HAWTHORNE
331
To this view James responds with extreme and satiric impatience. He
denies the darkness of Hawthorne's mind and in the course of doing
so actually seems to deny that it is a serious mind. For he tells us
that we must understand Hawthorne's concern with conscience to be
largely "ironical." He does not use the adjective in the sense which
will occur most naturally to the reader of today, the sense which is
cognate with "ambiguous" and suggests a source of emotional power.
He intends a meaning of the word which
is
close to whimsical play–
fulness. "He is to a considerable extent ironical-this is part of his
charm-part, even, one may say, of his brightness; but he is neither
bitter nor cynical, he is rarely even what I should call tragical." And
James goes on: "There have certainly been story-tellers of a gayer
and lighter spirit; there have been observers more humorous, more
hilarious-though on the whole Hawthorne's observation has a
smile in it oftener than may at first appear; but there has rarely been
an observer more serene, less agitated by what he sees, and less dis–
posed to call things deeply into question."
To the religious elements of the stories James gives no credence
.beyond an esthetic one. Hawthorne, he says, used religion for his own
artistic purposes; from the moral life of Puritanism his imagination
"borrowed" a "color" and "reflected" a "hue," but he experienced no
conviction whatever. James certainly abates nothing in his description
of the terrors of Puritanism, of how the "shadow of the sense of sin"
could darken the individual life and lead
it
either to despair or to a
catastrophic rebellion. But he is quite certain that Hawthorne was not
adversely affected by his Puritan heritage-he did not "groan and
sweat and suffer" under it, nor did he throw it off in anger. "... He
contrived by an exquisite process, best known to himself, to transmute
this heavy moral burden into the very substance of his imagination, to
make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of artistic pro–
duction."
James is unequivocal and emphatic in his belief that Hawthorne's
interest in Puritanism was nothing but artistic. He tells us that our
author gave his imagination license to "amuse" itself with the faith of
his ancestors, to make their morality its "playground"; what for his
forebears was the principle of existence, he made into one of his "toys."
"The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the
fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our
