Hawthorne's Short Stories (3 page)

His awareness of the human condition, as a result, was intrinsically an anxious one—not fiercely anxious, as Poe’s was, or angrily anxious, like Melville’s, but anxious nevertheless in a quiet, painful, persistent, pervasive way. Sometimes this anxiety comes to a head, in his work, in a piercing moment of bitterness and almost despair, but its typical expression is grave, pensive, or mournful. Hawthorne is the elegiac poet, so to say, of the sense of guilt. And this guilty sense attaches itself, when he is being most himself, not to sins or vices of the gross and palpable sort—“incontinence,” “violence,” or “fraud” (to use the Dantean triad)—but to the evil that seemed to Hawthorne, from self-knowledge and observation, to be the quintessence of them all, the evil of selfishness or pride. In just this insight he was not very far from Dante, as it happened, but in any case he was very far indeed from Emerson and the prevailing spokesmen of his time. For them the essence of all virtue was reliance on oneself. Not for Hawthorne. Upon both the theory and the practice of self-help, self-trust, self-reliance he looked with a troubled gaze: he was not a good “individualist” in that sense. He was far less disturbed than Emerson by the dangers of conformity, of dependence, of compromise; he was far
more
disturbed by the evil wrought in a man’s nature by the conscious or unconscious separation of himself from his fellows and the deadly tendency to hold himself not only aloof from them but superior to them. “I wrapped myself in
PRIDE
as in a mantle,” says the heroine of one of his tales, and the gloomy upshot of “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” is a metaphor of what follows on a gesture of that sort.

Most of Hawthorne’s characters wrap themselves in some such cloak, though the pride it symbolizes may take many forms—the pride of social rank, the pride of wealth and power, the pride of moral self-righteousness. One form it takes, however, is easily the most characteristic and the most revealing. This is the pride of intellect. There is no evading the fact that Hawthorne distrusted that faculty, distrusted it with a consistency and an undertone of self-reproach that have in them a shade of the Dostoevskian. To pride oneself on one’s intellectual powers or attainments, to cultivate the intellect at the expense of the sympathies, to take a merely speculative or scientific interest in one’s fellow men—this was for Hawthorne the deadliest form that human guilt could take: it was indeed, as “Ethan Brand” exemplifies, the Unpardonable Sin, the sin which the protagonist of that tale spent his life seeking and which he ended by finding in himself. This is the guiltiness also of the “prophetic” painter, of Dr. Rappaccini, and of Aylmer in “The Birthmark.” It is the guiltiness to which superior natures are peculiarly prone; a more than ordinary diabolism is the fruit of it, and in their more tenuous, more evanescent, more “emblematic” way these characters of Hawthorne’s belong in the same moral world as Raskolnikov or Stavrogin or Ivan Karamazov.

The penalty of intellectual pride and of all other forms of egotism—indeed, of guilt in general—is the deepest misery Hawthorne can conceive, the misery of estrangement, of separateness, of insulation from the normal life of mankind. This is the penalty of guilt, but it is also in a sense its origin, and in still another sense it
is
guilt itself, for no more in Hawthorne than in any deeply reflective tragic poet can one distinguish, beyond a certain point, between an evil and its source or its sequel. The simplest and truest thing to say of Hawthorne’s human vision is that for him the essence of wrong is aloneness; you begin and you end with that. To err is to cut oneself off from “the whole sympathetic chain of human nature”; to suffer is to be merely on one’s own. Solitariness, original or consequential, is his abiding theme; it is hard to believe that any other writer, including writers greater than he, has ever had a more acute sense than Hawthorne had of the whole terrible meaning of the word “solitude.”

The picture of human life that emerges from his work is naturally, as he himself would say, a “dusky” one, but it would be very shallow to label Hawthorne, in hackneyed language, a “pessimistic” or “misanthropic” writer: with all his limitations, he went too deep for sentimental pessimism or facile cynicism. He took a dark view but not a low one of human nature; he took a doubtful but not a despairing view of the human prospect. He called himself “a thoroughgoing democrat,” and certainly the adoption of this creed, as he says elsewhere, requires no scanty share of faith in the ideal. In his way, which was not the “optimistic” one, he had such faith. He had no faith in or respect for the forms and the forces that separate men from one another or distinguish sharply among them; he had no respect whatever for rank or caste or class, and he had almost as little for the intellectual ranks or classes that serve only too often to keep men apart. His real faith, quite “paradoxically,” was in what he called the heart. Much that he saw there was terrible enough, but humanly speaking he believed in nothing else—in nothing, that is, except in the capacities that equalize instead of dividing men, in the affections that draw them together, in imaginative sympathy and the sense of a common brotherhood in error and suffering. His conviction is quite clear that what is wrong can be righted by nothing unless by love. This may be, like Melville’s, a tragic version of the democratic faith; that is hardly to say that it is an unphilosophical one.

N
EWTON
A
RVIN
.

T
HERE
was once a time when New England groaned under the actual pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the Revolution. James II., the bigoted successor of Charles the Voluptuous, had annulled the charters of all the colonies, and sent a harsh and unprincipled soldier to take away our liberties and endanger our religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely a single characteristic of tyranny: a Governor and Council, holding office from the King, and wholly independent of the country; laws made and taxes levied without concurrence of the people immediate or by their representatives; the rights of private citizens violated, and the titles of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint stifled by restrictions on the press; and, finally, disaffection overawed by the first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on our free soil. For two years our ancestors were kept in sullen submission by that filial love which had invariably secured their allegiance to the mother country, whether its head chanced to be a Parliament, Protector, or Popish Monarch. Till these evil times, however, such allegiance had been merely nominal, and the colonists had ruled themselves, enjoying far more freedom than is even yet the privilege of the native subjects of Great Britain.

At length a rumor reached our shores that the Prince of Orange had ventured on an enterprise, the success of which would be the triumph of civil and religious rights and the salvation of New England. It was but a doubtful whisper: it might be false, or the attempt might fail; and, in either case, the man that stirred against King James would lose his head. Still the intelligence
produced a marked effect. The people smiled mysteriously in the streets, and threw bold glances at their oppressors; while far and wide there was a subdued and silent agitation, as if the slightest signal would rouse the whole land from its sluggish despondency. Aware of their danger, the rulers resolved to avert it by an imposing display of strength, and perhaps to confirm their despotism by yet harsher measures. One afternoon in April, 1689, Sir Edmund Andros and his favorite councillors, being warm with wine, assembled the red-coats of the Governor’s Guard, and made their appearance in the streets of Boston. The sun was near setting when the march commenced.

The roll of the drum at that unquiet crisis seemed to go through the streets, less as the martial music of the soldiers, than as a muster-call to the inhabitants themselves. A multitude, by various avenues, assembled in King Street, which was destined to be the scene, nearly a century afterwards, of another encounter between the troops of Britain, and a people struggling against her tyranny. Though more than sixty years had elapsed since the pilgrims came, this crowd of their descendants still showed the strong and sombre features of their character perhaps more strikingly in such a stern emergency than on happier occasions. There were the sober garb, the general severity of mien, the gloomy but undismayed expression, the scriptural forms of speech, and the confidence in Heaven’s blessing on a righteous cause, which would have marked a band of the original Puritans, when threatened by some peril of the wilderness. Indeed, it was not yet time for the old spirit to be extinct; since there were men in the street that day who had worshipped there beneath the trees, before a house was reared to the God for whom they had become exiles. Old soldiers of the Parliament were here, too, smiling grimly at the thought that their aged arms might strike another blow against the house of Stuart. Here, also, were the veterans of King Philip’s war, who had burned villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer. Several ministers were scattered among the crowd, which, unlike all other mobs, regarded them with such reverence, as if there were sanctity in their very garments. These holy men exerted their influence to quiet the people, but not to disperse them. Meantime, the purpose of the Governor, in disturbing the peace of the town at a
period when the slightest commotion might throw the country into a ferment was almost the universal subject of inquiry, and variously explained.