BOOKS OF THE DAY
"Nathaniel, You Great Man ! "
Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Biography. By Randall Stewart. (Yak University Press: Geoffrey Cumberlege. 22s.) 'THERE will eternally be something oddly elusive—with all the charm of elusiveness—about both Hawthorne and his work. Half "common- sensical," as his son Julian insisted so loudly, with a distaste for reforming ardour ; uncomfortable alike with Transcendentalism and 'Emerson, with the naive sylvanism of Thoreau and the embracing fervour of Melville, yet he himself had his own very individual brand of something far from commonplace or commonsensical. He lived confessedly in a kind of fairyland, from which could appear such strange things—we would have called them Surrealist a little While ago—as "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." Thus the immense valve of Mr. Davidson's book is not only in its technically fascinating material, the drafts and brouilions of the scrappy, posthumously 'edited publications, but in its elucidation of Hawthorne as a person, a person in decay, to be sure, but none the less self-revelatory for that. It is profoundly interesting, too, as an illustration of how the creative mind may work. It has usually been rather too readily granted that Hawthorne proceeded from some abstract moral idea first to the symbol and then to the living characters, and that may in part be true. But there had to be also some degree of simul- taneity; some intuitional integration had to occur ; and this problem Mr. Davidson tackles (we may hope only as a preliminary essay) in his last chapter.
In the last four years of his life Hawthorne was rapidly collapsir-; ; partly he was ageing (during the last year in Europe he must have been driven to weariness by his unwearyingly sight-seeing wife), and partly he was nerve-racked by the terrible shock and tensions of the Civil War. But there was probably something else ; just as his term in the Customs House at Salem had "by the rude contact of actual circumstance" almost destroyed his imaginative powers, "the im- palpable beauty of his soap-bubble," so the years as Consul at Liverpool had rusted his intuitive faculties. Perhaps also that quality in him which he never really faced, and which made D. H. Lawrence hail him as a bitter ironist in the phrase which contains the apostrophe at the head of this article, prevented the intuition from becoming operative. At all events, we see him torturedly struggling to make his symbols mean something ; for now the baffled allegorist had the symbols without being clear as to what they meant, or being able to clothe them in flesh and blood. There were a few main ones, which he worked at as though haunted by them, weaving and reweaving them, building, destroying, re-building, to no spiritual end or literary conclusion. All that emerged was the manuscript of one chapter of The Dolliver Romance, which lay on his coffin during the burial service. The main irritants around which the pearls simply would not form were the bloody footstep he was shown by the Ainsworths at Smithcll's Hall ; the coffin of the old lady, which, when opened, was "found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut ringlets" of whkh the O'Sullivans had told him ; the story he had from Thoreau that a man who thought himself immortal had lived in the Hawthornes' house, which became the elixir of life obsession ; American heirs to English estates. There were also some minor ones, such as the great spider he had seen in the British Museum.
The results were an incredible number of shots at four different novels, two of which might be called "the English romance " ; namely, The Ancestral Footstep and Doctor Grimsizawe's Secret ; and two "elixir stories," that is, Septimius Felton and The Dolhver Romance, the latter in part familiar to most of us since fragments are usually included with the second series of Twice-Told Tales. In arranging, elucidating and discussing these things, Mr. Davidson has given us a most exciting, touching and, in a way, terrible glimpse into the literary workshop, and into the. mind of a human being who was very nearly gteat.
If this well-written book will be indispensable to various groups of readers, Professor Randall Stewart's biography will be so to all students of Hawthorne. Mr. Stewart can be relied on for his facts, since he has long been a distinguished scholar in this field, having edited the voluminous Note Books, English as well as American ; yet it is a pity that he should give no references, so that we might if we wished easily follow up and enlarge our sense of the interesting points he brings up ; and that his bibliography should be so economical. This last is so partly because he has decided to ignore all previous biographers, though it may be doubted whether he gives us a clearer or deeper view of Hawthorne than we get from, say, Henry James. Mr. Stewart does, indeed, attempt to discount the loneliness of the "solitary years," and makes Hawthorne out to be a more genial figure, more of a bon viveur, than he is generally allowed to be. Also, in this modest and unpretentious book, safe and academic in matter and style, and a sure guide along the straight track of factual life, he gives us more detail than usual, about, for example, the curriculum at Bowdoin, the Customs House controversy and the period in Italy. Criticism is absent, except from the last chapter, where he indicates what would seem to be the accepted approach, serviceable for anyone
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