ro-its, old-fashioned styles of character and

cumstances.

modes of thought and feeling. He oftener than once openly complains of the stern inflexibility of modern realities and American civilisation:

"In the old countries with which fiction has long been conversant, a certain conventional privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; his work is not put exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to every-day probability, in view of the improved effects which he is bound to produce thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Fairy Land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which, the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This atmosphere is what the American romancer wants. In its absence, the beings of imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same cate gory as actually living mortals, a necessity that renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible."

In reference to the locality in which the scene is laid, he says in the preface to Transformation:

brain, where the light of consciousness falls but rarely, and then only casts strange, unknown, and ghastly shadows; of possible properties in Nature, in wondrous accord and harmony with these dark forms within our own constitution, which so seldom flit lie latent all around us, imperceptible to across mortal vision, properties that may our ordinary senses, yet exerting, or ready to exert, their influence on us every hour of our lives. Every object, every power presents itself to him as striking its roots deep into a subsoil of mystery. The present and visible ever spring from the past and unseen. Too sharp demarcations would obstruct the transition from the sphere of immediate obtrusive action, into that of agencies that have long passed from view, or have never been clearly brought within the range of mortal ken.

The introduction of these occult and preternatural powers produces no jar; they are not felt to be inconsistent with the rest of the narrative; they gain for themselves an acceptance as not only possible, but true, and in harmony with time, place, and “Italy, as the site of his romance, was chiefly irresistible suggestion of the false and sucircumstance. They bring with them no valuable to the author as affording him a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities perstitious; nothing of what Hawthorne would not be so terribly insisted upon as they himself styles "the stage effect of what is are, and must needs be, in America. No author, called miraculous interposition." The same without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of character of essential trueness that we conwriting a romance about a country where there tended for in his most ideal pictures obtains is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no here. This result is partly due to their picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything own nature, partly to the manner in which but commonplace prosperity, in broad and sim- these agencies are introduced and emple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear ployed. We do not feel that it is the ordinative land. It will be very long, I trust, before nary supernatural that is presented to us. romance-writers may find congenial and easily- That, however skilfully managed, would handled themes either in the annals of our stal- hardly recommend itself to either the judg wart republic, or in any characteristic and ment or the taste of the present day. Not probable events of our individual lives. Ro

mance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flow-only is the improbability, not to say impossi

ers, need ruin to make them grow."

bility, too great; it is out of harmony with our modes of thought and feeling, even The absence of hard outline and broad could it be made apparently possible. It light is especially demanded by another is no unnatural creature that obtrudes itself well-marked tendency of our author's mind, suddenly, inexplicably, into the circle of more or less displayed in almost all his our lives; no ghostly apparition revisiting works. His pages are replete with mys- the glimpses of the moon; no uncanny tery, hintings of an eerie presence, tokens dwarf or vulgar necromancer that is brought of a power preternatural yet strangely in before us, but beings and influences conaffinity with human life, repeated and re- nected with us by intimate and inseverable peated till a sense of unspeakable awe takes bonds, not coming and going, but ever possession of the mind. But this mystery is there, whether recognised or not. They never revealed; it is a presence without a seem the shadowy but immortal offspring form, an inarticulate voice, an impalpable of our own actions, thoughts and feelings, agency. We are kept in remembrance that - of ourselves; or the inalienable heritage there is more in heaven and earth than is that has come down to us from the characdreamt of in our philosophy. We are ters and lives of our progenitors. The brought face to face with the portals into same absence of incident that we have the unseen and inscrutable. We are made found characterizing the more material aware of recesses in the human heart and agents in the scene prevails with respect to

if worn on a younger and happier breast." "The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur

these; they do not come as a deus ex machina to achieve striking results, or to. overcome difficulties insuperable to mere mortal agency. They are, indeed, rarely committed to definite action. We are made to feel vaguely their power; what Dimmesdale.” "Pearl's inevitable tenthey may have done is hinted at as possibilities, but they are never caught in the act; we are never even assured of their positive interference. A haunting presence, they exercise their influence on us morally rather than by any sensible means.

deeply wronged them both, and demands in
vain, he replies, "Never know him! . . .
Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the
prying multitude. Thou mayest conceal it,
too, from the ministers and magistrates,
even as thou didst this day, when they
sought to wrench the name out of thy heart,
and give thee a partner on thy pedestal.
But as for me, I come to the inquest with
other senses than they possess.
There is a sympathy that will make me con-
scious of him. I shall see him tremble. I
shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and un-
awares. "Phoebe's physical organization,
moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception operating
with almost the effect of a spiritual medium,
that somebody was near at hand." We are
taught again that not in the garden of Eden
alone, but all the world over, forbidden
fruit grows on a tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, and that we cannot eat
thereof without having our eyes opened to
the dark secrets both of our own heart and
that of others:

[ocr errors]

dency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission." The moral relations arising from hidden actions reveal It is perhaps a phase of this power and themselves in a sort of quasi-physical way tendency that guides him to so constant and through the subtle, untraceable, interpeneemphatic a recognition of those secret sym-trating affinities of mind and matter. pathies between individuals connected by When Hester Prynne's husband demands no tie patent to sense, between our nature of her the name of the man who had so and even inanimate objects; of the subtle powers upon our minds of time and place; of the awful and overwhelming perplexity of our inherited tendencies and relationships; of the transmission, through generations, of the effects of human action and character, now slumbering though vital, again on occasions the most inopportune, or opportune, according as we regard the question from the personal and selfish point of view, or from that of universal and moral government-breaking out into activity, like the course of the electric fluid, apparently ever fitful, defying prediction, yet ever in strict obedience to eternal law and varying circumstance, here peaceful and ineffective, there subduing with irresistible force whatever it meets. There is in us a 66 mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust," in our relations with the spot where our forefathers have for centuries "been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to our mortal frames." The embroidered rag that life-long branded her shame on Hester Prynne's bosom, when musingly placed on its historian's breast, while yet he, ignorant alike of her name and life, was idly speculating on its purpose, seemed to cause a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but redhot iron." The sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, one to another. A

and vibrates from

flower, for instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law, converting her daily life into a flower-fragrance for these two sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than

steps, in the little world with which she was out"Walking to and fro, with those lonely footwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester,—if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted, she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revela tions that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded tim, that the outward guise of purity was but a the struggling woman, as yet only half his viclie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's, or must she receive these intimations-so obscure, yet so distinct-as truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and

66

She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, hen

loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. What evil thing is at hand?' would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron's bane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's, what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would give her warning, 'Behold, Hester, here is a companion!' and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted, fanciful possibility is afterwards slipped in with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks, as if as an affirmed fact. Thus "dark flabby her purity were somewhat sullied by that mo- leaves," unknown to men of science, were mentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman was found "growing on a grave which bore no that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, tombstone nor other memorial of the dead whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to man, save these ugly weeds that have taken revere? such loss of faith is ever one of the upon themselves to keep him in rememsaddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof brance. They grew out of his heart, and that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of typify, it may be, some hideous secret that her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hes- was buried with him, and which he had ter Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fel-done better to confess during his lifetime." low-mortal was guilty like herself."

the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bats' wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?"

Sometimes what is at first insinuated as a

"All the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart to make manifest an unspoken crime."

Several of these instances are no doubt susceptible of being resolved into figures of speech, expressing forcibly a truth that might have been hard to render in more literal terms; and some of them perhaps We must not omit to notice another feawere intended for no more. But it is dif- ture, which, though perhaps less conspicuficult to suppose they are all so meant. ous, yet, like small patches of vivid colour Many of them seem to point to something in a picture, contributes not less effectively far deeper than would be left as a residuum to produce the general result. This is a of bare statement, if we abstract as figure peculiar vein of humour, always fanciful, all that is capable of such treatment. The often grotesque, sometimes grim and grisly. conviction that there really is some such Poor Hepzibah Pyncheon's aristocratic hens profounder meaning wished to be conveyed laid now and then an egg and hatched a is greatly increased by a thorough perusal chicken, not for any pleasure of their own, of the works together. Many of the ex-but that the world might not absolutely lose pressions lose much of their force and significance by severance from the context; and there are many slighter indications of a similar kind which are altogether unsusceptible of extract. The cumulative effect, indeed, of such expressions in the course of consecutive reading is very great; and it is to such a reading we must appeal if we should seem to have made more of the point than our quotations justify: Sometimes the pregnant meaning we refer to is not asserted, but suggested as a probability, or in a query, or as a scintillation of fancy:

-

what had once been so admirable a breed of fowls." So excessive was the warmth of her brother the judge's affected and hypocritical aspect of overflowing benevolence one particular forenoon, "that (such at least was the rumour about town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!" The Puritan ministers, grim prints of whom adorned the walls of the old manse" study, "looked strangely like bad angels, or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and

so sternly with the devil that somewhat of personality. The products of his imaginahis sooty fierceness had been imparted to tion are always contemplated objectively; their own visages." How true a Yankee he regards them habitually in a scrutinizing, touch is this! When one little fellow warns deliberative, questioning attitude. He is a poor Italian boy that he had better move ever inquisitive and judicial. It would thus on, for that nobody lives in the house under almost appear as if in him the creative faca window of which he is grinding his hurdy-ulty, though not inferior either in strength gurdy that will be likely to care for his mu- or activity or fineness of temper, were exsic, "You fool, you, why do you tell him?' ercised in subserviency to the critical, -as whispered another shrewd little Yankee, if he peopled the world of his imagination caring nothing for the music, but a good only that he might become the witness and deal for the cheap rate at which it was had. judge of the characters and lives, powers Let him play as long as he likes! If there and tendencies, of his own creations. In is nobody to pay him, that's his own look- one respect his writings are detrimentally out!"" The cemetery of the Cappuccini at affected either by this habit or by a weakRome is a small portion of holy soil from ness of constructive talent, to which the Jerusalem; and, as the whole space has habit itself may be partly due. His indilong ago been occupied, there obtains the cu-vidual characters, indeed, are delineated rious and ghastly practice among the monks with wonderful minuteness, accuracy, and of taking the longest buried skeleton out of power. We seem to read into their very the oldest grave, when one of the brotherhood dies, to make room for the new corpse, and of building the disinterred bones into architectural devices, or of placing the unbroken frame-work of bone, sometimes still covered with mummied skin and hair, and dressed in cloak and cowl, in niches all around the vaults. "Thus," quaintly comments our author, “ each of the good friars, in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before daybreak, as it were, and make room for another lodger." Very often this faculty of humour expresses itself in a piquant little touch, as a kind of aside, or passing comment, or half responsive turn with which a line of reflection is quietly but emphatically closed like a single bright floweret at the end of a slender stem. But there is one remarkable instance in which it is extended through a long chapter. It is that in which the defunct Governor Pyncheon is a whole night long left undiscovered, the object of the gibes and appeals, the scorn and taunts, of the author's fantasy, which gambols round the senseless clay like a jeering spirit from the abyss. The presentation, face to face, of the transient and trifling occupations and interests of this life, with the mystery and solemnities of death and the unseen realities that lie beyond it, the grave reflections and unearthly mockery, the sustained power, the eerie subject and weird-like effects, are positively terrible.

Some of the qualities we have traced in Hawthorne's works belong rather to the critical than to the constructive faculty. One effect of this is that the author is never felt to identify himself with his characters. They are not subjects into which his own life is transfused; he never loses his own

core-so far at least as the personality of any one human being can become the object of comprehension to another. But his works, considered each as a whole, especially those that aim at full development, or at being something more than sketches, are deficient in what may be called architectural structure. There is a want of the converging unity which is the condition of every perfect work of art. This may be the result, as we have said, of a defect in constructive power. His imagination, instead of embracing in one grasp the scene, characters, circumstances, and their developments, as combining to form one system, as all members of one body, elements gravitating round one centre, seizes upon them too much in detail, each as a distinct unit, related to the others only by the ideal bond of moral and spiritual influence which he has created for them. Or it may be, in some measure, due to his habit of yielding too much to what he describes in one of his characters as "that cold tendency between instinct and intellect, which makes one pry with a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses." It is also, no doubt, increased by the want of a strong framework or mould of external circumstance and connected events, which, however it may subserve some of his other aims or tendencies, leaves him more dependent for the compact unification of his tales on a power of internal integration, which he either does not possess, or does not use in sufficient force.

We are not aware whether he ever attempted the work of a professed literary critic, but he has favoured us with a piece of self-criticism, which shows what his qual ifications in this direction were. Every reader must be struck with the singular feli

« EelmineJätka »