Selected Tales and Sketches (6 page)

The same spirit that unites Emerson with Father Miller—a sort of neopuritanical hatred of the merely existent—appears to motivate the project of radical reform as Hawthorne represents it in “Earth's Holocaust” (1844). An altogether unstable narrator ends by proposing, conservatively, that the notoriously American effort to purify the world will fail unless the human heart itself should undergo its own prior purgation. But the shape of the drama suggests the more radical possibility that some terrific lust for perfection will remain insatiate as long as any human trace remains; that the enthusiasm which had sponsored, in 1840, an entirely nonspecific “Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform” might be content with nothing less than the burning of the whole earth and all its heart-of-flesh inhabitants. And surely that dire hint is more than confirmed by “The Birth-mark” (1843), where the spiritual aspirations of contemporary “metascience” rise up to a monomania as dangerous to “the world's body” as the cosmic paranoia of Melville's Ahab.

Feminist critics may fairly notice that it is a hapless but worshipful wife who is elected to reveal the mark of fleshly imperfection and on whom, accordingly, the maddened Aylmer must perform his insane experiment. Yet as this gesture is itself problematized, it seems fair to suggest that it too is part of Hawthorne's historical
donnée,
especially as the tale appears to make more than a glancing reference to the “Ligeia” of Edgar Poe, whose Platonism repeatedly epitomized itself in the “most poetic” theme of the “death of a beautiful woman.” Evidently Hawthorne wished to observe that certain Western, even Christian attitudes toward “Woman” are embedded in the language often used to express “Man‘s” more than Faustian desire for symbolic transcendence. Probably, if the truth were known, Aylmer's own body, born of woman, bore some small natal scar of its own; yet of this possibility we hear nothing. Nor would Hawthorne's idealist, and untrustworthy, narrator know what to make of an (untold) tale in which a wife, scientist or not, seeks perfection in neutralizing the flesh of a husband
almost
worthy of adoration.

The explicitly sexual implications of idealism are perfectly evident in “Rappaccini's Daughter,” of course, where once again (in the memorable phrase of D. H. Lawrence) “Woman is the nemesis of doubting man”; but probably it is “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844) which most directly extends Aylmer's treacherous logic of insatiable aspiration. No one dies, to be sure. And Owen's precious “Annie” seems happy enough bearing the babies of the local blacksmith. But Owen is left with the austere discovery that the platonizing artist achieves nothing beyond his own “spirit”; and his world is left without any credible figure of the service which celibates of “the beautiful” might render the rest of the endlessly prolific human community. Emerson's “The Transcendentalist” (1844) might venture to suggest, boldly or shrilly, the high religious benefit of watching the holy watchers; but evidently Hawthorne remained committed to an art which produced “objects” for popular consumption, even if we do tend to crush the butterfly.

Thus Hawthorne's historicism continued. Not only thematically, as in the self-embarrassed protests of the narrator of “The Hall of Fantasy” in favor of the endurability of the “great, round, solid self” of the world, themselves in echo of Hawthorne's own more private expressions of satisfaction (in his notebooks) with the swelling roundness of Sophia's pregnant belly; but formally as well, in his continuing concern to tell the tale of present-day attempts to nullify the world's material being. “The Old Manse” ends by regretting that the Concord years had produced “no profound treatise of ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand on its own unsupported edges.” We know, as Hawthorne could not, that the novels would come--even if the dazzling
Scarlet Letter
would require the quizzical “Custom-House” to stand without tipping. Even so, however, the rhetoric protests too much, as Hawthorne surely hoped his kindest readers would notice. For the art of telling America's “moral history” had gone right on, with undiminished seriousness: interrupted, no doubt, by an extended time out for worldly work; but augmented, as well, by the discovery that the Transcendentalist logic of “idea” had solved the problem of the world no better than the Puritan premise of “grace.”

 

After 1846 Hawthorne published only a handful of new tales, and indeed “The Old Manse” explicitly promises that the
Mosses
will be the author's “last collection of this nature.” Possibly Hawthorne was already meditating a second, more remunerative career, as novelist. Or perhaps he felt some more artistic sense of diminishing returns in the ironic short form he had both invented and perfected: “Unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind.” In any case, the promise was substantially kept.

The Scarlet Letter
seems once to have been intended for inclusion in a collection to be titled “Old-Time Legends; together with sketches, experimental and ideal.” But then, of course, “The Custom-House” came along to help it stand alone. Subsequently,
The Snow-Image
(1851) gathered up the four tales Hawthorne had produced in 1849 and 1850; but as the volume is filled out with a much larger number of earlier pieces hitherto uncollected, the whole seems more a publishing convenience than a literary, project. And the second edition of the
Mosses
(1854) continues this same activity of universal self-collection-largely at the urging of now eager editors, and at some prejudice to the anti-transcendental unity of that remarkable work. By that date, of course, Hawthorne was the accomplished author of his “Three American Romances” and, searching in England for the theme of yet another extended romantic fiction, he was proportionately less concerned about the significance of his “obscure” years.

Of the post-1846 tales, several were solicited by friendly magazine editors. At least one, “The Snow-Image” (1850), was explicitly designated a “childish” performance; and it may be that “The Great Stone Face” (1850) was also meant to reach Hawthorne's secondary audience of youthful readers. An extended sketch called “Main-Street” (1849) reveals once again the full wickedness of Hawthorne's mature historical irony, but it reads best as a self-conscious defense of the earlier career as “moral” (rather than “positivistic”) historian of the Puritans; or else as a self-imposed review of the Puritan themes to be reactivated in
The Scarlet Letter.
And as it remains perfectly safe to regard “Ethan Brand” (1850) just as Hawthorne subtitled it, “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance,” so it seems fair to accept the 1846
Mosses
as a sort of formal conclusion to Hawthorne's career as writer and collector of tales and sketches. The novels were delayed, of course—in part, at least, by the second and more famous tour of custom-house service. But when they came, they came in a bunch. And in coming to constitute a sort of “Major Phase,” they have fully overshadowed the last, scattered attempts at short fiction.

Yet no survey of Hawthorne's tales can afford to omit “Ethan Brand”—not only because it may signal Hawthorne's first, unsuccessful transition from tale to romance, but also, and more significantly, because it makes clear, one last time, that Hawthorne's most romantic imaginings are never quite free of historical source and local application. One powerful reason for believing “Ethan Brand” indeed survives as but a fragment of a longer work is that it draws on and virtually exausts the wealth of particular observation Hawthorne had set down in a 50,000-word notebook of his 1838 trip to western Massachusetts: bad policy, if one brief tale were all he had originally intended. But the best reason for valuing the actual achievement of “Ethan Brand” is that in it all this “local color” is deployed in the career of an American Faust who has never ceased to be a Puritan, if only
malgré lui.

When we ask, as we must, what it means for Ethan Brand to have begun his notorious search for the “unpardonable sin” in a spirit not of arrogance but of brotherhood, the answer keeps coming back that—like Melville's Ahab, whose creation he plainly helped to inspire—Brand has hoped to act as a sort of representative human hero, a kind of latter-day, backwoods New England Prometheus. Fire having already been snatched from the jealous gods, and long since harnessed to the civilized arts of environmental engineering, what daring task remained? Or else, more defiantly formulated, what secret remained, within the fire, to remind the brooding humanist of the awful uncertainty that still enshrouded human life? Not death, apparently, but only the knowledge of that one supposed sin which of its very nature defied the mercy of even a thoroughly encovenanted Jehova. Perhaps the secret was not entirely past finding out.

No doubt the question was, in itself, impious in the last degree, like Ahab's monomaniac inquisition into the mystery of universal iniquity. No doubt Brand looked
“too long
into the fire.” So that the fiery conclusion—of suicide at the moment of cosmic blasphemy—may seem predictable enough. Yet the sense of triumph over all the world's “half-way” sinners is one that would have to develop. Himself, at last, a “Brand [Un]Plucked from the Burning,” still this ultimate neopuritan rebel appears to have begun with a concern for the reason of human despair as plausible as that of Cotton Mather himself. Nor, as the insistent allusions to writers of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism make clear, had the matter of malignity been entirely settled or left behind; from which observation, we may infer, the author of
Moby-Dick
took considerable aid and comfort.

If Hawthorne's own effort proved “abortive,” the explanation must surely lie in some temperamental inability to sustain a Melvillean protest against the enduring legacy of Calvinist orthodoxy. More historical than speculative, finally, Hawthorne's circumspect intelligence could see at once that the transcendence promised by perfect negation was as illusory as any other: one denied what one knew, then lapsed to the elements of universal process. Others endured, if not to tell the tale, at least to gather up the fragments.

Appropriately, therefore,
The Scarlet Letter
—the first and most compelling of the longer fictions—would return to the world whose moral shape Hawthorne knew best, the world of the Puritans as it functioned in the second decade of John Winthrop's model “City on a Hill.” The laws of this would-be Utopia are strict, but they are known; and sinners must bear the burden of social cause and effect. No one need wish, as Hawthorne makes clear in “Main-Street,” to repeat the
lives
of ancestors whom experience had taught so much “amiss”: Winthrop's vaunted “liberty” seemed more “like an iron cage,” and its “rigidity” appears to have generated even further “distortions of the moral nature.” Yet the
tale
might still be retold, if only to illustrate the moral premise of historicism as such: even the most repressive ideologies had seemed like a good idea at the time; and no “self” entirely escapes the limits of its correlative world.

Not even the artist escapes. His domain might be divided between past and present, inner and outer. But gestures of ultimacy remained empty. His subject could be only his own world-in-process. And America was no exception.

A Note on the Text

All the texts printed here are those established by the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's
Works
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press):
Twice-told Tales
(IX, 1974);
Mosses from an Old Manse
(X, 1974);
The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales
(XI, 1974); and the forthcoming
Miscellany.
The sequence of printing, however, reflects the order of their first magazine or gift-book appearance. With two exceptions: “The Notch of the White Mountains” (Nov., 1835) appears as introductory to “The Ambitious Guest” (June, 1835); and “The Christmas Banquet” (Jan., 1844) is placed as immediate sequel to “Egotism ; or, The Bosom-Serpent” (Mar., 1843).

IN those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and mad-men's reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met together at an appointed hour and place. One was a lady, graceful in form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled, and smitten with an untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her years; the other was an ancient and meanly dressed woman, of ill-favored aspect, and so withered, shrunken and decrepit, that even the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary term of human existence. In the spot where they encountered, no mortal could observe them. Three little hills stood near each other, and down in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines were numerous upon the hills, and partly fringed the outer verge of the intermediate hollow; within which there was nothing but the brown grass of October, and here and there a tree-trunk, that had fallen long ago, and lay mouldering with no green successor from its roots. One of these masses of decaying wood, formerly a majestic oak, rested close beside a pool of green and sluggish water at the bottom of the basin. Such scenes as this (so gray tradition tells) were once the resort of a Power of Evil and his plighted subjects; and here, at midnight or on the dim verge of evening, they were said to stand round the mantling pool, disturbing its putrid waters in the performance of an impious baptismal rite. The chill beauty of an autumnal sunset was now gilding the three hill-tops, whence a paler tint stole down their sides into the hollow.

“Here is our pleasant meeting come to pass,” said the aged crone, “according as thou hast desired. Say quickly what thou wouldst have of me, for there is but a short hour that we may tarry here.”