Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/217

Rh love or sympathy can no longer reach him—so that, with self-shudderings and outward terrors, his earthly fate is to be ever groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that saddens the whole world. Such is also "The Wedding Knell"—with that grotesquely repulsive rendezvous at the church-altar; the aged bride, an insatiate woman of the world,clad in brightest splendour of youthful attire, and suddenly startled, as she awaits the bridegroom, by the dreadful anachronism of a tolling bell, the only flourish to announce her affianced one, who arrives in the midst of a slow funeral procession, his vestment a shroud! Such, again, is "Wakefield"—with its warning monition, that amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world individuals are so nicely adjudged to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place for ever, and becoming the Outcast of the Universe. It is a capital touch in this story of an eccentric man's twenty years' desertion of his wife and home, without assignable cause, even to himself, while dwelling all the while in the next street,—that of his venturing out for the first time from his secret lodging, partly resolving to cross the head of the street, and send one hasty glance towards his forsaken domicile, when "habit—for he is a man of habits—takes him by the hand, and guides him, wholly unaware, to his own door, where, just at the critical moment, he is aroused by the scraping of his foot upon the step"—and, in affright, little dreaming of the doom to which his first backward step devotes him, he hurries away, breathless with agitation, and afraid to look back. Not always, as in this case, is Mr. Hawthorne careful to furnish his tales or vagaries with a "pervading spirit or moral," either implicit and implied, or "done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence." What, for instance, is the moral, what the spirit, what the meaning of "The Great Carbuncle?" Thought may, as he alleges, always have its efficacy, and every striking incident its moral: but interpreted as some, and they not purblind, critics apprehend, that allegory of the crystal mountains is efficacious only as a premium to scepticism, and a damper to all imagination that would with the lofty sanctify the low, and sublimate the human with the divine. No such intention may the allegorist have had; but at least he might have guarded against so justifiable a gloss by using a more intelligible cypher.

In his best style is that brief fantasy of the mid-day slumberer beside the tuft of maples, "David Swan"—during whose hour's sleep there successively visit him, as stray passengers on the highway, a pair of opulent elders, who half resolve to adopt him; and a heart-free maiden, who becomes a half lover at first sight; and a couple of scampish reprobates, who more than half determine to rob and, if need be, dirk the dreaming lad. When the coach-wheels awaken him, and he mounts and rides away, David casts not one parting glance at the place of his hour's repose beside the maple-shaded fountain—unconscious of the three unrealised Acts of that hour's unacted Drama—ignorant that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon that fountain's waters, and that