"I used to think I could imagine all the passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows, we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest shadow of a dream—till the heart be touched."
Whether he is threading the labyrinths of his imagination or watching the human shadows come and go, Hawthorne lingers longer in the shadow than in the sunshine. He was not a man of morose and gloomy temper, disenchanted with life and driven by distress or thwarted passion to brood in solitude. An irresistible, inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward genius. His imagination hovers with curious persistence round eerie, fantastic themes:
"An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making all the images reflected in it pass again across its surface"—a hint skilfully introduced into the history of old Esther Dudley in The Legends of the Province House, or:
"A dreadful secret to be communicated to several persons of various character—grave or gay—and they all to become insane, according to their characters, by the influence of the secret"
—an idea modified and adapted in The Marble Faun. "An ice-cold hand—which people ever afterwards remember when once they have grasped it"—is bestowed on the Wandering Jew, the owner of the marvellous Virtuoso's Collection, whose treasures include the blood-encrusted pen with which Dr. Faustus signed away his salvation, Peter Schlemihl's shadow, the elixir of life, and the philosopher's stone. The form of a vampire, who apparently never took shape on paper, flitted through the twilight of Hawthorne's imagination:
"Stories to be told of a certain person's appearance in public, of his having been seen in various situations, and his making visits in private circles; but finally on looking for this person, to come upon his old grave and mossy tombstone."
With so many alluring suggestions floating shadowwise across his mind, it is not wonderful that Hawthorne should have been fascinated by the dream of a human life prolonged far beyond the usual span—a dream, which, if realised, would have enabled him to capture in words more of those "shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses."
Although among the sketches collected in Twice-Told Tales (vol. i. 1837, vol. ii. 1842) some are painted in gay and lively hues, the prevailing tone of the book is sad and mournful. The light-hearted philosophy of the wanderers in The Seven Vagabonds, the pretty, brightly coloured vignettes in Little Annie's Rambles, the quiet cheerfulness of Sunday at Home or The Rill from the Town Pump, only serve to throw into darker relief gloomy legends like that of Ethan Brand, the man who went in search of the Unpardonable Sin, or dreary stories like that of Edward Fane's Rosebud, or the ghostly White Old Maid. One of the most carefully wrought sketches in Twice-Told Tales is the weird story of The Hollow of the Three Hills. By means of a witch's spell, a lady hears the far-away voices of her aged parents—her mother querulous and tearful, her father calmly despondent—and amid the fearful mirth of a madhouse distinguishes the accents and footstep of the husband she has wronged. At last she listens to the death-knell tolled for the child she has left to die. The solemn rhythm of Hawthorne's skilfully ordered sentences is singularly haunting and impressive:
"The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills, but deep shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre night were rising thence to overspread the world. Again that evil woman began to weave her spell. Long did it proceed unanswered, till the knolling of a bell stole in among the intervals of her words, like a clang that had travelled far over valley and rising ground and was just ready to die in the air… Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened into the tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower, and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall and to the solitary wayfarer that all might weep for the doom appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing the ground so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array. Before them went the priest reading the burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still here were revilings and anathemas whispered, but distinct, from women and from men… The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapour and the wind that just before had seemed to shake the coffin-pall moaned sadly round the verge of the hollow between three hills."
In a later collection of Hawthorne's short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, the grave and the gay, the terrific and the sportive, are once more intermingled. Side by side with a forlorn attempt at humorous allegory, Mrs. Bullfrog, we find the serious moral allegories of The Birthmark and The Bosom-Serpent, the wild, mysterious forest-revels in Goodman Brown, and the evil, sinister beauty of Dr. Rappacini's Daughter, a modern rehandling of the ancient legend of the poison-maiden, who was perhaps the prototype of Oliver Wendell Holmes' heroine in Elsie Venner (1861). The quiet grace and natural ease of Hawthorne's style lend even to his least ambitious tales a distinctive charm. If he chooses a slight and simple theme, his touch is deft and sure. Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, in which Hawthorne's delicate, whimsical fancy plays round the idea of the elixir of life, is almost like a series of miniature pictures, distinct and lifelike in form and colour, seen through the medium of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. Yet even in this fantastic trifle we can discern the feeling for words and the sense of proportion that characterise Hawthorne's longer works.