Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/219

Rh anguish, a spell of dreadful potency; itself a symbol of Eleanore's withdrawal from the sympathies of our common nature, and the instrument of her signal and utter humiliation. The subtlety and power of this legend are of the rarest.

"The Blithedale Romance" we esteem, in spite of its coming last, the highest and best of Mr. Hawthorne's works. The tale is narrated with more ingenuity and ease; the characters are at least equal to their predecessors, and the style is at once richer and more robust—more mellowed, and yet more pointed and distinct. A true artist has planned and has filled up the plot, ordering each conjunction of incidents, and interweaving the cross threads of design and destiny with masterly tact; skilled in the by-play of suggestion, hint, and pregnant passing intimations—in the provocative spell of suspense—in the harmonious development of once scattered and seemingly unrelated forces. His humour is fresher in quality, and his tragic power is exercised with almost oppressive effect—at times making the boldest, oldest romance-reader

at others, making all but him lose the dimmed line in blinding tears. There are scenes that rivet themselves on the memory—such as Coverdale's interview with Westervelt in the woodland solitude, followed by his observation of another rencontre from his leafy hermitage in the vine-entangled pine-tree; and the dramatic recital of Zenobia's Legend; and the rendezvous at Eliot's Pulpit; and above all, the dreadful errand by midnight in quest of the Dead—intensified in its grim horror by the contrasted temperaments of the three searchers, especially Silas Foster's rude matter-of-fact hardness, probing with coarse unconscious finger the wounds of a proud and sensitive soul. There are touches of exquisite pathos in the evolution of the tale of sorrow, mingled with shrewd "interludes" of irony and humour which only deepen the distress. Antiperistasis, Sir Thomas Browne would call it.

Upon the bearing of the romance on Socialism we need not descant, the author explicitly disclaiming all intent of pronouncing pro or con, on the theories in question. As to the characters, too, he as explicitly repudiates the idea, which in the teeth of such disclaimer, and of internal evidence also, has been attributed to him, of portraying in the Blithedale actors the actual companions of his Brook Farm career—or other American celebrities (as though Margaret Fuller were Zenobia, because both living on "Rights of Woman" excitement, and both dying by drowning!). The characters are few; but each forms a study. The gorgeous Zenobia—from out whose imposing nature was felt to breathe an influence "such as we might suppose to come from Eve, when she was just made, and her Creator brought her to Adam, saying, 'Behold! here is a Woman!'"—not an influence merely fraught with especial gentleness grace, modesty, and shyness, but a "certain warm and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have been refined away out of the feminine system." Hollingsworth—by nature deeply and warmly benevolent,