A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

In the Notebooks, particularly for 1835–1845, there is abundant record of how Hawthorne’s fancy was continually at play with the material within his reach. He made definite entries as to past events and vital associations of old buildings. He made detailed studies of odd characters seen in his occasional little journeys into the world. He even saved proper names, phrases, similes, epigrams which some day might be of use: “Miss Asphyxia Davis,” “A lament for life’s wasted sunshine,” “A scold and a blockhead,—brimstone and wood,—a good match,” “Men of cold passions have quick eyes.” But far more significant than these explicit items are the many which are suggestive of whole sketches or stories later to be written. Among these the following may easily be identified: “To make one’s own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story”; “A snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion.” “A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.” "Some very famous jewel or other thing, much talked of all over the world. Some person to meet with it, and get possession of it in some unexpected manner, amid homely circumstances.” “The influence of a peculiar mind, in close communion with another, to drive the latter to insanity.” “Pandora’s Box for a child’s story.” “A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and holily.” “To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes....” “A phantom of the old royal governors, or some such shadowy pageant, on the night of the evacuation of Boston by the British.” What Hawthorne attempted was essentially what Wordsworth did: to lift the material of everyday life out of the realm of the commonplace.

In another and more important way Hawthorne’s writings show the effect of these long years of preparation, and that is in the self-reflection in the majority of them, and especially in the four major romances. In the quarter century between his graduation from Bowdoin and the publication of “The Marble Faun,” the most striking and the most dangerous feature had been his long isolation and the resultant effects of it. He had not withdrawn from the world in contempt; he had insensibly drifted out of it. He was by no means indifferent to it; on the contrary, he was increasingly sensitive to it. He needed to fill his purse and he needed encouragement to write. Yet when he went out into the market place he was cruelly ignored by many and shouldered about by the hustling crowds, who were so used to their own rude ways that they were often quite innocent of the affronts they put upon him. It is a consequence of this unhappy experience that in the famous romances and in many of the shorter sketches the narrative is woven around two types—a shrinking, hypersensitive character and a rude or insidious but always malevolent man who stands for the incarnation of the outer world. For Hester and for Arthur Dimmesdale, for Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, for Priscilla and for Donatello, no complete isolation is possible. No deed which involves them, whether committed by themselves or by others, can be committed without regard to the future. Always there is a knocking at the gate, as the outer world insists on obtruding itself into the holiest of holies. And this invasion is the more cruel as it is the less deserved. Chillingworth’s malign and subtle revenge on Arthur Dimmesdale is an exercise of poetic justice. It is a horrible but not undeserved visitation. But Priscilla, Donatello, and the two pitiful Pyncheons are innocent victims. Hepzibah and Clifford are hounded out of life by a bland representative of the law and the church, a wolf in the sheep’s clothing of respectability. Priscilla falls in love with a reformer, one of the type who Thoreau complained pursued and pawed him with their “dirty institutions” and tried to constrain him into their “desperate, odd-fellow society”; she wilts at his touch. Donatello, the embodiment of innocent happiness, is enmeshed in the web of society and destroyed by the fell spirit at its center. Hawthorne never could have presented this view in its repeated tableaux if he had not for years seen the concourse of life rush by him, and for years made his successive efforts to reënter its currents.

The whole situation is summarized in Hawthorne’s introduction of Septimius Felton, hero of the last work of his pen. “I am dissevered from it,” he says in the opening scene. “It is my doom to be only a spectator of life; to look on as one apart from it. Is it not well, therefore, that, sharing none of its pleasures and happiness, I should be free of its fatalities, its brevity? How cold I am now, while this whirlpool is eddying all around me.” Yet, a moment later he snatches a gun and rushes out of the house to where he can see the British redcoats passing the Concord house. He refrains from shooting, only to be seen by a flanking party, and against his will is forced to fire a deadly bullet. “I have seen and done such things,” he says an hour later, “as change a man in a moment.... I have done a terrible thing for once ... one that might well trace a dark line through all my future life.” To this degree, then, Hawthorne’s surroundings and his own unfolding experience had supplied him with themes and materials.

Much of the remainder of his work had its source in his Puritan inheritance. To this the already quoted passage on old Salem (p. 237) bears witness. To this heritage is due in large measure the essential gravity of his nature, which has been unfairly but suggestively described as a compound of “seven eighths conscience and the rest remorse”; and to this is partly attributable his absorption with the presence and the problem of sin in the world. “The Scarlet Letter” deals with its immediate effect on the transgressor; “The House of the Seven Gables,” with its effect on succeeding generations; “The Blithedale Romance,” with its blighting effect on the reformer, who is selfish and heartless even in his fight against social wrong; “The Marble Faun,” with the basic reasons for the existence of evil. Yet though the Puritan strain in him could determine the direction of his thoughts, it could not determine their goal, for Hawthorne recoiled from the Puritan acceptance of sin as a devil’s wile to be atoned for only through the sufferings of a mediator or the tortures of the damned. He rejected the Calvinistic fear of eternal punishment for the Miltonic conclusion that the mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell; at which point he was at one with the Transcendentalists in substituting “for a dogmatic dread, an illimitable hope.” His indictment of the Puritans themselves was more insistent than his charges against their theology. He condemned them for their cruel intolerance and for the arid bleakness of their lives. So he was at once a product of his ancestry and a living protest against it.

But Hawthorne was more than a Puritan apostate; he was in accord with most of the rising individualism of his day. He felt that as the result of multitudinous changes in government, church, and industry, the world had for the moment “gone distracted through a morbid activity” and needed above all things a period of quiet in which to recover its balance of judgment. So he distrusted the schemes of “young visionaries,” “gray-headed theorists,” “uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world.” Yet he acknowledged that as long as the world could not be put to sleep, restlessness was better than inertia. The radical Holgrave, in “The House of the Seven Gables,” is his most sympathetic portrait of young America. A colloquy with Phœbe Pyncheon represents him as spokesman for the future, and Phœbe as the voice of the placidly thoughtless present. Her remarks, though brief, are quite as significant as his.

“‘Just think a moment [he exclaims] and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,—to Death, if we give the matter the right word!’

“‘But I do not see it,’ observed Phœbe.

“‘For example then,’ continued Holgrave, ‘a dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos!—We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us. Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men’s houses; as, for instance, this of the Seven Gables.’

“‘And why not?’ said Phœbe, ‘so long as we can be comfortable in them.’”

Properly interpreted, this conversation implies vigorous criticism of both the youthful speakers. Holgrave’s sweeping protests are too drastic, but Phœbe’s placid acquiescence is deadening. As if Hawthorne were afraid his sympathy with Holgrave would not appear, he goes on to say that in the course of time the youth will have to conform his faith to the facts without losing his hopes for the future, “discerning that man’s best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.”