Hawthorne Centenary Essays
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HAWTHORNE CENTENARY ESSAYS Edited by Roy Harvey Pearce Robert Lowell "Hawthorne" (a poem) Terence Martin "The Method of Hawthorne's Tales" Charles Feidelson, Jr. "The Scarlet Letter" Marcus Cunliffe "The House of the Seven Gables" Robert C. Elliott "The Blithedale Romance" Harry Levin "Statues from Italy: The Marble Faun" Edward H. Davidson "The Unfinished Romances" Hyatt H. Waggoner "Art and Belief" Daniel Hoffman "Myth, Romance, and the Childhood of Man" Roy Harvey Pearce "Romance and the Study of History" Larzer Ziff "The Artist and Puritanism" R. W. B. Lewis "The Tactics of Sanctity: Hawthorne and James" Edwin Fussell "Neutral Territory: Hawthorne on the Figurative Frontier" Edwin H. Cady "The Wizard Hand': Hawthorne, 1864-1900" Seymour L. Gross and Randall Stewart "The Hawthorne Revival" Roger Asselineau "Hawthorne Abroad" Matthew J. Bruccoli "Hawthorne as a Collector's Item, 1885-1924" Fredson Bowers "Hawthorne's Text" Lionel Trilling "Our Hawthorne" Hawthorne Centenary Essays Hawthorne Centenary Essays Edited by Roy Harvey Pearce Ohio State University Press Copyright © 1964 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 64-17821 Introductory Note W HEN plans were being made for the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the general editors decided that for such an edition only textual and historical introductions were appropriate. However firmly rooted in historical understanding, critical studies, we decided, would not in their very nature have the staying power of the texts we should establish. Accordingly, the introductions to volumes to the Centenary Edition are meant to supply infor mation relevant primarily to Hawthorne's texts and their history. Still, we wanted to commemorate the centenary of Hawthorne's death with a volume of studies which would show him and his work as they presently confront us. We trust that the texts of the Centenary Edition will make it all the surer that Hawthorne will not change. But surely his readers will. If there continues to be a Hawthorne problem, it is, as it always has been, a problem which he sets for his readers. The essays which follow offer so many solutions to that problem as it now stands, so many interpretations of "our" Hawthorne. R. H. P. Contents ROBERT LOWELL: Hawthorne 3 THE TALES AND ROMANCES TERENCE MARTIN: The Method of Hawthorne's Tales 7 CHARLES FEIDELSON, JR. : The Scarlet Letter 3i MARCUS CUNLIFFE: The House of the Seven Gables 79 ROBERT C. ELLIOTT: The Blithedale Romance IO3 HARRY LEVIN: Statues from Italy: The Marble Faun 119 EDWARD H. DAVIDSON: The Unfinished Romances 141 ART AND SUBSTANCE HYATT H. WAGGONER: Art and Belief 167 DANIEL HOFFMAN: Myth, Romance, and the Childhood of Man 197 ROY HARVEY PEARCE: Romance and the Study of History 22 1 LARZER ZIFF: The Artist and Puritanism 245 R. W. B. LEWIS: The Tactics of Sanctity: Hawthorne and James 271 EDWIN FUSSELL: Neutral Territory: Hawthorm on the Figurative Frontier 297 DISCOVERY AND REDISCOVERY EDWIN H. CADY: 'The Wizard Hand'*: Hawthorne, 1864-1900 3*7 SEYMOUR L. GROSS AND RANDALL STEWART: The Hawthorne Revival 335 ROGER ASSELINEAU: Hawthorne Abroad 367 MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI: Hawthorne as a Collector's Item, 1885-1924 387 FREDSON BOWERS: Hawthorne's Text 401 AFTERWORD LIONEL TRILLING: Our Hawthorne 429 Notes 461 Hawthorne Centenary Essays Rohert Lowell Hawthorne Follow its lazy main street lounging from the almshouse to Gallows Hill along a flat, unvaried surface covered with wooden houses aged by yellow drain like the unhealthy hair of an old dog. You'll walk to no purpose in Hawthorne's Salem. I cannot resilver the smudged plate. I drop to Hawthorne, the customs officer, measuring coal and mostly trying to keep warm- to the stunted black schooner, the dismal South-end dock, the wharf piles with their fungus of ice. On State Street a steeple with a glowing dial clock measures the weary hours, the merciless march of professional feet. Even this shy, distrustful ego sometimes walked on top of the blazing roof, and felt those flashes that char the discharged cells of the brain. Look at the faces- Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes and Whittier! Study the grizzled silver of their beards. Hawthorne's picture, however, has a blond mustache and golden General Custer scalp. He looks like a Civil War officer. He shines in the firelight. His hard survivor's smile is touched with fire. Leave him alone for a moment or two, and you'll see him with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant, the commonest thing, as if it were the clew. The disturbed eyes rise, furtive, foiled, dissatisfied from meditation on the true and insignificant. The Tales and Romances Terence Martin The Method of Hawthorne's Tales IT. AWTHORNE'S primary concern as a writer was to gain access to what he once called "the kingdom of possibilities." Repeatedly, he speaks of his need to attenuate the American insistence on actuality. The burden of the prefaces to his major romances is that he requires a latitude for his imagination, a "neutral ground" set metaphorically between the real world and the imaginary. His romances take form—he would have us believe—in the context of poetic precincts and fairy lands, part of the geography of the "neutral ground." Hawthorne's effort HAWTHORNE CENTENARY ESSAYS to dilate reality for the purposes of his art ends only with the significant admission in his introductory letter to Our Old Home in 1863 that "the Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me." What all such statements signify is that Hawthorne needed a fiction to create fiction. And long before he turned his ener gies to the romance, he had confronted the problem of how to bring his fiction into being in the form of the tale. The method of Hawthorne's tales reveals the achievement of a writer who had to establish the conditions of his fiction in the very act of creating that fiction itself. As he himself acknowledged, Hawthorne did not improve steadily as a writer of tales. Some of his best work came surprisingly early: "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Young Goodman Brown," and "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" were first published in 1832, 1835, and 1836, respectively. Slight tales appeared in the same year with major tales. Twice-Told Tales (1837) was considered superior as a collection to Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) by Poe, Mel ville, and most later critics. Yet "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) and "Ethan Brand" (185O clearly attempt and achieve more than do, say, "The White Old Maid" (1835) and "Mrs. Bull frog" (1837). The movement of Hawthorne's tales, indirect and often unsure, is toward The Scarlet Letter. But it took twenty years of striving before Hawthorne's triumph in The Scarlet Letter exhausted the tale for him as a working form even as it transformed the tale into the romance. During those years Hawthorne tried continually to set the proper conditions for his fiction as a way of resolving his most fundamental problem as a writer. THE CONDITIONS OF FICTION Hawthorne opens "The Hollow of the Three Hills" (1830) with an abrupt evocation of a mysterious past: "In those strange THE METHOD OF HAWTHORNE'S TALES old times, when fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met together at an appointed time and place.'' He begins, that is, by equating the real and the fantastic. If there were such a time, we see immediately, when dreams and reveries existed as a part of actual life, then surely there could be no more congenial setting for his tale. As the condition of his fiction, Hawthorne postulates the existence of "strange old times," then uses the immense latitude he thereby acquires to relate a tale of domestic tragedy from a thoroughly non-domestic point of view. By means of the crone's powers, with their suggestion of Satanic darkness, the lady of the tale can look back into her life to see the tragic consequences of her actions. She has wrung the hearts of her parents, betrayed her husband, and "sinned against natural affection" by leaving her child to die. Amid a setting redolent of witchcraft and evil, she experiences her visions of society. After each vision, Hawthorne makes a studied transition back to the hollow, thereby reinforcing the reality principle of the tale. For this is where the lady's sins have led her. She must consort with witchcraft and deviltry if she is to have even a glimpse of society. To measure the distance of her fall, she must make use of powers antithetical to heart and home. Taking advantage of the latitude assumed in (and achieved by) his abrupt opening sentence, Hawthorne has turned the world as we ordinarily know it inside out—we see society only in momentary visions from the standpoint of the marvelous. He has managed the form of his tale so that it embodies in a unique way a theme characteristic of his work. The opening sentence of "The Hollow of the Three Hills" constitutes a Hawthornesque variation of the time-honored opening of the fairy tale. It was a method of getting his fiction immediately under way which Hawthorne would use repeatedly. "The Great Carbuncle" (1837), for example, begins, "At night HAWTHORNE CENTENARY ESSAYS fall, once in the olden time. ... " In "The Lily's Quest" (1839), this has become "Two lovers, once upon a time. ." And in "Earth's Holocaust" (1844), "Once upon a time—but whether in the time past or the time to come is a matter of little or no moment.