In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's last complete romance, the Puritan problem of sin is transplanted to Italian soil. The scene is laid in Rome, where the art of Michael Angelo and Raphael, the secret orders of the Church, the tragic history of the eternal city, with its catacombs and ruins, furnish a rich and varied background for the story. So faithfully indeed are the galleries, churches, and historic corners of Rome described, that The Marble Faun has served as a guide for the cultured visitor. This expression of opinion by the late A. P. Stanley (1815-1881), a well-known author and dean of Westminster Abbey, is worth remembering: "I have read it seven times. I read it when it appeared, as I read everything from that English master. I read it again when I expected to visit Rome, then when on the way to Rome, again while in Rome, afterwards to revive my impressions of Rome. Recently I read it again because I wanted to." In this historic setting, Hawthorne places four characters: Donatello, the faun, Miriam, the beautiful and talented young artist, Kenyon, the American sculptor, and Hilda, the Puritan maid who tends the lamp of the Virgin in her tower among the doves and makes true copies of the old masters. From the beginning of the story some mysterious evil power is felt, and this power gains fuller and fuller ascendency over the characters. What that is the author does not say. It seems the very spirit of evil itself that twines its shadow about human beings and crushes them if they are not strong enough to resist.
[Illustration: HILDA'S TOWER, VIA PORTOGHESE, ROME]
In The Scarlet Letter it was shown that the moral law forces evildoers to pay the last farthing of the debt of sinning. In The Marble Faun the effect of sin in developing character is emphasized, and Donatello, the thoughtless creature of the woods is portrayed in his stages of growth after his moral nature has first been roused by a great crime. The question is raised, Can the soul be developed and strengthened by sin? The problem is handled with Hawthorne's usual moral earnestness of purpose, and is expressed in his easiest and most flexible style. Nevertheless this work has not the suppressed intensity, completeness of outline, and artistic symmetry possessed by The Scarlet Letter. The chief defects of The Marble Faun are a vagueness of form, a distracting variety of scene, and a lack of the convincing power of reality. The continued popularity of this romance, however, is justly due to its poetic conception, its atmosphere of ancient mystery, and its historic Roman background.
The Blithedale Romance and the cooperative settlement described in it were suggested to Hawthorne by his Brook Farm experience, although he disclaims any attempt to present an actual picture of that community. The idea of the division of labor, the transcendental conversations, and many of the incidents owe their origin to his sojourn at Brook Farm (p. 166). Although The Blithedale Romance does not equal the three romances already described, it contains one character, Zenobia, who is the most original and dramatic of Hawthorne's men and women, and some scenes which are as powerful as any drawn by him.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.—Hawthorne gave the Puritan to literature. This achievement suggests Irving's canonization of the Knickerbockers and Cooper's of the pioneer and the Indian. Himself a Unitarian and out of sympathy with the Puritans' creed, Hawthorne nevertheless says, "And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine." He and they had the same favorite subject,—the human soul in its relation to the judgment day. He could no more think of sin unrelated to the penalty, than of a serpent without shape or color. Unlike many modern novelists, his work never wanders beyond a world where the Ten Commandments rule. Critics have well said that he never painted a so-called man of the world, because such a man, by Hawthorne's definition, would really be a man out of the great moral world, which to Hawthorne seemed the only real world.
He is preeminently a writer of romance. He was always powerfully influenced by such romantic materials as may be found in the world of witchcraft and the supernatural, or such as are suggested by dim foreshadowings of evil and by the many mysteries for which human philosophy does not account. For this reason, his works are removed from the commonplace and enveloped in an imaginative atmosphere. He subjects his use of these romantic materials—the unusual, the improbable, and the supernatural—to only one touchstone. He is willing to avail himself of these, so long as he does not, in his own phrase, "swerve aside from the truth of the human heart."
His stories are frequently symbolic. He selects some object, token, or utterance, in harmony with his purpose, and uses it as a symbol to prefigure some moral action or result. The symbol may be an embroidered mantle, indicative of pride; a butterfly, typical of emergence from a dead chrysalis to a state of ideal beauty; or the words of a curse, which prophesy a ghastly death. His choice of scene, plot, and character is in harmony with the moral purpose indicated by the symbol. Sometimes this purpose is dimly veiled in allegory, but even when his stories are sermons in allegory, like The Snow Image, he so invests them with poetic fancy or spiritual beauty as to make them works of art. His extensive use of symbolism and allegory has been severely criticized. It is unfortunate that he did not learn earlier in life what The Scarlet Letter should have taught him, that he did not need to rely on these supports. He becomes one of the great masters when he paints character from the inside with a touch so vivid and compelling that the symbolism and the allegory vanish like a dissolving picture and reveal human forms. When he has breathed into them the creator's breath of life, he walks with them hand in hand in this lost Eden. He ascends the pillory with Hester Prynne, and writhes with Arthur Dimmesdale's agony. He plays on the seashore with little Pearl. He shares Hepzibah Pyncheon's solitude and waits on the customers in the cent shop with Phoebe. He eats two dromedaries and a gingerbread locomotive with little Ned Higgins.
Hawthorne did not care much for philosophical systems, and never concerned himself with the intricacies of transcendentalism. Yet he was affected by that philosophy, as is shown by his personal isolation and that of his characters. His intense belief in individuality is also a transcendental doctrine. He holds that the individual is his own jailer, his own liberator, the preserver or loser of his own Eden. Moral regeneration seems to him an individual, not a social, affair.
His style is easy, exact, flowing, and it shows the skill of a literary artist. He never strains after effect, never uses excessive ornament, never appears hurried. There was not another nineteenth-century prose master on either side of the Atlantic who could in fewer words or simpler language have secured the effect produced by The Scarlet Letter. He wished to be impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in The House of the Seven Gables, but he says simply:—
"She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother tongue."