Hawthorne's Short Stories Read Online

The circle now began to widen perceptibly. Longfellow reviewed the book with excited appreciativeness; there were other signs of regard and recognition from time to time, and when, in 1842, a second, expanded edition of the Tales appeared, they were noticed at length in several quarters—most momentously in Graham’s, where Poe devoted to them a famous and flattering review. So much as five years later, however, and even after Hawthorne, with the Mosses from an Old Manse, had made a third collection, Poe could still speak of him, in another review, as “the example, par excellence, in this country, of the privately-admired and publicly-unappreciated man of genius.” Few as the appreciators may have been, they were, most of them, highly competent to speak; many of them were other writers—the most ardent of all was Herman Melville—and their judgment was at last borne out, in 1850, by the great public success of The Scarlet Letter. The following year, with The Snow Image, Hawthorne made a fourth and final collection of his tales, the last that he wished to preserve or that, as he said, had survived in his own remembrance.1

Not many writers have worked so long amid such a hush or in such a shadow: the tales themselves, as Hawthorne himself strongly felt, are colored everywhere by the circumstances under which they were written. His own feeling was that they suffered as a result, and he was partly right; but they gained something vital too—a curiously cool intensity, an air of candid shyness, a quality of being at once private and communicative. They were not, he said, “the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart,” but his attempts—imperfectly successful ones, he thought—“to open an intercourse with the world.” But the truth is that his stories partook of both characters: they were attempts at communication with other men, such as only a solitary could conceive, but they were also attempts to make plain to himself the meaning of his own inward and outward experience. They were soliloquies that were meant to be overheard.

In any other period they might well have taken quite a different literary form—fabulous, visionary, legendary, poetic (in the limited sense), and even dramatic—and if they took the form of “short stories,” it was because, at the moment Hawthorne began to write, that mold was a natural and almost a handy one. This does not mean that it was long-established; on the contrary, it was in its primitive or experimental stage, especially in English, and if it was handy, it was only in the sense in which the history play was so for the young Shakespeare. The Italian novella, the French conte, the realistic-moral English tale—these were ancient types, but they were nothing to the purpose of Hawthorne or his contemporaries: they were not “inward,” they were not meditative or musing, they were not a matter of tone and lighting and harmony. It was only latterly that short pieces of prose fiction had begun to take on qualities such as these, and Hawthorne was as much the creator as he was the inheritor of a form.

He had been preceded by the romantic Germans, Tieck and Hoffmann and Chamisso, with their tales of fatal Geheimnisse, of uncanny solicitation and ruin, of “lost shadows” and spell-working portraits, of delusion and anxiety and guilt; and in his indolent but impressionable way he undoubtedly read some of these writers as they were being translated in his youth. He knew Irving, too, and the lesson of Irving’s delicate, daydreaming, watercolorist’s art was not lost on him. In the ten years between “Rip Van Winkle” and Hawthorne’s earliest tales, a whole little literature of short fiction had sprouted in this country, a mostly very pale but sometimes rather vivid literature of ghost stories, Indian legends, “village tales,” and historical anecdotes—the thin foliage of the annuals as it was put forth by the now forgotten Pauldings and Leggetts and Sedgwicks who were the lesser Faulkners or Porters of their time. It was (to change the figure) the only springboard from which Hawthorne could take off directly, and what he, like Poe at exactly the same moment, succeeded in making of the gift-book or magazine tale of the twenties and thirties is only one more out of a thousand illustrations of a familiar literary truth, the power of men of genius to sublimate the most unpromising forms.

He had things to express that were his own, not simply the moral and aesthetic small change of the era, and he had, what none of the others except Poe had in anything like the same degree, an innate sense of the plastic, an instinct for form, the tact and touch of a born artist—an artist whom it is tempting to think of as peculiarly New England, and to associate in one’s imagination with the old Yankee craftsmen, the silversmiths and the cabinet-makers whose solid and yet fastidious work his own does really suggest. He of course learned something here from his literary predecessors, even no doubt from the little men, but what he arrived at was his own and not Hoffmann’s or Irving’s or Leggett’s.

It happens that we can follow part way the process of his art; from an early period Hawthorne, like James and Chekhov after him, had had the habit of keeping notebooks, and on these, when he came to write his tales, he constantly drew. We often find in them, therefore, what James would call the “germs” or “seeds” from which the stories, in their own good season, unfolded. We find, too, the seeds from which they did not unfold: the observations of real people, queer or humorsome or even ordinary individuals who, unlike those in Chekhov, rarely reappear in the tales; the overheard or communicated fragments of “true” stories out of real lives which, unlike those in James, almost never made the transition from hearsay to art. The germ of a typical Hawthorne tale is not a “real” individual or an actual and firsthand story—his imagination needed a further withdrawal from things than that—but either some curious passage that had quickened his fancy in his reading or some abstractly phrased idea, moral or psychological, that he had arrived at in his endless speculative reveries.

He had been struck, to take an example of the first of these, by an anecdote about Gilbert Stuart which William Dunlap tells in his history of the fine arts in America. Stuart, according to Dunlap, had been commissioned by Lord Mulgrave to paint the portrait of his brother, General Phipps, on the eve of the General’s sailing for India. When the portrait was finished and Mulgrave, for the first time, examined it, he broke out with an exclamation of horror: “What is this?—this is very strange!” “I have painted your brother as I saw him,” said Stuart, and Mulgrave rejoined: “I see insanity in that face.” Some time later the news reached England that Phipps, in India, had indeed gone mad and taken his own life by cutting his throat. The great painter, as Dunlap adds, had seen into a deeper reality behind the man’s outward semblance, and with the insight of genius had painted that. Upon this hint Hawthorne wrote, and the result was “The Prophetic Pictures.”

Consider, however, what he ends by doing with the hint. An anecdote, strange enough in itself and told for the sake of its deeper meaning, but naked and meager in circumstance and shape, has been worked over into an enriched and molded narrative, in which the original suggestion is only barely recognizable. Back into a remoter past goes the time of the action; back into a past which, as James would say, was “far enough away without being too far”; not the too recent past, at any rate, of Stuart himself, who had died less than ten years before and whose memory was much too fresh in men’s minds. The tone of time is to count, but it is the tone of a dimmer time; and Hawthorne, with a few touches of his delicate, poetic erudition, evokes for us, only just fully enough, the simpler Boston of the mid-colonial day. The painter himself remains nameless and a little mythical; he has no actual counterpart in history—not in Smibert, certainly, nor Blackburn—and of course he could have none. As for his sitter, that sitter has become, to deepen the interest, two people, a young man and his bride: two lives, not merely one, are to be darkened and destroyed. The premonitions of madness, as in Dunlap, are to be detected in Walter Ludlow’s countenance, but so too are the premonitions of passive suffering and all-enduring love in Elinor’s. The painter himself, indeed, is to be involved in a way that did not hold for Stuart, but meanwhile the gloomy sequence of incidents moves from its natural prologue (the ordering of the portraits) to its first and second “acts” (the painting and then the displaying of them) through its long interval of latency (the years of the painter’s absence) to its scene of violent culmination (the painter’s return and the onset of Walter’s madness). Such was the form—carefully pictorial, narratively deliberate, in a derived sense dramatic—that Hawthorne worked out for himself in his most characteristic tales.

Dunlap’s anecdote, however, has undergone a still more revealing metamorphosis. The “moral” of Hawthorne’s actual story is not, as Dunlap’s was, the great painter’s power of seeing beyond the physical countenance into the mind and heart of the sitter, though Hawthorne does, with a deliberate turn of the ironic screw, put just that thought into Walter Ludlow’s mouth.