To make sketches so slight as these interesting, much more to embalm them in literature, requires some magical touch either in the hand of the author or the heart of the reader. They are the thistledown of literature, creatures of a contemplative idleness as pure as childhood's own, the sun's impartial photography on the film of a rambler's eye; yet in these few pages are condensed some thousands, probably, of Hawthorne's days. The life they depict has been called barren, and the literary product has been described as thin. “What triviality, what monotony, what emptiness!” the critics exclaim. It is, indeed, provincial; rusticity is its element. Hawthorne, however, did not choose it, as a topic, for that reason, with a conscious intention to exploit it. He could not have been aware, he could not have half known even, how provincial it was, for he had never gone out of this countryside in which he was bred, or become acquainted with a different world; even on his journeys in stage-coaches he had not got free of it. The sketches made no artificial appeal; they have the true flavor of the soil, and are written for those who sprang from it and dwelt upon it and would be buried in it. This is the charm that still clings to them, and indeed pervades them like an aromatic odor in East Indian wood. They are true transcripts of life, though vanished now from its place at least in that region, which then enjoyed the seclusion of a nest of villages uninvaded by railroads, and was nearer perhaps to Calcutta and Sumatra and the Gold Coast than to New York. He was not so solitary and alone in this life, after all. That part of New England was not far from being a Forest of Arden, when Emerson might be met any day with a pail berrying in the pastures, or Margaret Fuller reclining by a brook, or Hawthorne on a high rock throwing stones at his own shadow in the water. There was a Thoreau — there still is — in every New England village, usually inglorious. The lone fisherman of the Isaak Walton type had become, in the New World, the wood-walker, the flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist. Hawthorne might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type, on the nature side; and Hawthorne was to the village what Thoreau was to the wild wood.
The truth of these sketches is their prime quality, for Hawthorne wrote them with the familiar affection and home-attachment of one who had fleeted the golden time of his youth amid these scenes of common day, and prolonged it far into manhood, and should never quite lose its glow of mere existence, its kindliness for humble things, its generous leisure for the perishable beauty of nature dotted here and there with human life. It is a countrified scene that is disclosed, but this truth which characterizes it, this fidelity of fact and sentiment and mood, suggests new and deeper values, — a charm, a health, even a power comes to the surface as one gazes, the power of peace in quiet places; and even a cultivated man, if he be not callous with culture, may feel its attractiveness, a sense that the tide of life grows full in the still coves as well as on all the sounding beaches of the world; and an existence in which the smell of peat-smoke is an event, and the sight of some children paddling in the water is a day's memory, and the mere drawing in of the salt sea wind is life itself, may seem as important in its simplicity as the varied impressions of a day in the season. This was Hawthorne's life; was it after all so valueless? He was well aware that even the native moralist, though unenlightened, would call him to account for wasting his time; and he made his apology after having obeyed his mood: —
“Setting forth at my last ramble on a September morning, I bound myself with a hermit's vow to interchange no thoughts with man or woman, to share no social pleasure, but to derive all that day's enjoyment from shore and sea and sky, — from my soul's communion with these, and from fantasies and recollections, or anticipated realities. Surely here is enough to feed a human spirit for a single day. Farewell, then, busy world! Till your evening lights shall shine along the street, — till they gleam upon my sea-flushed face as I tread homeward, — free me from your ties, and let me be a peaceful outlaw.
“… But grudge me not the day that has been spent in seclusion, which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around me in my hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man's character, as if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that are not mortal. And when, at noontide, I tread the crowded streets, the influence of this day will still be felt; so that I shall walk among men kindly and as a brother, with affection and sympathy, but yet shall not melt into the indistinguishable mass of humankind. I shall think my own thoughts, and feel my own emotions, and possess my individuality unviolated.”
The apology seems adapted to the comprehension of the native moralist, it must be confessed, and is only an afterthought; for Hawthorne enjoyed his out-door life for its own sake, with little reference to its ameliorating influence on his social behavior. It is his own life, nothing more or less, that he thus describes, in the surroundings that heaven vouchsafed to him for better or worse in the Salem streets, in the Danvers lanes, by the coves of Marblehead, and along the western river uplands or the winding seashore of Beverly beside the islands. If he went far afield to Nantucket, he returned with “Chippings with a Chisel;” if he took an umbrella for a walk in the rain at home, he brought back “Night Sketches.” Such was his place. His own delight in this existence is noticeable, for it fitted his nature; in none of his works is the pleasure of the author in writing them so marked a trait, and in none does one come nearer to his natural self. They are complete and intimate revelations of the life of his senses, the sounds and sights and happenings of daily life. They pleased the readers he had at that time in New England, because they were a faithful reproduction of the commonplace, played upon by sentiment and slightly moralized, but quite in the tone of the community; and all men like to see themselves and their ways reflected in the mirror of words. They continue to yield the same mild pleasure now, perhaps rather by virtue of a reminiscent charm, for this life still exists on the horizons of memory as a part of the days gone by. They belong with the literature of the old red schoolhouse, the moss-covered bucket, and the barefoot boy, — they are of a past that was countrified and old-fashioned, and are its best record; and even in the style, the mode of conception, they have the look of antiquated things. Their nearness to the school has been adverted to; the cognate piece, “A Bell's Biography,” has the completeness of a boy's composition; there is a touch of nonage in them all, intellectually. In this, too, they are true to the time. Things provincial seen by a provincial mind and set forth by a provincial art, — such are these delicately minute sketches; and unless one takes them so, he misses their excellence, their virtue, the vitality they have. Life in the provinces, however, is also a divine gift, and its values have seldom been better portrayed, its breadth, its narrowness, its shadings through sunshine and nightfall, its sentiment, its miscellaneousness, its weariness; but its controlling characteristic is its rural peace, such as one likes to see in a painting on the wall for year-long contemplation, and if this be broken, it is with real tragedy, disasters of the sea, or such an inland story as the drowning of the young woman at Concord so accurately told in the “Note-Books.” Hawthorne's personality counts for much, too, in these pieces, as Irving's also does in his sketches. The sense of a kindly temperament, hospitable to all that lives and is in the dusty world, is felt like a touch of nature making us akin to the writer; the classic quality of the prose itself gilds all with sunshine; and one only needs love of the soil to complete the charm.
These records of memory and sentiment, however, belong to Hawthorne's ocular observation, in the main, and to the exterior sphere of his art. It is in the historical tales that his imagination first acts with seeing power; and here, too, the story by which he preferred to be known, “The Gentle Boy,” stands out, though i
ts prominence is rather a matter of priority than of distinction, for it is the fruit of his sympathies more than of his imagination. The remembrance of his ancestor's share in the persecution of the Quakers may have suggested the theme, and specially drawn out his own gentleness in the treatment. The singularity of the tale is partly due to the fascination of the child's name, Ilbrahim, which brings before the mind an eastern background, emphasizes his loneliness, and gives a suggestion of Scriptural charm to the narrative. One almost expects to see palm-trees growing up over him. He is, however, not individualized, — he is the universal orphan child; nor does it require any stretch of fancy to see in him the Christchild that St. Christopher bore over the river, for so might that Child have come into this wilderness preaching the eternal lesson. The pathetic story is a fable of piety, in fact, and is somewhat nervelessly handled for reality; the figures seem to glide in their motions, they are not quite set on the earth, they are impalpable except in their emotions. The facts lack firmness, though the feeling is wrought out with truth and refinement and makes an irresistible appeal of pity. It is, however, rather in the second historical tale which Hawthorne chose to stand as his pseudonym of authorship, “The Gray Champion,” that he finds the type whose method he afterward repeats while developing it more richly. This tale is a picture, a scene, ending in a tableau; the surrounding stir of life, excitement, and atmosphere is first prepared, then the procession comes down the street, and is arrested, challenged, and thrown back by the venerable figure of the old Puritan who stands alone, like a prophet come back from the dead to deliver the people. The composition, the development, the focusing are in Scott's manner; it is from him that this dramatic presentation of history in a single scene, as here, or by a succession of scenes carrying on a story, is derived; partly pictorial, partly theatrical, always dramatic, this is the method which Hawthorne applied, the art of “The Author of Waverley,” who was its great master in English fiction. “Endicott and the Red Cross” is a small study of the same sort; and in that sketch, and elsewhere, it is noticeable that in bearing and language the characters resemble the Covenanters, as Scott fixed the type in literature, more than they recall the real New England Puritans. Hawthorne's interest in colonial history found its most complete early expression in the “Tales of the Province House,” in which he for once succeeded in grouping a series in a natural and effective way so as to make a larger whole. “Sir William Howe's Masquerade” is told by a succession of scenes, quite in the manner described, and the suggestion of mystery, the supernatural intention felt in the incident though not explicitly present in the fact, which in this story attends the last descending figure of the line of royal governors, as it also attended the figure of the Gray Champion, is also in Scott's manner, though more subtly effected. In “Edward Randolph's Portrait” the appearance of the picture on the faded canvas is mechanically accounted for, but at the moment of its discovery this same supernatural expectancy, as it were, is aroused in the beholders; the incident itself recalls the appearance of the portrait of old Lord Ravenswood at the marriage ball of “The Bride of Lammermoor,” though the analogy may very likely never have occurred to Hawthorne. “Old Esther Dudley” is hardly more than a character portrait, — the memory of the Province House and all it stood for preserved in the devotion of the old servant into whose life it had passed and whose spirit it occupied like a reliquary of old time. The best of these four tales is “Lady Eleanore's Mantle,” and it is so because in it Hawthorne's genius passed out of the sphere of history and touched on that universal moral world where his most original creation was to lie. It is necessary here only to observe that in this tale he has fully seized the power of the physical object, plainly sensible to all as matter of fact, to serve as the medium for moral suggestion often difficult to put into words, of that sort whose effect is rather in the feelings than in thought; and this, without turning the object into an express symbol. The mantle of Lady Eleanore is a garment of pride, and also a garment of death in its dread form of pestilence; the story continually returns to it, as its physical theme, and the imagination fixes upon it by a kind of fascination, as through it the double aspect of Lady Eleanore's isolation is sensibly clothed, her haughtiness and her contagion, whose fatal bond is in this mantle, which finally seems not only to express her life but to rule her tragedy. Here one feels a new power, because while Hawthorne still retains the method of narration he had adopted, he has enriched it with an art and genius distinctly his own. In another tale, — which is provincial if not historical, and which was one of his earlier pieces, — ”Roger Malvin's Burial,” there is also a noticeable beginning in his art, for in this he uses undesigned coincidence to give that impression of a guided accomplishment of fate, which is so dramatically effective to the moral sense. From these few instances it will be observed that Hawthorne reached artistic consciousness, and a mastery of aim and method, slowly and along no one line of development; rather his genius seemingly put forth many tendrils, seeking direction and support and growth, and gradually in these hundred tales he found himself and his art.
History assisted Hawthorne's imagination in its operation by affording that firmness and distinctness of outline which was most needed in his work; it gave body to his creations, but in his most characteristic and original tales this body was not to be one of external fact, but of moral thought. His genius contained a primary element of reflection, of meditation on life, of the abstract; and while his imagination might take its start and find an initial impulse, an occasion, in some concrete object on which it fastened, its course in working itself out was governed by this abstract moral intention. In dealing with life directly, and not through history, the tales which are at the least remove from mere observation are those that were immediately suggested by his journeys and embody these experiences in their background if not in the whole; such are “The Seven Vagabonds” and the two Shaker episodes, “The Canterbury Pilgrims” and “A Shaker Bridal.” His experiments in the grotesque style, “Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe” and “Mrs. Bullfrog,” can be left one side, for they never passed the stage of amateurish weakness, and led to nothing. His meditation on life sometimes centres about an individual, but this is only seeming; his real interest was always in collective life or in the atmosphere round about all lives. To take a simple case, but one typical of his point of view and method, “The Haunted Mind” is a study in the night-atmosphere of the human soul, in a certain state, and is rendered with the vividness of personal experience. “Fancy's Show-Box” is a more individualized variant of the same motive, and yet its substance is the frankly abstract question of responsibility for guilt which is not acted but only entertained; and as in this tale the story is of the sins that hover round the soul waiting to be born, so in “David Swan” the story is of the events that might happen to an unsuspecting man, but pass by innocuous after merely shadowing his sleep like a threat. To this atmosphere of life also belongs the elaborate shadow sketch, “Monsieur de Miroir,” a motive often treated in literature and here more lightly handled than one would have anticipated, and hence more ineffectively, for Hawthorne's power did not lie in his playfulness of fancy so much as in its darker workings. Hawthorne let his mind brood over these possibilities of life, these half-vital acts, thoughts, and beings, like fears in an anxious mind, things that have only partial being, but are real enough at times to trouble the mind's eye. A touch of this atmosphere of unreality is found, also, in such a tale as “Wakefield,” the story of the man who disappeared from his place in life though he remained in the neighborhood unknown; the main theme is rather the man cut off from life, which Hawthorne so often recurred to, but the element of life's contingency, the nearness of an event that might happen but never does, is what makes the strangeness of this curious study.
In approaching life itself in its individual forms, the slightness of Hawthorne's attempt in the earlier pieces is very marked. A good example of it is “The Wives of the Dead.” Two wives, who suppose their husbands have
been lost at sea, are told separately at different hours of the night, in the house they occupy together, that the lost has been saved; each believing the other a widow leaves her to sleep. Here are merely two dramatic moments described and opposed, a perfect example of likeness in difference on a small scale, done with great truth to nature; the sketch is finely wrought, and gains by its intense condensation of situation and its brief single mood. Two such moments, in his simpler tales, Hawthorne was accustomed to take, and treat by opposition; the power lies in the contrast. Such, to give examples, are “The White Old Maid,” “Edward Fane's Rosebud,” and with less distinctness, “The Wedding Knell,” where the contrast goes back to lost youth for effect. In the very artificial fable, which has elements of the fairy story in it, “The Three-fold Destiny,” there is this simple construction, and it is found also in “The Prophetic Pictures,” though that tale is primarily a study in the idea of fate, a subject seldom touched by Hawthorne, the notion of an inevitable destiny foreseen by the painter's intuition and forecast on the canvas, but implicit from the beginning in character. In all these tales scene, situation, and character, as well as the dialogue, are handled with little variation; pictorial and dramatic effects are sought, and the slight plot is developed, by the means usual to Hawthorne's hand. The allegorizing method, it should be observed, though it appears with greater or less influence, is not employed with any exclusiveness, but takes its place with other resources of his art. In “The Great Carbuncle,” however, and in “The Man of Adamant,” the allegory is predominant and absorbs the tale. Perhaps it is as an offshoot of this allegorizing mood that the tales of pure fancy should be regarded, those masque-like inventions, “A Select Party” and “The Hall of Fantasy,” together with “The Intelligence Office” and “A Virtuoso's Collection,” also remnants of old-fashioned ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque; oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive rather than sympathetic.
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 704
