The ‘Legends of the Province House’ (‘Howe’s Masquerade,’ ‘Edward Randolph’s Portrait,’ ‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,’ and ‘Old Esther Dudley’) have their warp of historical truth, but the imaginative element is dominant. ‘The Gentle Boy’ is Hawthorne’s sympathetic tribute to the persecuted sect of the Quakers. ‘Sunday at Home,’ ‘Snow-Flakes,’ ‘Sights from a Steeple,’ ‘Footprints on the Seashore,’ represent a type of literature which former generations enjoyed, and which modern magazine editors would decline with energy and quite perfunctory thanks.
There are stories of horror and psychological mystery. The author of ‘Markheim’ might have chosen a theme like that treated in ‘Wakefield,’ or in ‘The Prophetic Pictures.’ His handling would have been different. We do not gladly suffer an obvious moral in these days. No one would now dare to put ‘A Parable’ for the explanatory title of his narrative, as Hawthorne has done in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ or advise the reader that the experiences of David Swan (if experiences those can be called where a man sleeps and things do not happen to him) argue ‘a superintending Providence.’
In Mosses from an Old Manse Hawthorne’s gain in power is marked. He still ‘moralizes’ his legends; but the force of the conception and the richness of the imagery drive the philosophy into the background. The grim and uncanny humor of which Hawthorne had a masterful command is displayed to the full in this book. No better illustration can be cited than the scene where the old witch Mother Rigby exhorts the scarecrow, she had so cunningly fashioned, to be a man. It is a grotesque, a gruesome, and a mirth-provoking scene.
Hawthorne had brooded long over the superstitious past with which his own history was so singularly linked. Among the fruit of these meditations was the story of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ Like the minister in the fearful narrative of ‘Thrawn Janet,’ Goodman Brown had been in the presence of the powers of evil; but unlike the minister, he no longer believed in virtue.
Mosses from an Old Manse also includes odd conceits such as ‘The Celestial Railroad,’ a new enterprise built from the famous City of Destruction, a ‘populous and flourishing town,’ to the Celestial City. The dreamer in this modern Pilgrim’s Progress takes the journey under the personal conduct of Mr. Smooth-it-away and notes with interest the improvements in methods of transportation since Bunyan’s time. Less ingenious but no less amusing are ‘The Hall of Fantasy,’ ‘The Procession of Life,’ and ‘The Intelligence Office.’ Monsieur de l’Aubépine loved an allegorical meaning.
Between the Twice-Told Tales and the Mosses Hawthorne published a group of children’s stories. Grandfather’s Chair and the two succeeding volumes consist of little narratives of colonial history, in which our national exploits are celebrated in the tone of confident Americanism so much deplored by Professor Goldwin Smith. There are ‘asides’ for grown people, as when Grandfather tells the children that Harvard College was founded to rear up pious and learned ministers, and that old writers called it ‘a school of the prophets.’
‘Is the college a school of the prophets now?’ asked Charley.
‘You must ask some of the recent graduates,’ answered Grandfather.
The Wonder-Book and its sequel, the Tanglewood Tales, contain new versions of old classical myths, the Gorgon’s Head, the Minotaur, the Golden Fleece, and nine more. Here the adult reader has a chance to feel the magic of Hawthorne’s art in a form where it seems most tangible but is no less elusive. He will be astonished at the air of reality given these old legends.
The perfect example of his work in this genre (the child’s story) is the initial fantasy of The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales. Such complete interweaving of the imaginative and the realistic is little short of marvellous. And yet there are people who say that perfect art cannot subsist in company with a moral. They may be commended to the account of the common-sensible man who in the goodness of his heart brought the odd, glittering, little snow-fairy into the house and put her down in front of the hot stove.