But is this real, normal life? In such life do not the streams mingle? Are not evil influences quickly neutralized, as noxious germs die in the sunshine? No one would more readily acknowledge this than Hawthorne. He says: “It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under the microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him clumsily together again. What wonder, then, that we be frightened at such a monster, which, after all—though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage—may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.”
The critic of Hawthorne could not describe better the limitation of his stories as pictures of real life. His characters, however clearly conceived, are insulated from many of their real relations, and their peculiarities are magnified.
In the preface to “The Scarlet Letter” he says that the tale “wears to my eye a stern and sombre aspect, too much ungladdened by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of Nature and real life, and which undoubtedly should soften every picture of them.”
One who would defend Hawthorne the Author against Hawthorne the Critic must point out the kind of literature to which his work belongs. When we judge it by the rule of the romance or of the realistic novel, we fail to do justice to its essential quality. The romancer, the story-teller pure and simple, is attracted by the swift sequence of events. His nimble fancy follows a plot as a kitten follows a string. Now it happens that in a world constituted as ours is the sequence of events follows a moral order. A good story has always in it an element of poetic justice. But the romancer does not tell his story for the sake of the moral. He professes to be as much surprised when it is discovered as is the most innocent reader. In like manner the realistic novel, in proportion as it is a faithful portrayal of life, has an ethical lesson. But the writer disclaims any purpose of teaching it. His business is to tell what the world is like. He leaves the rest to your intelligence.
But there is another kind of literature; it is essentially allegory. The allegorist takes a naked truth and clothes it with the garments of the imagination. Frequently the clothes do not fit and the poor truth wanders about awkwardly, self-conscious to the last degree. But if the artist be a genius the abstract thought becomes a person.
Hawthorne’s work is something more than allegory, but his mind worked allegorically. His characters were abstract before they became concrete. He was not a realist aiming to give a comprehensive survey of the actual world. He consciously selected the incidents and scenes which would illustrate his theme.
In his conclusion of “The Marble Faun,” when the actors have withdrawn, the Author comes before the curtain and says that he designed “the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere that some laws and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged. The idea of the modern Faun, for example, loses all the poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it and becomes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity if we bring it into the actual light of day.” This is not realism.
It is a mood in which the bounds between romance and allegory fade away; persons become symbols and symbols have breathed into them the breath of life. The story and the truth it shadows are one.
The mood is common in poetry. Poets like Dante and Spenser and Shelley from it have given us
Wise and lovely songs