366
PARTISAN REVIEW
ambivalence, of this sundered devotion, that he achieved his unique
color and interest. His incubus he taught to poetize.
The constraint under which he labored had its source, of
course, in the old Calvinist faith, but he was born too late to know
it for what it once was. Of religion, indeed, he knew little beyond
its fears. Originally a powerful vision of man's relation to God,
the puritan orthodoxy was now reduced to a narrow moral scheme
with clerical trappings. And Hawthorne's dilemma was that though
the supernatural hardly existed for him in any realm save that of
the fanciful, he was none the less unable to free himself from the
perception of human destiny in terms of sin and redemption,
sacrilege and consecration. The sacramental wine had turned to
poison in his cup. His dreams abounded in images of his ancestors
rising from their graves and of himself walking down Main Street
in a shroud. No wonder, then, that he tended to conceive of the
past as a menace to the living, as a force the ghastly fascination of
which must be resisted.
The House of the Seven Gables
is one long symbolisation of
this feeling. "In t.his age," preaches Holgrave, the young man
who stands for the renovation of life, "the moss-grown and rotten
Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out
of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin
anew.... What slaves we are to bygone times-to Death... We
live in dead men's houses ... as in this of the Seven Gables... .
The house ought to be purified with fire,-purified till only its
ashes remain." Still, at the same time as Hawthorne abused the
past and remonstrated against its morbid influences, he continued
to indulge his taste for gloom and moldiness-for "old ideals and
loitering paces and muffied tones." And as the years passed he
yielded more and more to this tendency, with the result that in his
last phase his mind faltered-it had lost, as he himself admitted,
"its fine edge and temper"-and he could produce nothing but
such fragmentary and essentially pointless allegories as
Septimius
Felton
and
The Dolliver Romance.
The conflict in him is clearly between a newborn secular
imagination, as yet untried and therefore permeated with the feel–
ing of shock and guilt, and the moribund religious tradition of old
New England.
It
is a conflict which has seldom been detected by
his critics, who have for the most part confounded his inner theme
