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the upper, spiritual, reasoned being. Secretly he lusts in the sensual imagination, in bruising the heel of his spiritual self and laming it forever." These are typical utterances of an older and a newer critic of American authors. If we try to substantiate them by looking carefully at his work for instances of self-portraiture, the cases most easily susceptible of something like proof are the three observer characters, Holgrave, Coverdale, and Kenyon.

Miles Coverdale's function in The Blithedale Romance is distinctly that of the author-observer. Not till the last sentence in the book do we learn that he is supposed to be in love with Priscilla, a condition to which his conduct gives almost no clue. His coldhearted way of staying outside the play of passions is remarked by himself and by others. Even in the secluded circle of Blithedale, he seeks the greater seclusion of self-communion in solitude (p. 421). He likens his own part in the story to that of the Chorus in classic plays. He assists the story only in the French sense. He reproaches himself a number of times, and others also reproach him, first, with an inability to feel that any cause in the world is worth his whole-hearted adherence, and secondly, with a habit of prying into other people's characters for no purpose except the gratification of his curiosity (pp. 398, 415, 463, 495, 502). This second tendency is usually unfavorably presented, as in this pas

"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" (p. 495). Once, however, he defends it as no mere vulgar curiosity but rather most delicate appreciation. Zenobia, he says, "should have been able to appreciate that quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other lives, and to endeavor-by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions, by taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with the companions whom God assigned me to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves" (p. 502). The principal actors in the drama should have been glad, he thinks, of being so intelligently seen through.

Such a character has much in common with the young daguerreo

• English Review, v. 28, p. 410. The passage does not exist in the book as published in the United States, though the accusation is even more plain.

typist in The House of Seven Gables. The fundamental basis of this story is an idea at which Hawthorne had hinted the previous year in The Custom House sketch, in relation to his own family; namely, that "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil." He speaks also, of his own "strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment" for his native town of Salem. "It is not love, but instinct." There, too, he speaks of his determination that his children, who "have had other birthplaces," ""shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." Of this dual idea, the story is made, the tyranny of their past history and of place ruling the lives of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the escape from such influences being the keynote of the much less interesting love tale of Phoebe and Holgrave.

Holgrave, like Coverdale, appears to be drifting through life, looking on without taking part. Although only twenty-two years old, he has already been engaged in nine different occupations. One of his first speeches to Hepzibah is, “I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it." Phoebe "scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature. He was too calm and cool an observer" (p. 213). Phoebe "felt his eye often; his heart, seldom or never." He studied all three members of the family attentively. "He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all, he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more. In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food, not heart-sustenance." While he is described as having a certain power, we are told that he is pretty certain never to fulfil the promise of his qualities. Later in the story (p. 258), he promises Phoebe that, if opportunity offers, he will > help the two unfortunates of the/tale, but explains that he has no real impulse either to help or to hinder them, "but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself and to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral satisfaction from it."

Without wearying ourselves with vain repetitions, we may say

shortly that about the same combination of qualities go to make up the sculptor, Kenyon, in The Marble Faun. He is supposed to be in love with Hilda, but the story of his successful suit is so little elaborated that we almost feel it unnecessary. Far more important is his role of observer, confidant, and chorus. He, too, is curious to know what lies behind the events he sees; he, too, has little sympathy with the suffering he witnesses. Unlike Hilda, he does not feel contaminated by the crime of his friends. His curiosity and his coolness are so at war with each other that once, in a striking scene, he refuses to hear Miriam's secret for fear he may somehow be obliged to share her suffering. In fact, Kenyon scarcely acts like a gentleman towards a friend in need. We echo Phoebe's exclamation to Holgrave, "I wish you would behave more like a Christian and a human being!"

5

That these three are fairly close to Hawthorne's own character there is little doubt. A comparison of Passages from the American Note Books from April through October 1841 with chapters I-IX of The Blithedale Romance would convince anyone that Miles Coverdale in the story is put through many of Hawthorne's actual experiences at Brook Farm, even to a bad cold in the head, and that he thinks many of Hawthorne's thoughts recorded eleven years before the Romance was published. There is plenty of testi- | mony that Hawthorne was absolutely taciturn in society. We can not suppose his silence due merely to shyness, at least in later life. Many friends such as Howells have told us of his social charm when he chose to exert himself, and he was quite equal to the miscellaneous social demands of his consulship at Liverpool. The cause of his aloofness of manner seems rather to have been an actual lack of sympathy with what he saw and heard. Even in the early years of married life, he spent most of his day apart from his wife. Much as he loved her, her physical presence was not necessary to his happiness. Yet he went readily enough into company, whether that of the tavern or the Saturday Club, for the silent observation of human nature was his keenest pleasure. As early as 1831, in Sights from a Steeple, he tells us that "the most. desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their

In Literary Friends and Acquaintance, pp. 55-57.

deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself" (p. 220). Twenty years later in a letter to Horatio Bridge, prefixed to The Snow Image, he tells us that he has been burrowing to his utmost ability into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance; and he once more boasts that his apparently autobiographical introductions really give us only externals, matters entirely on the surface. "These things," he declares, "hide the man instead of displaying him." Carelessly then-and, I feel sure, with no expectation that anyone would really accept the challenge-he flings us a hint: "You must make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits."

Now the roster of Hawthorne's characters yields a whole procession of persons who, with an immense variety of outward attributes and circumstances, present much this same combination of coldness and aloofness with much outward charm, brilliance, sensitiveness to impressions, and intellectual curiosity or eagerness to discover the secret of life. One very powerful story, The Christmas Banquet (1844), presents the figure of Gervayse Hastings, a perennial guest at the banquet arranged each year for the most unhappy of all the earth. "He looks like a man-and, perchance, like a better specimen of man than you ordinarily meet. You might esteem him wise; he is capable of cultivation and refinement, and has at least an external conscience, but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those to which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find him chill and unsubstantial—a mere vapor" (p. 322). The other wretched guests, a company which includes the murderer, the idiot, the sick, the bereaved, the unfortunate, the misanthropist, believe he has no business at the banquet, for he is rich, well-dressed, fortunate, and apparently always smiling. At the last he explains though he has no idea they will understand-that his misfortune is "a chilliness-a want of earnestness-a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor-a haunting perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men have, I have really possessed nothing, neither joys nor griefs. All things, all persons . . . have been like shadows flickering on the wall. It was so with

my wife and children-with those who seemed my friends: it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before me. Neither have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest" (p. 345). In his short stories Hawthorne is constantly composing variations on this same theme, the temperament set apart from others by its own defective sympathy, or its greater intelligence, or both, unable to participate in life as a whole and making only shadowy contacts. Feathertop, the man without a heart, ceases to exist when he realizes the cause of his isolation. The painter in The Prophetic Pictures, "though gentle in manner, and upright in intent, and action, . . . did not possess kindly feelings; his heart was cold; no living creature could be brought near enough to keep him warm" (p. 206). In The Artist of the Beautiful, the perfect work of art, a living butterfly, is killed because it is misunderstood by the world, and this failure is as much the artist's as the world's. In The Snow Image, the same story is retold in children's terms. In The Birthmark, the scientist, a man of fine character and noble purpose, forgets the claims of love and the consideration due to human weakness in the eagerness of the intellectual quest, uses human life for the purposes of experiment-that is, coldly, scientifically, impersonally and destroys the very life he hopes to perfect. Hollingsworth, the philanthropist in The Blithedale Romance, is guilty of the same unscrupulous behavior towards his friend Coverdale and towards the two women who love him; and he, too, fails to accomplish the social benefit he intends for mankind.

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These characters are all such as may, at least outwardly, be classed as "good." In such a figure as Rappaccini, on the other hand, who cares infinitely more for science than for mankind," and who "would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge" (p. 116), this favorite conception of Hawthorne's passes over into the realm of evil. Rappaccini, like and unlike the Artist of the Beautiful, has learned how to create life, but only of a poisonous variety. His learning spreads death in the world.

In fact, this cold curiosity in its extreme form is Hawthorne's idea of the unpardonable sin. Ethan Brand, laughing without mirth, takes pride in having committed “a sin that grew nowhere else!"-the " only sin that deserves a recompense of immortal

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