Hawthorne's Short Stories

1832

1835

1836

1837

1838

1839

1843

1844

1850

1851

1852

I
F
H
AWTHORNE
had died in his middle forties—an advanced age for a man of genius—we should know him now not as the author of
The Scarlet Letter
or any of his other novels but solely as a writer of short stories or tales. It is true that, two or three years after he left college, Hawthorne had written and published anonymously a little novel called
Fanshawe
, which under different auspices might well have been followed shortly by other works of fiction on the same scale—and of richer substance—but some chill in the New England air at that early hour disheartened the young Hawthorne for novel-writing, and in fact he had destroyed all the copies of
Fanshawe
itself that he could lay hands on. It had been a pretty unripe little work at best, and in any case for twenty years thereafter Hawthorne stuck consistently to the briefer form. By good luck it was admirably suited, all that while, to what he had to say, as it was to what Hoffmann and Gogol and Gautier had to say at much the same time, and the best of Hawthorne’s tales express his nature, his personal sense of things, so subtly and truly that there can be no question of loss or limitation.

No literary fame, however, was ever of slower or less sensational growth. Hawthorne himself, who had been born in 1804, once said that for many years he had been the obscurest man of letters in America, and this remark hardly exaggerated the facts. For a long time his audience had been limited to the readers of the modish little “gift-books” or annuals, and even in those genteel pages he was anonymous and unidentifiable. A deep-rooted shyness had kept him from signing his contributions to the
Token
, as the best of the annuals was called, and for years he had hidden behind the mask of “Ashley Allen Royce” or “The Author of ‘The Gentle Boy.’ ” Such work as his, however, could not fail indefinitely to make its impression, and a handful of readers had already been puzzling over the secret of its authorship when, in 1836, Park Benjamin, an astute and friendly journalist, named him by his real name—and eulogized him—in a popular magazine.

A year later Hawthorne was persuaded by a friend to make a collection of his pieces in book form, and the
Twice-Told Tales
appeared over the imprint of a Boston publisher. The circle now began to widen perceptibly. Longfellow reviewed the book with excited appreciativeness; there were other signs of regard and recognition from time to time, and when, in 1842, a second, expanded edition of the
Tales
appeared, they were noticed at length in several quarters—most momentously in
Graham’s
, where Poe devoted to them a famous and flattering review. So much as five years later, however, and even after Hawthorne, with the
Mosses from an Old Manse
, had made a third collection, Poe could still speak of him, in another review, as “
the
example,
par excellence
, in this country, of the privately-admired and publicly-unappreciated man of genius.” Few as the appreciators may have been, they were, most of them, highly competent to speak; many of them were other writers—the most ardent of all was Herman Melville—and their judgment was at last borne out, in 1850, by the great public success of
The Scarlet Letter
. The following year, with
The Snow Image
, Hawthorne made a fourth and final collection of his tales, the last that he wished to preserve or that, as he said, had survived in his own remembrance.
¹

Not many writers have worked so long amid such a hush or in such a shadow: the tales themselves, as Hawthorne himself strongly felt, are colored everywhere by the circumstances under which they were written. His own feeling was that they suffered as a result, and he was partly right; but they gained something vital too—a curiously cool intensity, an air of candid shyness, a quality of being at once private and communicative. They were not, he said, “the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart,” but his attempts—imperfectly successful ones, he thought—“to open an intercourse with the world.” But the truth is that his stories partook of both characters: they were attempts at communication with other men, such as only a solitary could conceive, but they were also attempts to make plain to himself the meaning of his own inward and outward experience. They were soliloquies that were meant to be overheard.

In any other period they might well have taken quite a different literary form—fabulous, visionary, legendary, poetic (in the limited sense), and even dramatic—and if they took the form of “short stories,” it was because, at the moment Hawthorne began to write, that mold was a natural and almost a handy one. This does not mean that it was long-established; on the contrary, it was in its primitive or experimental stage, especially in English, and if it was handy, it was only in the sense in which the history play was so for the young Shakespeare. The Italian
novella
, the French
conte
, the realistic-moral English tale—these were ancient types, but they were nothing to the purpose of Hawthorne or his contemporaries: they were not “inward,” they were not meditative or musing, they were not a matter of tone and lighting and harmony. It was only latterly that short pieces of prose fiction had begun to take on qualities such as these, and Hawthorne was as much the creator as he was the inheritor of a form.

He had been preceded by the romantic Germans, Tieck and Hoffmann and Chamisso, with their tales of fatal
Geheimnisse
, of uncanny solicitation and ruin, of “lost shadows” and spell-working portraits, of delusion and anxiety and guilt; and in his indolent but impressionable way he undoubtedly read some of these writers as they were being translated in his youth. He knew Irving, too, and the lesson of Irving’s delicate, daydreaming, watercolorist’s art was not lost on him. In the ten years between “Rip Van Winkle” and Hawthorne’s earliest tales, a whole little literature of short fiction had sprouted in this country, a mostly very pale but sometimes rather vivid literature of ghost stories, Indian legends, “village tales,” and historical anecdotes—the thin foliage of the annuals as it was put forth by the now forgotten Pauldings and Leggetts and Sedgwicks who were the lesser Faulkners or Porters of their time. It was (to change the figure) the only springboard from which Hawthorne could take off directly, and what he, like Poe at exactly the same moment, succeeded in making of the gift-book or magazine tale of the twenties and thirties is only one more out of a thousand illustrations of a familiar literary truth, the power of men of genius to sublimate the most unpromising forms.

He had things to express that were his own, not simply the moral and aesthetic small change of the era, and he had, what none of the others except Poe had in anything like the same degree, an innate sense of the plastic, an instinct for form, the tact and touch of a born artist—an artist whom it is tempting to think of as peculiarly New England, and to associate in one’s imagination with the old Yankee craftsmen, the silversmiths and the cabinet-makers whose solid and yet fastidious work his own does really suggest. He of course learned something here from his literary predecessors, even no doubt from the little men, but what he arrived at was his own and not Hoffmann’s or Irving’s or Leggett’s.