Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/216

204 divine faculty of silence, when mixing in social life. Small-talk, tea-table prattle, tripping gossip, versatile chit-chat—these are not for one whose cherished habit is to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, and to sit in the shade to ruminate, while others traverse the gay meadow to graze. Nor is he to be appreciated but by those who, whatever their loquacity, are, au fond, pensive and given to speculative broodings. The art with which he can lend a superstitious awe to his stories, and subtilise their grosser common-places into ghostly significance, will indeed always secure him a good company of readers. But to enter into his mood as well as meaning, and to gather from his sentences and suggestions all that was fermenting in his soul when he wrote them, is for an inner circle of disciples. Not that we arrogate a place there; but at least we can recognise this esoteric initiation.

The "Twice-told Tales" have been criticised by the author himself (and, he intimates, "with perfect sincerity and unreserve"), and compared by him to pale-tinted flowers that have blossomed in too retired a shade—marked by the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion, he observes, there is sentiment; and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. "Whether from lack of power," he continues, "or an unconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humour; the tenderest woman, one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos." And he asks us, if we would see anything in the book, to read it in the dear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; confessing that if opened in the sunshine it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

All prizes, no blanks, the pages are not, whether read, as Jack Falstaff says, "by day or night, or any kind of light." But whenever read, at vespers or matins, on grass or in garret, by youth or by age, the pages are studded, haud longis intervallis, with passages that pay their way. Amid so miscellaneous a "store," we can select for passing mention one or two only, which appear most characteristic of the narrator's manner of spirit. Such is "The Minister's Black Veil" which could have been written by none other than the hand that traced in burning furrows the "Scarlet Letter:" there is truly, as Parson Hooper feels, a preternatural horror interwoven with the threads of the black crape covering his face—an ambiguity of sin or sorrow so enveloping the poor minister, that