416
PARTISAN REYIEW
Not until James did a fiction-writer appear in America who was
able to sympathise with an_9. hence to take advantage of the methods
of Thackeray, Balzac, and Turgenev. Since the principle of real·
ism presupposes a thoroughly secularized relationship between the
ego and experience, Hawthorne and Melville could not possibly
have apprehended it. Though not religious men themselves, they
were nevertheless held in bondage by ancestral conscience and
dogma, they were still living in. the afterglow of a religious faith
that drove the ego, on its external side, to aggrandize itself by
accumulating practical sanctions while scourging and inhibiting
its intimate side. In Hawthorne the absent or suppressed experi·
ence reappears in the shape of spectral beings whose function is to
warn, repel, and fascinate. And the unutterable confusion that
reigns in some of Melville's narratives
(Pierre, Mardi),
and which
no amount of critical labor has succeeded in clearing up, is pri·
marily due to his inability either to come to terms with experience
or else wholly and finally to reject it.
Despite the featureless innocence and moral-enthusiastic air
of the old American books, there is in some of them a peculiar
virulence, a feeling of discord that does not easily fit in with the
general tone of the classic age. In such worthies as Irving, Cooper,
Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell there is scarcely any·
thing more than meets the eye, but in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville
there is an incandescent symbolism, a meaning within meaning, the
vitality of which is perhaps only now being rightly appreciated.
D. H. Lawrence was close to the truth when he spoke of what ser·
pents they were, of the "inner diabolism of their uilderconscious·
ness." Hawthorne, "that blue-eyed darling," as well .as Poe and
Melville, insisted on a subversive vision of human nature at the
same time as cultivated Americans were everywhere relishing the
orations of Emerson who, as James put it, was helping them "to
take a picturesque view of one's internal possibilities and to find
in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight
effects." Each of these three creative men displays a healthy re·
sistance to the sentimentality and vague idealism of his contem–
poraries; and along with this resistance they display morbid qual–
ities that, aside from any specific biographical factors, might per·
haps be accounted for by the contradiction between the poverty of
the experience provided by the society they lived in and the high
