Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/214



have we devoted a few pages of this Magazine to a general notice of the writings of Mr. Hawthorne. The present series, however, affords an opportunity for resuming the subject—with a particular reference to one of his publications ("Twice-told Tales") which was then hardly mentioned, and to another ("The Blithedale Romance") which has been subsequently produced.

His reputation has advanced, is increasing, and ought still to be progressive. He is now read, in their own consonant-crazy tongue, by borderers on the Black Sea, and exiles of Siberia. There is an individual charm about his writings, not perhaps, to the minds most influenced by it, of a wholly unexceptionable kind; for it may be true that "il fait que chacun, après l'avoir lu, est plus mécontent de son être." Indeed, it is impossible, we should think, to read him without becoming sadder if not wiser—in spite of an assumed air of gaillardise, and a cheery moral tacked now and then to a sorrowful parable, he is essentially sad-hearted, and confirms any similar tendency in his readers. We expect a hue-and-cry to he raised against him in this matter by the sanatory commissioners of criticism and guardians of the literary board of health. In his choice of subjects, he has already been indicted by them as himself a mauvais sujet. He is charged with a fondness for the delineation of abnormal character; and it is a true bill. If guilt be involved in the indictment, guilty he will plead. Individuality, idiosyncrasy, propria persona-lity, he must have at any price. Into the recesses and darker sub-surface nooks of human character he will penetrate at all hazards. "This long while past," says Zenobia to the Blithedale romancer, "you have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark comers of the heart." The romancer himself records his fear, that a certain cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made him '"pry with a specuUtive interest into people's passions and impulses," had gone far towards unhumanising his heart. Elsewhere he expresses his apprehension that it is no healthy employ, devoting ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women; for 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 put another under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again—the quotient being a very monster—which, though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage—may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves. In harmony with this tendency—this "making my prey of people's individualities, as my custom was" —is a fondness for merging (as the Germans have it) in : as where one of Mr. Hawthorne's characters, in the wantonness of youth, strength, and comfortable