Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/221

 Rh the group of actors. His character is replete with interest, whether as a partial presentment of the author's own person, or as a type of no uncommon individuality in this age of "yeast." We have in him a strange but most true "coincidence" of warm feeling and freezing reflection, of the kind deep heart and the vexed and vacillating brain, of a natural tendency to faith and a constitutional taint of scepticism, of the sensuous, indolent epicurean and the habitual cynic, of the idealist—all hope, and the realist—all disappointment. It is this fusion of opposite, not contradictory qualities, which gives so much piquancy and flavour to Coverdale's character, and his author's writings in general.

To become a member of the Blithedale socialistic institute, at which the world laughed as it will laugh at castles in the air—and all the while, evidently all the while, to be convinced at heart that the scheme is impracticable—this is quite au naturel with the Blithedale romancer. When he retires, and former acquaintance show themselves inclined to ridicule his heroic devotion to the cause of human welfare, he sanctions the jest, and explains that really he had but been experimentalising, and with no valuable amount of hope or fear at stake, and that the thing had enabled him to pass the summer in a novel and agreeable way, had afforded him some grotesque specimens of artificial simplicity, and could not, therefore, quoad himself, be reckoned a failure. Miles gives us the best insight into his mind in its distinctive features, by such a passing reflection as this—where he is recording the invigorating tone of Blithedale air to the new converts from faded conventional life: "We had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after ail, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp." His deficiency in the excelsior aspiration of the sanguine temperament stands revealed in every chapter. A little exaggerated, but that not much, in his language to Priscilla: "My past life has been a tiresome one. enough; yet I would rather look backward ten times than forward once. For, little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just the good they seek. If it come at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want." And the conflicting influences of which we have spoken are notably illustrated when he describes his antipathy to, heightened by his very sympathy with, the odious Westervelt: "The professor's tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of man; and all the more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him." An admirable bit of psychology, and eminently like Natnaniel Hawthorne.

But for our restricted limits, fain would we string together a few of those pithy reflections with which the romance abounds—many of them, indeed questionable, but nearly all worth transcription, and stamped with the quaint die of the romancer's esprit. Differ from him as you may, you are all along interested in him, and are apt to find more in his crotchets than in a dullard's "exquisite reasons."

Of "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," the "Mosses from an Old Manse," &c., we have entered our verdict, such as it is, in a previous "fly-leaf." The "Life of Franklin Pierce," a confessedly time-serving palaver, is in no way worthy of that "statue of