For the art of telling America’s “moral history” had gone right on, with undiminished seriousness: interrupted, no doubt, by an extended time out for worldly work; but augmented, as well, by the discovery that the Transcendentalist logic of “idea” had solved the problem of the world no better than the Puritan premise of “grace.”

 

After 1846 Hawthorne published only a handful of new tales, and indeed “The Old Manse” explicitly promises that the Mosses will be the author’s “last collection of this nature.” Possibly Hawthorne was already meditating a second, more remunerative career, as novelist. Or perhaps he felt some more artistic sense of diminishing returns in the ironic short form he had both invented and perfected: “Unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind.” In any case, the promise was substantially kept.

The Scarlet Letter seems once to have been intended for inclusion in a collection to be titled “Old-Time Legends; together with sketches, experimental and ideal.” But then, of course, “The Custom-House” came along to help it stand alone. Subsequently, The Snow-Image (1851) gathered up the four tales Hawthorne had produced in 1849 and 1850; but as the volume is filled out with a much larger number of earlier pieces hitherto uncollected, the whole seems more a publishing convenience than a literary, project. And the second edition of the Mosses (1854) continues this same activity of universal self-collection-largely at the urging of now eager editors, and at some prejudice to the anti-transcendental unity of that remarkable work. By that date, of course, Hawthorne was the accomplished author of his “Three American Romances” and, searching in England for the theme of yet another extended romantic fiction, he was proportionately less concerned about the significance of his “obscure” years.

Of the post-1846 tales, several were solicited by friendly magazine editors. At least one, “The Snow-Image” (1850), was explicitly designated a “childish” performance; and it may be that “The Great Stone Face” (1850) was also meant to reach Hawthorne’s secondary audience of youthful readers. An extended sketch called “Main-Street” (1849) reveals once again the full wickedness of Hawthorne’s mature historical irony, but it reads best as a self-conscious defense of the earlier career as “moral” (rather than “positivistic”) historian of the Puritans; or else as a self-imposed review of the Puritan themes to be reactivated in The Scarlet Letter. And as it remains perfectly safe to regard “Ethan Brand” (1850) just as Hawthorne subtitled it, “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance,” so it seems fair to accept the 1846 Mosses as a sort of formal conclusion to Hawthorne’s career as writer and collector of tales and sketches. The novels were delayed, of course—in part, at least, by the second and more famous tour of custom-house service. But when they came, they came in a bunch. And in coming to constitute a sort of “Major Phase,” they have fully overshadowed the last, scattered attempts at short fiction.

Yet no survey of Hawthorne’s tales can afford to omit “Ethan Brand”—not only because it may signal Hawthorne’s first, unsuccessful transition from tale to romance, but also, and more significantly, because it makes clear, one last time, that Hawthorne’s most romantic imaginings are never quite free of historical source and local application. One powerful reason for believing “Ethan Brand” indeed survives as but a fragment of a longer work is that it draws on and virtually exausts the wealth of particular observation Hawthorne had set down in a 50,000-word notebook of his 1838 trip to western Massachusetts: bad policy, if one brief tale were all he had originally intended. But the best reason for valuing the actual achievement of “Ethan Brand” is that in it all this “local color” is deployed in the career of an American Faust who has never ceased to be a Puritan, if only malgré lui.

When we ask, as we must, what it means for Ethan Brand to have begun his notorious search for the “unpardonable sin” in a spirit not of arrogance but of brotherhood, the answer keeps coming back that—like Melville’s Ahab, whose creation he plainly helped to inspire—Brand has hoped to act as a sort of representative human hero, a kind of latter-day, backwoods New England Prometheus. Fire having already been snatched from the jealous gods, and long since harnessed to the civilized arts of environmental engineering, what daring task remained? Or else, more defiantly formulated, what secret remained, within the fire, to remind the brooding humanist of the awful uncertainty that still enshrouded human life? Not death, apparently, but only the knowledge of that one supposed sin which of its very nature defied the mercy of even a thoroughly encovenanted Jehova. Perhaps the secret was not entirely past finding out.

No doubt the question was, in itself, impious in the last degree, like Ahab’s monomaniac inquisition into the mystery of universal iniquity. No doubt Brand looked “too long into the fire.” So that the fiery conclusion—of suicide at the moment of cosmic blasphemy—may seem predictable enough. Yet the sense of triumph over all the world’s “half-way” sinners is one that would have to develop. Himself, at last, a “Brand [Un]Plucked from the Burning,” still this ultimate neopuritan rebel appears to have begun with a concern for the reason of human despair as plausible as that of Cotton Mather himself. Nor, as the insistent allusions to writers of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism make clear, had the matter of malignity been entirely settled or left behind; from which observation, we may infer, the author of Moby-Dick took considerable aid and comfort.

If Hawthorne’s own effort proved “abortive,” the explanation must surely lie in some temperamental inability to sustain a Melvillean protest against the enduring legacy of Calvinist orthodoxy. More historical than speculative, finally, Hawthorne’s circumspect intelligence could see at once that the transcendence promised by perfect negation was as illusory as any other: one denied what one knew, then lapsed to the elements of universal process. Others endured, if not to tell the tale, at least to gather up the fragments.

Appropriately, therefore, The Scarlet Letter—the first and most compelling of the longer fictions—would return to the world whose moral shape Hawthorne knew best, the world of the Puritans as it functioned in the second decade of John Winthrop’s model “City on a Hill.” The laws of this would-be Utopia are strict, but they are known; and sinners must bear the burden of social cause and effect. No one need wish, as Hawthorne makes clear in “Main-Street,” to repeat the lives of ancestors whom experience had taught so much “amiss”: Winthrop’s vaunted “liberty” seemed more “like an iron cage,” and its “rigidity” appears to have generated even further “distortions of the moral nature.” Yet the tale might still be retold, if only to illustrate the moral premise of historicism as such: even the most repressive ideologies had seemed like a good idea at the time; and no “self” entirely escapes the limits of its correlative world.

Not even the artist escapes. His domain might be divided between past and present, inner and outer. But gestures of ultimacy remained empty. His subject could be only his own world-in-process. And America was no exception.

A Note on the Text

All the texts printed here are those established by the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne’s Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press): Twice-told Tales (IX, 1974); Mosses from an Old Manse (X, 1974); The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales (XI, 1974); and the forthcoming Miscellany. The sequence of printing, however, reflects the order of their first magazine or gift-book appearance. With two exceptions: “The Notch of the White Mountains” (Nov., 1835) appears as introductory to “The Ambitious Guest” (June, 1835); and “The Christmas Banquet” (Jan., 1844) is placed as immediate sequel to “Egotism ; or, The Bosom-Serpent” (Mar., 1843).

The Hollow of the Three Hills

IN those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and mad-men’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life, two persons met together at an appointed hour and place. One was a lady, graceful in form and fair of feature, though pale and troubled, and smitten with an untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her years; the other was an ancient and meanly dressed woman, of ill-favored aspect, and so withered, shrunken and decrepit, that even the space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordinary term of human existence. In the spot where they encountered, no mortal could observe them. Three little hills stood near each other, and down in the midst of them sunk a hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two or three hundred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines were numerous upon the hills, and partly fringed the outer verge of the intermediate hollow; within which there was nothing but the brown grass of October, and here and there a tree-trunk, that had fallen long ago, and lay mouldering with no green successor from its roots.