PARRINGTON AND REALITY
31
him.
If
what Hawthorne did was certainly nothing to build a party
on, we ought perhaps to forgive him when we remember that he
was only one man and that the future of mankind did not depend
on him. But this very fact serves only to irritate Parrington; he
believes that part of Hawthorne's literary lack comes from his
failure to get around and meet people. Hawthorne could not, we
are told, establish contact with the "Yankee reality," and the "sub–
stantial world of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew Haw–
thorne seems scarcely to have been aware of."
To tum from reality might mean to tum to romance, but
Hawthorne, Parrington tells us, was romantic "only in a narrow
and very special sense." He was not interested in the world of, as
it were, practical romance, in the Salem of the clipper ships; he
turned away and created-"a romance of ethics." This is not an
illuminating phrase but it is a catching one and might be taken to
mean that Hawthorne was now in the great tradition of, say,
Shakespeare; but we quickly learn that no, Hawthorne had entered
a barren field, for, though he himself lived in the present and had
all the future to mold, he preferred to find many of his subjects in
the past. And we learn too that his romance of ethics is not admir–
able because it requires the hard, fine pressing of ideas and we are
also told that "a romantic uninterested in adventure and afraid of
sex is likely to become somewhat graveled for matter." (This lib–
eral-radical test of literature by the baldness of the writer's treat–
ment of Sex! Mr. Smith will apply it to Henry James.) Hawthorne's
mind was, in short, a thin one, and Parrington puts in evidence his
use of allegory and symbol and the very severity and precision of
his art to prove that he suffered from a sadly limited intellect, for
so much art could scarcely be needed unless the writer were trying
to exploit to the utmost the few poor ideas that he had.
In short, Hawthorne was "forever dealing with shadows, and
he knew that he was dealing with shadows." Perhaps so, but
shadows are also part of reality and one would not want a world
without shadows: it would not even be a "real" world. But we must
get beyond Parrington's metaphor. The fact is that Hawthorne was
dealing beautifully with realities, with substantial things. The man
who could raise those brilliant and serious doubts about the nature
and possibility of moral perfection, the man who could keep him–
self aloof from the "Yankee reality" and who could, as in
The
