Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/770

Rh 726 AMERICAN LITERATURE Man,&quot; &quot; The Black Cat,&quot; &quot; The Premature Burial,&quot; &quot; The Pit and the Pendulum,&quot; &quot; The Cask of Amontillado,&quot; &quot; The Tell-Tale Heart,&quot; are redeemed by their literary merits and their reference, under the form of grotesque circumstances, to dominant fears and passions of mankind. In the &quot; Fall of the House of Usher,&quot; &quot; The Domain of Arnheim,&quot; &quot;William Wilson,&quot; and &quot;Ligeia,&quot; a more purely poetic or deeply psychological element is added to the horror. In the &quot; Murders of the Hue Morgue,&quot; &quot; The Mystery of Marie Roget,&quot; &quot;The Purloined Letter,&quot; and &quot;The Gold Bug,&quot; he is on the border-land between romance and reality, and seems to prove himself in potentiality the prince of all detectives. We shall have to refer to him again as a poet. The super-subtilty of Balzac and Poe appears with higher qualities in the works of the greatest of New England romancers, on the whole the most artistic of American prose writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Of his style it is impossible to speak too highly ; for without any of the defects often found in the writings of his countrymen, it has a healthy flavour of nationality. It is accurate and strong, terse and yet full, rich and yet simple, harmonious, varied, and suggestive. These excellencies of form give a fascination to his most ordinary themes as to his descriptions of scenery and works of art. The only modern pictures of Italy comparable to those of Rome and her sculptures in Transformation are Ruskin s Venice and the finest stanzas in the fourth canto of Childe Harold. But Hawthorne s scenery can seldom be disentangled from the mood of mind in which he views it, and which constantly associates it with some remoter purpose or underlying allegory. Amid the din of voices in the Custom-house or half-buried in the mosses of his Manse, walking along the Appian Way or gliding down the Assabeth, he dwells among strange visions. The sea-shore tells him secrets of the past, and the prattling village is full of a present sympathy. But the features of nature, and life, and character which he loves to draw are peculiar. They are for the most part sombre and mysterious ; not with the sort of mystery that attends unprecedented events and unnatural marvels, but with the mystery which he finds underneath the current of common lives. One of his prevailing thoughts is, things are not what they seem he is so fond of peering beneath the surface of existence, that in his pages it almost loses its ordinary reality ; he tries so constantly to look through life that he scarcely takes time to look at it. The highest art of all is that which comprehends both aspects, and, seeing the face of nature as it is, also penetrates to its hidden meanings. Hawthorne, on the other hand, weaves his fictions, to borrow a phrase from himself, in &quot; the moonlight of romance ;&quot; and while he admits that materials for a better book than he has written &quot; lie scattered on the page of life open before him, he has seldom stooped to gather them.&quot; &quot; Moonlight,&quot; lie repeats in his preface to the Scarlet Letter, &quot;moonlight in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet and showing all its figures so distinctly, making every object so distinctly visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, is a medium the most suitable for a romance writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. The room becomes a neutral territory,&quot; somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the actual and imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.&quot; Hawthorne has sometimes abandoned this neutral terri tory, and given us a few short sketches which show that he is eminently capable, when he chooses, of illustrating and characterising common things ; such, among his minor tales, are &quot; The Old Apple Dealer,&quot; &quot; Little Annie s Ramble,&quot; &quot; A Rill from the Town Pump,&quot; &quot; Sights from a Steeple,&quot; &quot; The Village Uncle,&quot; that well-named &quot; Buds and Bird Voices,&quot; and &quot; The Seven Vagabonds,&quot; the most humorous and genial of his lighter pieces. His prevailing themes are drawn on a border-land or twilight between two worlds, half real and half ideal ; fairy tales, in which human beings are the fairies, and are made to point morals of their own histories. He haunts us, as he himself was haunted, by problems. Of the five volumes of his minor sketches, three at least are filled with allegories riddles, some of them hard to read, and open to doubtful because double interpretations. &quot; The Great Stone Face &quot; is a noble piece of writing, apart from the lesson it is intended to convey. &quot; Drowne s Wooden Image &quot; and &quot; The Artist of the Beautiful &quot; are in themselves &quot;beautiful exceedingly.&quot; The exquisite pathos of &quot;Lily s Guest&quot; and &quot;Edward Fane s Rosebud &quot; lies on the surface. &quot; Lady Eleanor s Mantle &quot; tells its own story in a parable of the Nemesis of pride ; but in &quot; Roger Malvin s Burial,&quot; &quot; The Wedding Knell,&quot; &quot;Young Goodman Brown,&quot; and others, the meaning is either more intricate or more remote. Hawthorne s longer works are all conceived in the same spirit. Their incidents are comparatively few, and might have easily been condensed into one of his shorter tales ; which in their turn might easily have been expanded into elaborate romances what a consummate story, for instance, might have been reared on the basis of &quot;Rappacini s Daughter!&quot; His forte lies in the analysis of character and situations, rather than the dramatic arrangement of events. &quot; To live in other lives, and to endeavour to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves,&quot; is the purpose set before himself by a character which in one of those romances nearly represents the author. Everywhere he seems to be carrying out this purpose, operating upon some thiee or four characters, and removing them as he tells us in the introduction to Blitkedale a little from the highway of ordinary travel to a theatre where these creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics without exposing them to too. close a comparison with the actual events of real lives. A small group of figures is thus made to work out some problem of life, or at least to throw by their ideal actions a light on some puzzle in the author s mind. The great question over which, in one form or other, he perpetually broods, is the nature of evil the effect of sin and error on the soul and their relation to virtue and human progress. In the Bliihedale Romance, for instance, his theme is that the exaggeration of good may turn to evil. This almost pain fully minute anatomy of four lives, relieved by passages of delicate description and a few scenes of thrilling power, is designed to show the blighting effects of a one-sided idea, even though it assumes the guise of a benevolent impulse, when it overrides private and personal claims. In Trans formation, or the Romance of Monte Beni, a conception in some respects the converse of this, is wrought out of richer materials ; and we are taught to appreciate the possibilities of good that there may be in evil, by the effect which an impulsive crime has in inspiring a simple instinctive nature with a stronger life. The Scarlet Letter, which is at once the most solid and the subtlest of the author s works, illustrates the fatal influence which a single sin exerts on all the persons whom it involves ; but unlike the Blithcdale Romance, which is a dismal tragedy, it ends with a magnifi cent triumph of expiation. The Scarlet Letter appears to us to be the best analytical novel of this century, the nearest approach to it in artistic finish and pyschological penetration being Goethe s Elective Affinities. The llouse of the Seven Gables has more variety, and mixes humour with its pathos ; but the web of this last romance, which has for its moral the malign influences which may be transmitted from one generation to another, is woven of thinner threads. Hawthorne s Protean genius is a power in American thought. His influence as a teacher and an artist is still crescent among the contemporaries from