The Dark Lady of Saler
Philip Rahv
Because I seek an image, not a book.
...
W.
B.
YEATS
H AWTHORNE
IS
GENERALLY
spoken of as a novelist of sin,
but
the truth is that he is not a novelist, at least not in the sense in
which the term is commonly used, nor is sin wholly and unequiv·
ocally his subject. What that subject is remains to be defined,
though by way of introduction it might be said that it is less a
subject than a predicament. Or, better still, the predicament is
the subject.
What is the intention of the novel as we have come to know
it? In the broadest sense, it is to portray life as it is actually
lived. Free access to experience is the necessary condition of the
novel's growth as well as the objective guaranty of its significance;
experience is at once its myth and its reason; and he who shuns
experience is no more capable of a convincing performance in its
sphere than a man unnerved by the sight of blood is capable of
heroic feats on the battlefield. Now Hawthorne lived in an age
when it was precisely experience-or, at any rate, those of its
elements most likely to engage the interests of an artist-that was
least at the disposal of the imaginative American, whose psychic
resistance to its appeal was everywhere reinforced by the newness
and bareness of the national scene, by its much-lamented "paucity
of ingredients." It is this privation that accounts for Hawthorne's
chill ideality, for his tendency to cherish the fanciful at the
expense of the substantial and to reduce the material world to the
all-too-familiar abstractions of spiritual law and of the moral con–
science. Two strains mingle in his literary nature: the spectral
strain of the Gothic tale and the pietistic strain of Christian
allegory, and both contribute
t.-.
his alienation from the real.t
*This essay is a chapter from a book on the evolution of the hero and heroine
in
American fiction.
tin his
American Prose Masters,
W. C. Brounell observes that Hawthorne's "par–
ticular genius took him out of the novelist's field altogether. His novels are not
novels. They have not the reality of novels, and they elude it not only in their per·
sonages but in their picture of life in general." But it is hardly a question of Hawthorne's
"particular genius" leading him away from the novel. His "particular genius" cannot
be assessed apart from the forces that shaped its expression.
If
we accept Brounell's
definition of the novel as the medium of the actual, it can be stated flatly that neither
Hawthorne nor any of his contemporaries succeeded in mastering it.
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