His notebooks reflect at the same time this quiet life and its excitements, the stirring adventures of an artist in search of perfection. He 'had settled down by the wayside of life like a man under an enchantment.' None but the artist can know how happy such enchantment is. He notices the flashing soles of a boy's bare feet running past him in the wood, and 'a whirlwind, whirling the dried leaves round in a circle, not very violently.' He writes one day, 'The tops of the chestnut trees have a whitish appearance, they being, I suppose, in bloom'; two days later, unsatisfied, he makes another attempt to fit his words to his impression:—'The tops of the chestnut trees are peculiarly rich, as if a more luscious sunshine were falling on them than anywhere else, "Whitish," as above, don't express it.' One of his biographers, himself no mean artist, suggests that Hawthorne's must have been a dull existence, if in it such trifles were worthy of note. But the frequency of such notes, interspersed by innumerable sketches for stories, is not a sign of the poverty of Hawthorne's life but of its opulence. For Hawthorne, busied always with dim things not easily expressed, every walk was a treasure hunt that might supply some phrase, some simile, that would give blood and sinew to the ghost of an idea.
The material of his work.
His friends were as far removed from the ordinary as himself. He was never 'bustled in the world of workaday.' Even his spell of life as surveyor in the Customs was such that his description of it reads not unlike Charles Lamb's recollections of the old clerks in the South-Sea House. The Customs House was a place of sleep and cobwebs, and the people in it, mostly retired sea-captains, 'partook of the genius of the place.' 'Pour connaître l'homme,' says Stendhal, 'il suffit de l'étudier soi-même; pour connaître les hommes, il faut les pratiquer.' Hawthorne had never kept company with men; his nature and his circumstances made him learn man from his own heart. He was never hampered as a romancer by the kind of knowledge that would have made him a novelist. He deals not with manners, for he had little opportunity of studying them, nor with passions, for they had not greatly troubled him, but with conscience. He plays upon the strings of conscience, and, dusty as the instrument may be, his playing wakes an echo.
Perhaps if he had been less personal, less lovable, we could not have tolerated his tampering with those secret strings whose music is so novel and so poignant. Certainly we would have found him intolerable if he had been less serious. If he had jangled those fibres with a laugh they would have given no response. If he had waked them with a careless discord they would have broken. We can bear it because he is Hawthorne; we listen to him because he is in earnest. All, in such matters, depends upon the attitude of the artist. War, for example, is a terrible thing in Tolstoy, a joyous thing in Dumas, and an ordinary thing, neither terrible nor joyous, in Smollett. We take to ourselves something of an artist's outlook, and sin is nothing to us unless we hear of it from a man to whom it is momentous.
Goya's 'Monk and Witch'.
I remember a little picture by Goya representing a monk and a witch. The woman, with white staring eyeballs, wide nostrils, fallen jaw, shrinks back against the monk in puling terror; and he, crazed utterly, his eyes fixed on nothingness, shrieks with gaping mouth some horrid incantation that drowns the gasping breathing of the witch. Theirs is no physical fear of fire or sword or scourge: they have sinned, and seen the face of God. Before me are a set of reproductions of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.' Death lies before the feet of the burgess in the road, plucks unconcernedly at the robe of the abbot, viciously sticks a spear through the middle of the knight, and snuffs the altar candles in the nun's cell, where her young lover is playing on a guitar. But the picture of Judgment at the end is no more than a careless grace after meat. It is there with propriety but without conviction. Death is a full stop, not a comma. What is it to me that the burgess may have cheated, the abbot be a hypocrite, the knight a roysterer, and the nun a wanton? Death is close at hand to put a stop to the doings of them all. I do not know what was the sin of the monk or the witch, and yet the mere memory of their spiritual terror moves me more than the pictures before my eyes. Their peril is not of this world.
The background of Hawthorne's tales.
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