364
PARTISAN REVIEW
broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page." BU:t he was fated to be disappointed. The
golden glow of reality never suffused his pages. Instead of enter·
ing the waking world of the novel, he remained to the last a
"romancer" under the spell of that shadowy stuff which he at once
loved and hated.
In the development of narrative-prose his place is decidedly
among the pre-novelists-a position which he holds not alone but
in the company of Poe and Melville and virtually the entire clan
of classic American writers who, at one time or another, turned
their hand to the making of
fi~tion.
The fact is that no novels,
properly speaking, were produced in America until late in the
nineteenth century, when the moralistic, semi-clerical outlook
which had so long dominated the native culture-heroes finally
began to give way. The freedom promised by the Transcendental·
ist movement of the mid-century had not gone beyond a certain
philosophical warmth and ardor of purpose. Though this move·
ment expanded American thought, in itself this did not suffice to
release the novelistic function. The release was effected only after
the Civil War, when the many-sided expansion of American life
created a new set of circumstances more favorable to artists whose
business is with the concrete manifestations of the real and
with
its everyday textures. Then it was that James and Howells, sus–
ceptible, in different degrees, to the examples of European writing,
came forward with new ideas, plans, and recipes.
Hawthorne's isolation from experience incapacitated him as
a novelist. Yet he longed to break through this isolation, searching
for the key that would let him out of the dungeon and enable him
to "open intercourse with the world." "I have not lived," he cried,
"but only dreamed of living.... I have seen so little of the world
that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of...."
~ven
the moderately candid biographies of him show that such
protests were typical of his state of mind. And since these protests
also inform his fiction, even if only in a tortuous and contradictory
fashion, it can be said that his basic concern as a writer, though
expressed in the traditional-morai terms of the problem of sin, was
at bottom with the problem of experience-experience, however,
not in the sense of its open representation in the manner of a novel·
