Page:Nathaniel Hawthorne (Woodbury).djvu/149

 also belongs the elaborate shadow sketch, "Monsieur de Miroir," a motive often treated in literature and here more lightly handled than one would have anticipated, and hence more ineffectively, for Hawthorne's power did not lie in his playfulness of fancy so much as in its darker workings. Hawthorne let his mind brood over these possibilities of life, these half-vital acts, thoughts, and beings, like fears in an anxious mind, things that have only partial being, but are real enough at times to trouble the mind's eye. A touch of this atmosphere of unreality is found, also, in such a tale as "Wakefield," the story of the man who disappeared from his place in life though he remained in the neighborhood unknown; the main theme is rather the man cut off from life, which Hawthorne so often recurred to, but the element of life's contingency, the nearness of an event that might happen but never does, is what makes the strangeness of this curious study.

In approaching life itself in its individual forms, the slightness of Hawthorne's attempt in the earlier pieces is very marked. A good example of it is "The Wives of the Dead." Two wives, who suppose their husbands have been lost at sea, are told separately at different hours of the night, in the house they occupy together, that the lost has been saved; each believing the other a widow leaves her to sleep. Here are merely two dramatic moments described and opposed, a perfect example of likeness in difference on a small scale,