THE DARK LADY
381
yet psychologically it still ruled and confined him. Hence the
inherited beliefs appear in his work as spectres rather than as
convictions.
A literature of sin is most naturally developed in a society
suffering from a surfeit of experience-an excess which it cannot
control because of a derangement of values. This was the condi–
tion of Russian society in Dostoevsky's time; and it is this unlim–
ited availability of experience, amounting almost to anarcqy,
which enabled the Russian novelist to materialize his themes of
sin and evil. We believe in the sins of Stavrogin, Raskolnikov, and
the Karamazovs because they are actualized within the experiential
realm, the only realm in which significant actions can be truly
confirmed. Now if regarded from this point of view, the American
romancer must be placed at the opposite pole from the Russian
novelist. The society to which he belonged suffered not from a
surfeit but from poverty of experience; and, far from being too
fluid, its values were altogether too rigid. His problem was simpler
than Dostoevsky's as ':"ell as radically different in nature. It was
not an exceptional but necessarily a typical problem-typical,
despite all variations, of America's creative writers in the nine–
teenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth. It can be
defined as the problem of the re-conquest, of the re-acquisition of
experience in its cultural, esthetic, and, above all, subjective
aspects. For this is the species of experience which had gradually
been lost to the migrant European man in the process of subju–
gating and settling the new world.
Van Wyck Brooks has described Hawthorne as the "most
deeply planted of American writers." But this is true only in the
sense that he is the most deeply and vividly local. He rifled the
hive of New England honey, but he was quite indifferent to the
wider ranges of the national scene. His is the "sweet flavor," to
use one of his own similies, of "a frost-bitten apple, such as one
picks up under the tree in December." It is the chill yet mellow
flavor of the Salem centuries. On this side of him he indeed sums
up and closes the puritan cycle; but from another angle of vision
he can be seen to be precursive of the later and more positive
interests of American letters. Times past are mirrored in the dark
lady's harsh fate, yet in her mystic sensuality she speaks of things
to come.
