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.

NEWTON ARVIN.

1 Two of the tales in this volume, “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “The Antique Ring,” were never reprinted by Hawthorne himself after their first appearance. They were included by his editor in editions of his works published after his death.

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Twice-Told Tales

THE GRAY CHAMPION

THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL

THE MAY-POLE OF MERRY MOUNT

THE GENTLE BOY

WAKEFIELD

THE GREAT CARBUNCLE

THE PROPHETIC PICTURES

DR. HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIMENT

LADY ELEANORE’S MANTLE

OLD ESTHER DUDLEY

THE AMBITIOUS GUEST

THE WHITE OLD MAID

PETER GOLDTHWAITE’S TREASURE

ENDICOTT AND THE RED CROSS

Mosses from an Old Manse

THE BIRTHMARK

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET

DROWNE’S WOODEN IMAGE

EARTH’S HOLOCAUST

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL

The Snow Image

THE GREAT STONE FACE

ETHAN BRAND

THE WIVES OF THE DEAD

Tales and Sketches

THE ANTIQUE RING

ALICE DOANE’S APPEAL

Other Books from Vintage Classics

Twice-Told Tales

THE GRAY CHAMPION

THERE 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.