Hawthorne's Short Stories, Page 2

  I have just used the word “allegorical,” and however inaccurate it may be, it points to another aspect of Hawthorne’s manner that no reader can ever have ignored. “Allegories of the Heart” was the title that he himself seems to have planned to use for a whole group of his stories, and he frankly recognized in his work what he called “an inveterate love of allegory.” It has thrown off a good many readers, from Poe onward, and certainly it sometimes takes a form that is chillingly mechanical and bare. But it would be superficial to make very much of the mere word, or to see in Hawthorne’s “allegory” only a piece of conscious literary machinery. He may have inherited from his boyhood favorites, Spenser and Bunyan, the habit of a somewhat more explicit and more tangible moral imagery than most of his contemporaries found natural. But he is no allegorist in the older sense: his “moralities,” after all, at his most characteristic, are far too completely dramatized, too iridescent psychologically, for that; and the fact is he shared deeply the general impulse of his time, among writers, to discern a transcendental meaning in physical objects, or to make physical objects the means for expressing what would otherwise be inexpressible.

  “You know,” says one of his characters, “that I can never separate the idea from the symbol in which it manifests itself.” It was a way of describing the instinctive movements of his own, and indeed any poet’s, imagination. If Hawthorne had lived a generation later, in Europe, he would have counted as a symbolist, though as it was he stopped short, at some point not easy to specify, of being a symboliste in the strictest sense: he trusts too little, for that, the suggestiveness of his symbols themselves, when left without commentary, and he yields himself far too little to the dark drift of the irrational. The truth is he is neither quite an allegorist nor quite a symbolist, but a writer sui generis who occupies a beautiful terrain of his own between these two artistic modes; it is tempting to catch up another word he often used, and call him an “emblematist,” with a certain reliance on the old meaning—the partly pictorial, partly edifying meaning—of the word “emblem.” He had inherited, at any rate, the old Puritan love of emblems and tokens and allegories, and he gave it vent as only a poet of his own romantic generation could do.

  His favorite symbols tell us much, of course, about the deepest grain of his nature, but there is no space here for a detailed account of them. Two or three remarks will have to be enough. It is bound to strike any reader, sooner or later, how often this descendant of the Puritans, this provincial Yankee, this aesthetically unsophisticated and personally rather ascetic writer—how often Hawthorne instinctively makes use of the imagery of the fine arts (pictures, as we have seen, and statues), or of the minor arts (jewelry in particular), or of dress and costume (a black veil, an embroidered mantle, the finery of a dandy): it suggests, but only among other things, how much more sensuous his temperament was than it outwardly appeared to be. We are certain to be struck, moreover, by the recurring imagery of disease or physical affliction—not, as in Poe, in its more shocking and macabre forms, but in the comparatively less frightful forms of slow dissolution, of ravaging plague, of a tainted physical system, of a birthmark or a scar or a twisted mouth: only in such symbols could Hawthorne’s sense of a radical moral obliquity in human nature adequately express itself. And, finally, it is extremely revealing how constantly this shy and solitary recluse found himself dealing in the imagery of social life—the imagery of a banquet or a masquerade, of a state ball or a wedding, of a merrymaking or a fireside gathering: his fancy was haunted, in his solitude, as if by tantalizing mirages, by images of social pomp or gregarious good cheer.

  It was not haunted, as Poe’s was, by images of cruelty, of torture, of claustrophobia and hypsophobia and phobophobia itself; and this is eloquent of the great differences between the two men as artists, between the more deeply psychoneurotic but also more intense and hallucinatory writer and the cooler, more purely meditative one. A quite different contrast suggests itself between Hawthorne and Melville in these terms: the symbols of a trackless sea, of violent tempests, of waterspouts and tornadoes, of the monstrous animal life of the ocean, of hunting, combat, and slaughter—these symbols, utterly unnatural to Hawthorne, are wonderfully expressive of Melville’s wilder, more passionate, more deeply demoniac nature. The very vocabularies of these three contemporaries are revealingly unlike one another. Who can have failed to be conscious, in reading Poe, how bitterly and compulsively there keep recurring, as in a verbalized nightmare, the words terror, anxiety, horror, anguish, and fear? Who can have missed the meaning of Melville’s talismanic language, of the telltale words wild, barbarous, and savage; vengeful, cunning, and malignant; noble, innocent, and grand; inexorable, inscrutable, and unfathomable? Compare with these the palette of Hawthorne’s vocabulary: the favorite adjectives, dusky, dim, and shadowy, or cold, sluggish, and torpid; the favorite verbs, separate, estrange, and insulate; the favorite nouns, pride and egotism, guilt and intellect, heart and sympathy. They tell us everything about his sensibility, his imagination, and the creative idiosyncrasy of his human insight.

  They tell us, for example, that, unlike the realistic novelists of his day (some of whom he particularly admired and enjoyed), Hawthorne was not interested, as a writer, in the great social and worldly spectacle of manners and affairs; what concerned him was what he himself once called “psychological romance,” a phrase that suggested to him something much more serious—indeed, more tragic—than it may suggest to us. He cared, as James said, for “the deeper psychology”; and his tales, like his novels, are the expression of his burrowings, to use his own words again, “into the depths of our common nature.” What he found there was something that, more often than not, saddened him—when it did not, as it sometimes did, appal him. What he found made it impossible for Hawthorne to share the great glad conviction of his age that, as Emerson had told it, “love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things”; he came closer to feeling that guilt and wrong are inevitable; that, at any rate, they are terribly deeply meshed in the texture of human experience. His sense of the heights to which human beings can rise was an intermittent one; his sense of the depths to which they can fall, of the maze of error in which they can wander, was steady and fascinated. What it means to be in harmony with things and with oneself—of this he had his own intuition, and there are gleams of it on his pages. For him, however, it was a far more characteristic intuition, a far more continuous experience, to understand what it means to be in the wrong. That is the moral nucleus of most of his tales.

  His awareness of the human condition, as a result, was intrinsically an anxious one—not fiercely anxious, as Poe’s was, or angrily anxious, like Melville’s, but anxious nevertheless in a quiet, painful, persistent, pervasive way. Sometimes this anxiety comes to a head, in his work, in a piercing moment of bitterness and almost despair, but its typical expression is grave, pensive, or mournful. Hawthorne is the elegiac poet, so to say, of the sense of guilt. And this guilty sense attaches itself, when he is being most himself, not to sins or vices of the gross and palpable sort—“incontinence,” “violence,” or “fraud” (to use the Dantean triad)—but to the evil that seemed to Hawthorne, from self-knowledge and observation, to be the quintessence of them all, the evil of selfishness or pride. In just this insight he was not very far from Dante, as it happened, but in any case he was very far indeed from Emerson and the prevailing spokesmen of his time. For them the essence of all virtue was reliance on oneself. Not for Hawthorne. Upon both the theory and the practice of self-help, self-trust, self-reliance he looked with a troubled gaze: he was not a good “individualist” in that sense. He was far less disturbed than Emerson by the dangers of conformity, of dependence, of compromise; he was far more disturbed by the evil wrought in a man’s nature by the conscious or unconscious separation of himself from his fellows and the deadly tendency to hold himself not only aloof from them but superior to them. “I wrapped myself in PRIDE as in a mantle,” says the heroine of one of his tales, a
nd the gloomy upshot of “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” is a metaphor of what follows on a gesture of that sort.

  Most of Hawthorne’s characters wrap themselves in some such cloak, though the pride it symbolizes may take many forms—the pride of social rank, the pride of wealth and power, the pride of moral self-righteousness. One form it takes, however, is easily the most characteristic and the most revealing. This is the pride of intellect. There is no evading the fact that Hawthorne distrusted that faculty, distrusted it with a consistency and an undertone of self-reproach that have in them a shade of the Dostoevskian. To pride oneself on one’s intellectual powers or attainments, to cultivate the intellect at the expense of the sympathies, to take a merely speculative or scientific interest in one’s fellow men—this was for Hawthorne the deadliest form that human guilt could take: it was indeed, as “Ethan Brand” exemplifies, the Unpardonable Sin, the sin which the protagonist of that tale spent his life seeking and which he ended by finding in himself. This is the guiltiness also of the “prophetic” painter, of Dr. Rappaccini, and of Aylmer in “The Birthmark.” It is the guiltiness to which superior natures are peculiarly prone; a more than ordinary diabolism is the fruit of it, and in their more tenuous, more evanescent, more “emblematic” way these characters of Hawthorne’s belong in the same moral world as Raskolnikov or Stavrogin or Ivan Karamazov.

  The penalty of intellectual pride and of all other forms of egotism—indeed, of guilt in general—is the deepest misery Hawthorne can conceive, the misery of estrangement, of separateness, of insulation from the normal life of mankind. This is the penalty of guilt, but it is also in a sense its origin, and in still another sense it is guilt itself, for no more in Hawthorne than in any deeply reflective tragic poet can one distinguish, beyond a certain point, between an evil and its source or its sequel. The simplest and truest thing to say of Hawthorne’s human vision is that for him the essence of wrong is aloneness; you begin and you end with that. To err is to cut oneself off from “the whole sympathetic chain of human nature”; to suffer is to be merely on one’s own. Solitariness, original or consequential, is his abiding theme; it is hard to believe that any other writer, including writers greater than he, has ever had a more acute sense than Hawthorne had of the whole terrible meaning of the word “solitude.”

  The picture of human life that emerges from his work is naturally, as he himself would say, a “dusky” one, but it would be very shallow to label Hawthorne, in hackneyed language, a “pessimistic” or “misanthropic” writer: with all his limitations, he went too deep for sentimental pessimism or facile cynicism. He took a dark view but not a low one of human nature; he took a doubtful but not a despairing view of the human prospect. He called himself “a thoroughgoing democrat,” and certainly the adoption of this creed, as he says elsewhere, requires no scanty share of faith in the ideal. In his way, which was not the “optimistic” one, he had such faith. He had no faith in or respect for the forms and the forces that separate men from one another or distinguish sharply among them; he had no respect whatever for rank or caste or class, and he had almost as little for the intellectual ranks or classes that serve only too often to keep men apart. His real faith, quite “paradoxically,” was in what he called the heart. Much that he saw there was terrible enough, but humanly speaking he believed in nothing else—in nothing, that is, except in the capacities that equalize instead of dividing men, in the affections that draw them together, in imaginative sympathy and the sense of a common brotherhood in error and suffering. His conviction is quite clear that what is wrong can be righted by nothing unless by love. This may be, like Melville’s, a tragic version of the democratic faith; that is hardly to say that it is an unphilosophical one.

  NEWTON ARVIN.

  1 Two of the tales in this volume, “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “The Antique Ring,” were never reprinted by Hawthorne himself after their first appearance. They were included by his editor in editions of his works published after his death.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHRONOLOGY

  INTRODUCTION

  Twice-Told Tales

  THE GRAY CHAMPION

  THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL

  THE MAY-POLE OF MERRY MOUNT

  THE GENTLE BOY

  WAKEFIELD

  THE GREAT CARBUNCLE

  THE PROPHETIC PICTURES

  DR. HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIMENT

  LADY ELEANORE’S MANTLE

  OLD ESTHER DUDLEY

  THE AMBITIOUS GUEST

  THE WHITE OLD MAID

  PETER GOLDTHWAITE’S TREASURE

  ENDICOTT AND THE RED CROSS

  Mosses from an Old Manse

  THE BIRTHMARK

  YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

  RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER

  THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD

  FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND

  EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT

  THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET

  DROWNE’S WOODEN IMAGE

  EARTH’S HOLOCAUST

  THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL

  The Snow Image

  THE GREAT STONE FACE

  ETHAN BRAND

  THE WIVES OF THE DEAD

  Tales and Sketches

  THE ANTIQUE RING

  ALICE DOANE’S APPEAL

  Other Books from Vintage Classics

  Twice-Told Tales

  THE GRAY CHAMPION

  THERE was once a time when New England groaned under the actual pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the Revolution. James II., the bigoted successor of Charles the Voluptuous, had annulled the charters of all the colonies, and sent a harsh and unprincipled soldier to take away our liberties and endanger our religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely a single characteristic of tyranny: a Governor and Council, holding office from the King, and wholly independent of the country; laws made and taxes levied without concurrence of the people immediate or by their representatives; the rights of private citizens violated, and the titles of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint stifled by restrictions on the press; and, finally, disaffection overawed by the first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on our free soil. For two years our ancestors were kept in sullen submission by that filial love which had invariably secured their allegiance to the mother country, whether its head chanced to be a Parliament, Protector, or Popish Monarch. Till these evil times, however, such allegiance had been merely nominal, and the colonists had ruled themselves, enjoying far more freedom than is even yet the privilege of the native subjects of Great Britain.

  At length a rumor reached our shores that the Prince of Orange had ventured on an enterprise, the success of which would be the triumph of civil and religious rights and the salvation of New England. It was but a doubtful whisper: it might be false, or the attempt might fail; and, in either case, the man that stirred against King James would lose his head. Still the intelligence produced a marked effect. The people smiled mysteriously in the streets, and threw bold glances at their oppressors; while far and wide there was a subdued and silent agitation, as if the slightest signal would rouse the whole land from its sluggish despondency. Aware of their danger, the rulers resolved to avert it by an imposing display of strength, and perhaps to confirm their despotism by yet harsher measures. One afternoon in April, 1689, Sir Edmund Andros and his favorite councillors, being warm with wine, assembled the red-coats of the Governor’s Guard, and made their appearance in the streets of Boston. The sun was near setting when the march commenced.

  The roll of the drum at that unquiet crisis seemed to go through the streets, less as the martial music of the soldiers, than as a muster-call to the inhabitants themselves. A multitude, by various avenues, assembled in King Street, which was destined to be the scene, nearly a century afterwards, of another encounter between the troops of Britain, and a people struggling against her tyr
anny. Though more than sixty years had elapsed since the pilgrims came, this crowd of their descendants still showed the strong and sombre features of their character perhaps more strikingly in such a stern emergency than on happier occasions. There were the sober garb, the general severity of mien, the gloomy but undismayed expression, the scriptural forms of speech, and the confidence in Heaven’s blessing on a righteous cause, which would have marked a band of the original Puritans, when threatened by some peril of the wilderness. Indeed, it was not yet time for the old spirit to be extinct; since there were men in the street that day who had worshipped there beneath the trees, before a house was reared to the God for whom they had become exiles. Old soldiers of the Parliament were here, too, smiling grimly at the thought that their aged arms might strike another blow against the house of Stuart. Here, also, were the veterans of King Philip’s war, who had burned villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer. Several ministers were scattered among the crowd, which, unlike all other mobs, regarded them with such reverence, as if there were sanctity in their very garments. These holy men exerted their influence to quiet the people, but not to disperse them. Meantime, the purpose of the Governor, in disturbing the peace of the town at a period when the slightest commotion might throw the country into a ferment was almost the universal subject of inquiry, and variously explained.