NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
'TITHE ghostly genius of Hawthorne is a great loss to the American people. He has been called a mystic, which he was not, —and
psychological dreamer, which he was in very slight degree. He was really the ghost of New England,—we do not mean the spirit," nor the "phantom," but the ghost in the older sense in which that term is used as the thin, ratified essence which is to be found somewhere behind the physical organization,—embodied, indeed, and not by any means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly taber- nacle, but yet only half embodied in it, endowed with a certain painful sense of the gulf between his nature and its organization, always recognizing the gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always more or less unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit in them. They are ghostly writings. He was, to our minds, a sort of sign to New England of the divorce that has been going on there (and not less perhaps in old England) between its people's spiritual and earthly nature, and of the impotence which they will soon feel, if they are to be absorbed more and more in that shrewd hard earthly sense which is one of their most striking characteristics, in communicating even with the ghost of their former self. Hawthorne, with all his shy- ness, and tenderness, and literary reticence, shows very distinct traces also of understanding well the cold, curious, and shrewd spirit which besets the Yankees even more than other commercial peoples. His heroes have usually not a little of this hardness in them. Coverdale, for instance, in the " Blithedale: Romance," confesses that "that cold tendency between instinct and intellect which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart." Holgrave, in the "House of the Seven Gables," is one of the same class of shrewd, cold, curious heroes. Indeed there are few of the tales without a cha- racter of this type. But though Hawthorne had a deep sympathy with the practical as well aa the literary genius of New England, it is always in a far-removed and ghostly kind of way, as though he were stricken by some spell which half-paralyzed him from communi- cating with the life around him, as though he saw it only by a re- flected light. His spirit haunted rather than ruled his body ; his body hampered his spirit. Yet his external career was not only not romantic, but identified with all the dullest routine of commercial duties. That a man who consciously telegraphed, as it were, with the world, transmitting meagre messages through his material or- ganization, should have been first a Custom-house officer in Massa- chusetts, and then the Consul in Liverpool, brings out into the strongest possible relief the curiously representative character in which he stood to New England as its literary or intellectual ghost. There is nothing more ghostly in his writings than his account, in his recent book, of the Consulship in Liverpool,—how he began by trying to communicate frankly with his fellow-countrymen, how he found the task more and more difficult, and gradually drew back into the twilight of his reserve, how he shrewdly and some- what coldly watched "the dim shadows as they go and come," speculated idly on their fate, and all the time discharged the re- gular routine of Consular business, witnessing the usual depositions, giving captains to captainless crews, affording costive advice or assist- ance to Yankees when in need of a friend, listening to them when they were only anxious to offer, not ask, assistance, and generally observing them from that distant and speculative outpost whence all common things looked strange.
Hawthorne, who was a delicate critic of himself, was well aware of the shadowy character of his own genius, though not aware that precisely here lay its curious and thrilling power. In the preface to "Twice-Told Tales" he tells us frankly, "The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written ; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." And then he adds, coming still nearer to the mark, "They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart, but his attempts, and very im- perfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse witk the world." That is, he thinks, the secret of his weakness, but it is also the secret of his power. Ile carries with him always the air of trying to manifest himself ; and the words come faintly, not like whispers, so much as like sounds lost in the distance they have traversed. A common reader of Mr. Hawthorne would say that he took a pleasure in mystifying his readers, or weaving cobweb threads not to bind their curiosity, but to startle and chill them, so gtavely does he tell you in many of his tales that he could not quite make out the details of a fictitious conversation, and that he can only at best hint its purport. For instance, in "Transformation," he says of his heroine and her tempter, "Owing to this moral estrangement, this chill remoteness of their position, there have come to us but a few vague whisperings of what passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the sinister personage who had dogged her footsteps ever since her visit to the
catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we undertake a task resembling in its perplexity that of gathering up and piecing together the fragments of a letter which has been torn and scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance,—many sentences, and these probably the most im-
portant ones,—have flown too far on the winged breeze to be recovered." This is a favourite device of Mr. Hawthorne's, and does not, we think, proceed from the wish to mystify, so much ea from the refusal of his own imagination so to embody his own conception as to make it clearly conceivable to the,,mind of his readers. He had a clear conception of his own design, and a coa- ception, too, of the world for which he was writing, and was ever afraid of not conveying his own conception, but some other dis- tinct from it and inconsistent with it, to the world, if he ex- pressed it in his own way. He felt that he could not re- produce in others his own idea, but should only succeed in spoil- ing the effect he had already, by great labour, produced. He had manifested himself partially, but the next stroke, if he made it at all, would spoil everything, mistranslate him, and reverse the im- pression he hoped to produce. It was the timidity of an artist who felt that he had, as it were, to translate all his symbols from a language he knew thoroughly into one he knew less perfectly, but still so perfectly as to be nervously sensible to the slightest fault. It was a process like that which the wild artist Blake describes as his conversation with the ghost of Voltaire, though without its certainty of success. When the shrewd English barrister asked whether Voltaire spoke in English, Blake replied, " The impres- sion on my mind was English of course, but I have no doubt that he touched the keys French." Hawthorne's communication with others was a continual process of this kind. The keys of his genius were touched distinctly, but there was a liability to failure in rendering these touches into the common tongue so that others would understand them. And sometimes, like a ghost that moves its lips but cannot be heard, he simply acquiesced in the incapacity, only using expressive gestures and vague beckonings to indicate generally a subject for awe or fear. From a similar cause Hawthorne was continually expressing his regret that his native country has as yet no Past, and he seems always to have been endeavouring to supply the want by peopling his pictures of life with shadowy presences, which give them some of the wile effect of a haunted house or a medimval castle. We doubt much, however, whether it was really a Past after which he yearned. When he laid his scene in Italy or wrote about England he certainly made little or no use of their Past in his art, and, we imagine, that all he really craved for was that interposing film of thought between himself and the scene or characters he was delineating, which spared his isolated imagination the necessity of trying to paint in the exact style of the people he was addressing. He wanted an apparent excuse for the far-off and distant tone of thought and feeling which was most natural to him.
And when we tarn from the manner to the thoughts of this weird New England genius, we find the subjects on which Haw- thorne tries to "open intercourse" with the world are just the subjects on which the ghost of New England would like to con- verse with New England,—the workingroaq guilt, remorse, and shame in the old Puritan times, as in the "Scarlet Letter ;'' the morbid thirst to discover and to sin the unpardonable sin, as in the very striking little fragment called "Ethan Brand," which we have always regretted keenly that Hawthorne never completed ; the eternal solitude of every individual spirit, and the terror with which people realize that solitude, if they ever do completely realize it, as in the extraordinary tale of the awe inspired by a mild and even tender-hearted man, who has made a vow which puts a black veil for ever between his face and that of all other human beings, and called the "Minister's Black Veil ;"—the mode in which sin may develop the intellect treated imaginatively both in "Ethan Brand," and at greater length and with even more power in "Transformation ;"—the mysterious links between the flesh and the spirit, the physical and the spiri- tual nature, a subject on which all original New England writers have displayed a singular and almost morbid interest, and which Hawthorne has touched more or less in very many of his tales, especially in the strange and lurid fancy called " Rappacini's Daughter," where Hawthorne conceives a girl acccustomed by her father's chemical skill to the use of the most deadly poisons, whose beauty of mind and body is equal and perfect, but who, like deadly nightshade or the beautiful purple flowers whose fragrance she inhales, breathes out a poison which destroys every insect that floats near her mouth, shudders at her own malign influence on everything she touches, and gives rise of course to the most deadly conflict of emotions in those who love her ;—these, and sub- jects like these, indigenous in a mind steeped in the metaphysical and moral lbre of New England, endowed with much of the cold simplicity of the Puritan nature, and yet insulated from the world for which he wished to write, and too shy to press into it, are the favourite themes of Hawthorne's brooding and shadowy moods.
His power over his readers arises from much the same cause as that of his own fanciful creation,—the minister who wore the black veil as a symbol of the veil which is on all hearts, and who startled men less because he was hidden from their view than because he made them aware of their own solitude. "Why do you tremble at me alone ?" says the mild old man on his deathbed, from beneath his black veil, and with the glimmering smile on his half-hidden lips, "tremble also at each other? Have men avoided me, and "women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled only from my black veil? What but the mystery which it obscurely typifies has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best beloved, when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasur- ing up the secret of his sin, then deem me a monster for the symbol beneath which I have lived and die ! I look around me, and lo ! on every visage a black veil !" Hawthorne, with the pale melancholy smile that seems ever to be always on his lips, seems to speak from a somewhat similar solitude. Indeed we suspect the story was a kind of parable of his own experience. Edgar Poe, though by no means a poor critic, made one great blunder, when he said of Hawthorne, "he has not half the material for the exclusiveness of authorship that he has for its universality. He has the purest style, the finest taste, the most available scholar- ship, the most delicate humour, the most touching pathos, the most. radiant imagination, the most consummate ingenuity, and with these varied good qualities he has done well as a mystic. But is there any one of these qualities which should prevent his doing doubly well in a career of honest, upright, sensible, prehensible, and comprehensible literature? Let him mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Mcott, hang (if possible) the editor of the Dial, and throw out of window to the pigs all his old numbers of the North American Review." The difficulty did not lie in these sacrifices, but in the greater feat of escaping from himself, and could he have done so, of course he would as much have lost his imaginative spell as a ghost would do who really returned into the body. That pallid, tender, solitary, imaginative treatment of characteristics and problems which have lain, and still lie, very close to the heart of New England,—that power of exhibiting them lit up by the moon- light of a melancholy imagination,—that ghostly half appeal for sympathy, half offer of counsel on the diseases latent in the New England nature,—were no eccentricity, but of the essence of his literary power. What gave him that pure style, that fine taste, that delicate humour, that touching pathos, in a great degree even. that radiant imagination and that consummate ingenuity, was the consciously separate and aloof life which he lived. Without it he might have been merely a shrewd, hard, sensible, conservative,. success-worshipping, business-loving, Yankee democrat, like the intimate College friend Ex-President Pierce, whom he helped to raise to a somewhat ignominious term of power, and who was one. of the mourners beside his death-bed. Hawthorne had power to haunt such men as these because he had nursed many of their qualii- ties, thoughts, and difficulties, in a ghostly solitude, and could so make them feel, as the poor folks said figuratively of themselves after communing with the veiled minister, that "they had been with. him behind the veil."
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