THE DARK LADY
363
Yet there is in this writer a submerged intensity and passion
-a tangled imagery of unrest and longing for experience and
regret at its loss which is largely ignored by those of his critics
who place him too securely within the family-circle of the New
England moralists. His vision of evil carries something ·more than
a simple, one-way assertion of traditional principles; it carries
their negation as well. He was haunted not only by the guilt of
his desires but also by the guilt of his denial of th_em. The puritan
in him grappled with the man of the nineteenth century-histori–
cally a man of appetite and perspective; and the former did not
so easily pacify and curb the latter as is generally assumed.
The whole tone and meaning of Hawthorne's work, it seems
to me, turns on this conflict.
In his own estimate he was a "romancer," and his insistence
on designating himself as such should not be overlooked. Time
and again he admonished his readers not to expect from him that
"fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and
ordinary course of man's existence" which is the mark of the
novelist. He took pains to distinguish between the romance and
the novel in order to lay claim, though not without due apologies,
to the latitude inherent in the earlier genre. Yet he was fully aware
of its deficiencies, aware that the freedom it afforded was more
apparent than real, committing him to all sorts of dodges and
retreats to which his artist's conscience could not be reconciled.
This explains his habit of referring to his own compositions in a
disparaging manner as "fancy-pictures" that could not
~urvive
a
close comparison with the actual events of real lives.
Even while writing
The Scarlet Letter,
the theme of which
suited him perfectly, he publicly regretted the "folly" of flinging
himself back into a distant age and attempting to create "a sem–
blance of a world out of airy matter." He would have been far
better served, he goes on to confess in that superb essay,
The Cus–
tom House,
had he sought his themes in the "warm materiality"
of the daily scene. "The fault," he concludes, "was mine. The
page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and com–
monplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A
better book than I shall ever write was there.... At some future
day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and
