Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860

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She had been a very hard creature to manage. Her father could
influence, but not govern her. Old Sophy, born of a slave mother in the
house, could do more with her than anybody, knowing her by long
instinctive study. The other servants were afraid of her. Her father
had sent for governesses, but none of them ever stayed long. She made
them nervous; one of them had a strange fit of sickness; not one of
them ever came back to the house to see her. A young Spanish woman who
taught her dancing succeeded best with her, for she had a passion for
that exercise, and had mastered some of the most difficult dances.

Long before this period, she had manifested some most extraordinary
singularities of taste or instinct. The extreme sensitiveness of her
father on this point prevented any allusion to them; but there were
stories floating round, some of them even getting into the
papers,--without her name, of course,--which were of a kind to excite
intense curiosity, if not more anxious feelings. This thing was
certain, that at the age of twelve she was missed one night, and was
found sleeping in the open air under a tree, like a wild creature. Very
often she would wander off by day, always without a companion, bringing
home with her a nest, a flower, or even a more questionable trophy of
her ramble, such as showed that there was no place where she was afraid
to venture. Once in a while she had stayed out over night, in which
case the alarm was spread, and men went in search of her, but never
successfully,--so that some said she hid herself in trees, and others
that she had found one of the old Tory caves.

Some, of course, said she was a crazy girl, and ought to be sent to an
Asylum. But old Dr. Kittredge had shaken his head, and told them to
bear with her, and let her have her way as much as they could, but
watch her, as far as possible, without making her suspicious of them.
He visited her now and then, under the pretext of seeing her father on
business, or of only making a friendly call.

* * * * *

The Doctor fastened his horse outside the gate, and walked up the
garden-alley. He stopped suddenly with a start. A strange sound had
jarred upon his ear. It was a sharp prolonged rattle, continuous, but
rising and falling as if in rhythmical cadence. He moved softly towards
the open window from which the sound seemed to proceed.

Elsie was alone in the room, dancing one of those wild Moorish
fandangos, such as a _matador_ hot from the _Plaza de Toros_ of Seville
or Madrid might love to lie and gaze at. She was a figure to look upon
in silence. The dancing frenzy must have seized upon her while she was
dressing; for she was in her bodice, bare-armed, her hair floating
unbound far below the waist of her barred or banded skirt. She had
caught up her castanets, and rattled them as she danced with a kind of
passionate fierceness, her lithe body undulating with flexuous grace,
her diamond eyes glittering, her round arms wreathing and unwinding,
alive and vibrant to the tips of the slender fingers. Some passion
seemed to exhaust itself in this dancing paroxysm; for all at once she
reeled from the middle of the floor, and flung herself, as it were in a
careless coil, upon a great tiger's-skin which was spread out in one corner
of the apartment.

The old Doctor stood motionless, looking at her as she lay panting on
the tawny, black-lined robe of the dead monster, which stretched out
beneath her, its rude flattened outline recalling the Terror of the
Jungle as he crouched for his fatal spring. In a few moments her head
drooped upon her arm, and her glittering eyes closed,--she was
sleeping. He stood looking at her still, steadily, thoughtfully,
tenderly. Presently he lifted his hand to his forehead, as if recalling
some fading remembrance of other years.

"Poor Catalina!"

This was all he said. He shook his head,--implying that his visit would
be in vain to-day,--returned to his sulky, and rode away, as if in a
dream.

* * * * *

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

The romance of "The Marble Faun" will be widely welcomed, not only for
its intrinsic merits, but because it is a sign that its writer, after a
silence of seven or eight years, has determined to resume his place in
the ranks of authorship. In his preface he tells us, that in each of
his previous publications he had unconsciously one person in his eye,
whom he styles his "gentle reader." He meant it "for that one congenial
friend, more comprehensive of his purposes, more appreciative of his.
success, more indulgent of his short-comings, and, in all respects,
closer and kinder than a brother,--that all-sympathizing critic, in
short, whom an author never actually meets, but to whom he implicitly
makes his appeal, whenever he is conscious of having done his best." He
believes that this reader did once exist for him, and duly received the
scrolls he flung "upon whatever wind was blowing, in the faith that
they would find him out." "But," he questions, "is he extant now? In
these many years since he last heard from me, may he not have deemed
his earthly task accomplished, and have withdrawn to the paradise of
gentle readers, wherever it may be, to the enjoyments of which his
kindly charity on my behalf must surely have entitled him?" As we feel
assured that Hawthorne's reputation has been steadily growing with the
lapse of time, he has no cause to fear that the longevity of his gentle
reader will not equal his own. As long as he writes, there will be
readers enough to admire and appreciate.

The publication of this new romance seems to offer us a fitting
occasion to attempt some description of the peculiarities of the genius
of which it is the latest offspring, and to hazard some judgments on
its predecessors. It is more than twenty-five years since Hawthorne
began that remarkable series of stories and essays which are now
collected in the volumes of "Twice-Told Tales," "The Snow Image and
other Tales," and "Mosses from an Old Manse." From the first he was
recognized by such readers as he chanced to find as a man of genius,
yet for a long time he enjoyed, in his own words, the distinction of
being "the obscurest man of letters in America." His readers were
"gentle" rather than enthusiastic; their fine delight in his creations
was a private perception of subtile excellences of thought and style,
too refined and self-satisfying to be contagious; and the public was
untouched, whilst the "gentle" reader was full of placid enjoyment.
Indeed, we fear that this kind of reader is something of an
Epicurean,--receives a new genius as a private blessing, sent by a
benign Providence to quicken a new life in his somewhat jaded sense of
intellectual pleasure; and after having received a fresh sensation, he
is apt to be serenely indifferent whether the creator of it starve
bodily or pine mentally from the lack of a cordial human shout of
recognition.

There would appear, on a slight view of the matter, no reason for the
little notice which Hawthorne's early productions received. The
subjects were mostly drawn from the traditions and written records of
New England, and gave the "beautiful strangeness" of imagination to
objects, incidents, and characters which were familiar facts in the
popular mind. The style, while it had a purity, sweetness, and grace
which satisfied the most fastidious and exacting taste, had, at the
same time, more than the simplicity and clearness of an ordinary
school-book. But though the subjects and the style were thus popular,
there was something in the shaping and informing spirit which failed to
awaken interest, or awakened interest without exciting delight.
Misanthropy, when it has its source in passion,--when it is fierce,
bitter, fiery, and scornful,--when it vigorously echoes the aggressive
discontent of the world, and furiously tramples on the institutions and
the men luckily rather than rightfully in the ascendant,--this is
always popular; but a misanthropy which springs from insight,--a
misanthropy which is lounging, languid, sad, and depressing,--a
misanthropy which remorselessly looks through cursing misanthropes and
chirping men of the world with the same sure, detecting glance of
reason,--a misanthropy which has no fanaticism, and which casts the
same ominous doubt on subjectively morbid as on subjectively moral
action,--a misanthropy which has no respect for impulses, but has a
terrible perception of spiritual laws,--this is a misanthropy which can
expect no wide recognition; and it would be vain to deny that traces of
this kind of misanthropy are to be found in Hawthorne's earlier, and
are not altogether absent from his later works. He had spiritual
insight, but it did not penetrate to the sources of spiritual joy; and
his deepest glimpses of truth were calculated rather to sadden than to
inspire. A blandly cynical distrust of human nature was the result of
his most piercing glances into the human soul. He had humor, and
sometimes humor of a delicious kind; but this sunshine of the soul was
but sunshine breaking through or lighting up a sombre and ominous
cloud. There was also observable in his earlier stories a lack of vigor,
as if the power of his nature had been impaired by the very
process--which gave depth and excursiveness to his mental vision.
Throughout, the impression is conveyed of a shy recluse, alternately
bashful in disposition and bold in thought, gifted with original and
various capacities, but capacities which seemed to have developed
themselves in the shade, without sufficient energy of will or desire to
force them, except fitfully, into the sunlight. Shakspeare calls
moonlight the sunlight _sick_; and it is in some such moonlight of the
mind that the genius of Hawthorne found its first expression. A mild
melancholy, sometimes deepening into gloom, sometimes brightened into a
"humorous sadness," characterized his early creations. Like his own
Hepzibah Pyncheon, he appeared "to be walking in a dream"; or rather,
the life and reality assumed by his emotions "made all outward
occurrences unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of an unconscious
slumber." Though dealing largely in description, and with the most
accurate perceptions of outward objects, he still, to use again his own
words, gives the impression of a man "chiefly accustomed to look
inward, and to whom external matters are of little value or import,
unless they bear relation to something within his own mind." But that
"something within his own mind" was often an unpleasant something,
perhaps a ghastly occult perception of deformity and sin in what
appeared outwardly fair and good; so that the reader felt a secret
dissatisfaction with the disposition which directed the genius, even in
the homage he awarded to the genius itself. As psychological portraits
of morbid natures, his delineations of character might have given a
purely intellectual satisfaction; but there was audible, to the
delicate ear, a faint and muffled growl of personal discontent, which
showed they were not mere exercises of penetrating imaginative
analysis, but had in them the morbid vitality of a despondent mood.

Yet, after admitting these peculiarities, nobody who is now drawn to
the "Twice-Told Tales," from his interest in the later romances of
Hawthorne, can fail to wonder a little at the limited number of readers
they attracted on their original publication. For many of these stories
are at once a representation of early New-England life and a criticism
on it. They have much of the deepest truth of history in them. "The
Legends of the Province House," "The Gray Champion," "The Gentle Boy,"
"The Minister's Black Veil," "Endicott and the Red Cross," not to
mention others, contain important matter which cannot be found in
Bancroft or Grahame. They exhibit the inward struggles of New-England
men and women with some of the darkest problems of existence, and have
more vital import to thoughtful minds than the records of Indian or
Revolutionary warfare. In the "Prophetic Pictures," "Fancy's Show-Box,"
"The Great Carbuncle," "The Haunted Mind," and "Edward Fane's
Rose-Bud," there are flashes of moral insight, which light up, for the
moment, the darkest recesses of the individual mind; and few sermons
reach to the depth of thought and sentiment from which these seemingly
airy sketches draw their sombre life. It is common, for instance, for
religious moralists to insist on the great spiritual truth, that wicked
thoughts and impulses, which circumstances prevent from passing into
wicked acts, are still deeds in the sight of God; but the living truth
subsides into a dead truism, as enforced by commonplace preachers. In
"Fancy's Show-Box," Hawthorne seizes the prolific idea; and the
respectable merchant and respected church-member, in the still hour of
his own meditation, convicts himself of being a liar, cheat, thief,
seducer, and murderer, as he casts his glance over the mental events
which form his spiritual biography. Interspersed with serious histories
and moralities like these, are others which embody the sweet and
playful, though still thoughtful and slightly saturnine action of
Hawthorne's mind,--like "The Seven Vagabonds," "Snow-Flakes," "The
Lily's Quest," "Mr. Higgenbotham's Catastrophe," "Little Annie's
Ramble," "Sights from a Steeple," "Sunday at Home," and "A Rill from
the Town-Pump."

The "Mosses from an Old Manse" are intellectually and artistically an
advance from the "Twice-Told Tales." The twenty-three stories and
essays which make up the volumes are almost perfect of their kind. Each
is complete in itself, and many might be expanded into long romances by
the simple method of developing the possibilities of their shadowy
types of character into appropriate incidents. In description,
narration, allegory, humor, reason, fancy, subtilty, inventiveness,
they exceed the best productions of Addison; but they want Addison's
sensuous contentment and sweet and kindly spirit. Though the author
denies that he has exhibited his own individual attributes in these
"Mosses," though he professes not to be "one of those supremely
hospitable people who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with
brain-sauce, as a titbit for their beloved public,"--yet it is none the
less apparent that he has diffused through each tale and sketch the
life of the mental mood to which it owed its existence, and that one
individuality pervades and colors the whole collection. The defect of
the serious stories is, that character is introduced, not as thinking,
but as the illustration of thought. The persons are ghostly, with a sad
lack of flesh and blood. They are phantasmal symbols of a reflective
and imaginative analysis of human passions and aspirations. The
dialogue, especially, is bookish, as though the personages knew their
speech was to be printed, and were careful of the collocation and
rhythm of their words. The author throughout is evidently more
interested in his large, wide, deep, indolently serene, and lazily sure
and critical view of the conflict of ideas and passions, than he is
with the individuals who embody them. He shows moral insight without
moral earnestness. He cannot contract his mind to the patient
delineation of a moral individual, but attempts to use individuals in
order to express the last results of patient moral perception. Young
Goodman Brown and Roger Malvin are not persons; they are the mere,
loose, personal expression of subtile thinking. "The Celestial
Railroad," "The Procession of Life," "Earth's Holocaust," "The Bosom
Serpent," indicate thought of a character equally deep, delicate, and
comprehensive, but the characters are ghosts of men rather than
substantial individualities. In the "Mosses from an Old Manse," we are
really studying the phenomena of human nature, while, for the time, we
beguile ourselves into the belief that we are following the fortunes of
individual natures.

Up to this time the writings of Hawthorne conveyed the impression of a
genius in which insight so dominated over impulse, that it was rather
mentally and morally curious than mentally and morally impassioned. The
quality evidently wanting to its full expression was intensity. In the
romance of "The Scarlet Letter" he first made his genius efficient by
penetrating it with passion. This book forced itself into attention by
its inherent power; and the author's name, previously known only to a
limited circle of readers, suddenly became a familiar word in the
mouths of the great reading public of America and England. It may be
said, that it "captivated" nobody, but took everybody captive. Its
power could neither be denied nor resisted. There were growls of
disapprobation from novel-readers, that Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr.
Dimmesdale were subjected to cruel punishments unknown to the
jurisprudence of fiction,--that the author was an inquisitor who put
his victims on the rack,--and that neither amusement nor delight
resulted from seeing the contortions and hearing the groans of these
martyrs of sin; but the fact was no less plain that Hawthorne had for
once compelled the most superficial lovers of romance to submit
themselves to the magic of his genius. The readers of Dickens voted
him, with three times three, to the presidency of their republic of
letters; the readers of Hawthorne were caught by a _coup d'etat_, and
fretfully submitted to a despot whom they could not depose.

The success of "The Scarlet Letter" is an example of the advantage
which an author gains by the simple concentration of his powers on one
absorbing subject. In the "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses from an
Old Manse" Hawthorne had exhibited a wider range of sight and insight
than in "The Scarlet Letter." Indeed, in the little sketch of "Endicott
and the Red Cross," written twenty years before, he had included in a
few sentences the whole matter which he afterwards treated in his
famous story. In describing the various inhabitants of an early
New-England town, as far as they were representative, he touches
incidentally on a "young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose
doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes
of all the world and her own children. And even her own children knew
what that initial signified. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and
desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth,
with golden thread and the nicest art of needle-work; so that the
capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything,
rather than Adulteress." Here is the germ of the whole pathos and
terror of "The Scarlet Letter"; but it is hardly noted in the throng of
symbols, equally pertinent, in the few pages of the little sketch from
which we have quoted.

Two characteristics of Hawthorne's genius stand plainly out, in the
conduct and characterization of the romance of "The Scarlet Letter,"
which were less obviously prominent in his previous works. The first
relates to his subordination of external incidents to inward events.
Mr. James's "solitary horseman" does more in one chapter than
Hawthorne's hero in twenty chapters; but then James deals with the arms
of men, while Hawthorne deals with their souls. Hawthorne relies almost
entirely for the interest of his story on what is felt and done within
the minds of his characters. Even his most picturesque descriptions and
narratives are only one-tenth matter to nine-tenths spirit. The results
that follow from one external act of folly or crime are to him enough
for an Iliad of woes. It might be supposed that his whole theory of
Romantic Art was based on these tremendous lines of Wordsworth:--

"Action is momentary,--
The motion of a muscle, this way or that:
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite."

The second characteristic of his genius is connected with the first.
With his insight of individual souls he combines a far deeper insight
of the spiritual laws which govern the strangest aberrations of
individual souls. But it seems to us that his mental eye, keen-sighted
and far-sighted as it is, overlooks the merciful modifications of the
austere code whose pitiless action it so clearly discerns. In his long
and patient brooding over the spiritual phenomena of Puritan life, it
is apparent, to the least critical observer, that he has imbibed a deep
personal antipathy to the Puritanic ideal of character; but it is no
less apparent that his intellect and imagination have been strangely
fascinated by the Puritanic idea of justice. His brain has been subtly
infected by the Puritanic perception of Law, without being warmed by
the Puritanic faith in Grace. Individually, he would much prefer to
have been one of his own "Seven Vagabonds" rather than one of the
austerest preachers of the primitive church of New England; but the
austerest preacher of the primitive church of New England would have
been more tender and considerate to a real Mr. Dimmesdale and a real
Hester Prynne than this modern romancer has been to their typical
representatives in the world of imagination. Throughout "The Scarlet
Letter" we seem to be following the guidance of an author who is
personally good-natured, but intellectually and morally relentless.

"The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne's next work, while it has
less concentration of passion and tension of mind than "The Scarlet
Letter," includes a wider range of observation, reflection, and
character; and the morality, dreadful as fate, which hung like a black
cloud over the personages of the previous story, is exhibited in more
relief. Although the book has no imaginative creation equal to little
Pearl, it still contains numerous examples of characterization at once
delicate and deep. Clifford, especially, is a study in psychology, as
well as a marvellously subtile delineation of enfeebled manhood. The
general idea of the story is this,--"that the wrong-doing of one
generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of
every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief";
and the mode in which this idea is carried out shows great force,
fertility, and refinement of mind. A weird fancy, sporting with the
facts detected by a keen observation, gives to every gable of the Seven
Gables, every room in the House, every burdock growing rankly before
the door, a symbolic significance. The queer mansion is
haunted,--haunted with thoughts which every moment are liable to take
ghostly shape. All the Pyncheons who have resided in it appear to have
infected the very timbers and walls with the spiritual essence of their
lives, and each seems ready to pass from a memory into a presence. The
stern theory of the author regarding the hereditary transmission of
family qualities, and the visiting of the sins of the fathers on the
heads of their children, almost wins our reluctant assent through the
pertinacity with which the generations of the Pyncheon race are made
not merely to live in the blood and brain of their descendants, but to
cling to their old abiding-place on earth, so that to inhabit the house
is to breathe the Pyncheon soul and assimilate the Pyncheon
individuality. The whole representation, masterly as it is, considered
as an effort of intellectual and imaginative power, would still be
morally bleak, were it not for the sunshine and warmth radiated from
the character of Phoebe. In this delightful creation Hawthorne for once
gives himself up to homely human nature, and has succeeded in
delineating a New-England girl, cheerful, blooming, practical,
affectionate, efficient, full of innocence and happiness, with all the
"handiness" and native sagacity of her class, and so true and close to
Nature that the process by which she is slightly idealized is
completely hidden.

In this romance there is also more humor than in any of his other
works. It peeps out, even in the most serious passages, in a kind of
demure rebellion against the fanaticism of his remorseless
intelligence. In the description of the Pyncheon poultry, which we
think unexcelled by anything in Dickens for quaintly fanciful humor,
the author seems to indulge in a sort of parody on his own doctrine of
the hereditary transmission of family qualities. At any rate, that
strutting chanticleer, with his two meagre wives and one wizened
chicken, is a sly side fleer at the tragic aspect of the law of
descent. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, her shop, and her customers, are so
delightful, that the reader would willingly spare a good deal of
Clifford and Judge Pyncheon and Holgrave, for more details of them and
Phoebe. Uncle Venner, also, the old wood-sawyer, who boasts "that he
has seen a good deal of the world, not only in people's kitchens and
back-yards, but at the street-corners, and on the wharves, and in other
places where his business" called him, and who, on the strength of this
comprehensive experience, feels qualified to give the final decision in
every case which tasks the resources of human wisdom, is a very much
more humane and interesting gentleman than the Judge. Indeed, one
cannot but regret that Hawthorne should be so economical of his
undoubted stores of humor,--and that, in the two romances he has since
written, humor, in the form of character, does not appear at all.

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