THE PROGRESSIVE HAWTHORNE
Mr. Cantwell regards "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" as a "gen–
uinely high-spirited, comic story." What could be more rollicking?–
a bewildered boy comes to Boston in the dead of the hellish night look–
ing for Major Molineux and finds that his kinsman is being tarred and
feathered and tossed out of town. Mr. Cantwell has also discovered the
truth about
The Scarlet Letter.
It is the "story of a doctor, a clergy–
man, and the woman they loved." The doctor represents Science. The
clergyman represents Religion. The woman cannot choose betwe.en them.
Moral: neither Science nor Religion is sufficient in itself.
Yet Mr. Cantwell
is
primarily a biographer rather than a critic. He
belongs to the contemporary movement in American biography which
might be called the Hodge-Podge, Sears-Roebuck, or Van-Wyck-Brooks
School. The theory of this school is that the art of biography consists
of displaying an inordinately conspicuous consumption of facts-any
facts-and that in order to achieve Vitality and Abundanc.e the biogra–
pher should ignore such stodgy concepts as commonsense, ccherence,
grammar, punctuation, and the dramatization of his theme. The fol–
lowing paragraph is worse than most, but it is a fair indication of Mr.
Cantwell's method:
The femininity of Hawthorne's world increased when, at the age
of nine, he injured his foot. He had been playing ball. The circum–
stances of the injury are vague.
It
was said that one foot ceased to grow,
and that he was threatened with lameness. At any rate it was plain that
he could not go to school. He was delighted and made the most of his
mysterious ailment to stay at home. Hannah Lord, the hired girl, bundled
him up and carried him out into the street. He hopped down to the
stage-coach office. One remedy attempted was to pour cold water on
his foot from an upper window. The War of 1812 began, with so close a
vote in favor of the declaration of war that its very beginning was an
admission that much of the country-especially New England-was op–
posed to fighting it.
One of Mr. Cantwell's means of achieving Abundance is to give a short
biography of almost every one of the hundreds of persons mentioned
in the book, and if possible to print the person's picture. Having heard
that Hawthorne's wife often dreamed that the Duke of Buckingham
had stabbed her in the breast, I was therefore disappointed to find
neither a biography nor a picture of the Duke.
To turn from Mr. Cantwell's teeming and soggy biography to the
academicism of Professor Stewart is sheer exhilaration. By simply and
often sensitively setting down the facts about Hawthorne's life, by fre–
quently quoting Hawthorne's letters and journals, and by putting the
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