THE PROGRESSIVE HAWTHORNE
The concept of the "Portable" is partly to blame.
It
works very
well and usefully with some authors. But with Hawthorne it means
devoting over a third of the six-hundred pages to
The Scarlet Letter,
a wonderful work but easily available in cheap editions; and probably
it has already been read by the peop:e who will buy this "Portable."
Mr. Cowley himself appears to wish that he might have printed
The
House of the Seven Gables
or
The Blithedale Romance;
the latter he
very rightly feels "deserves more attention than it has lately been re–
ceiving." Clearly, everyone concerned had been sensitively responsive
to present needs, this "Portable" could have been unified around
The
Blithedale Romance
instead of simply draped around
The Scarlet Letter.
Even if the convention of the "Portable" had allowed this, however,
Mr. Cowley would presumably have missed his editorial chance. There
is no evidence that "the original problem" in writing
The Blithedale
Romance
was "to write a realistic novel about the life and death of a
utopian community." This is Mr. Cowley's "original problem," not
Hawthorne's who had no fetish of "social realism."
The Blithedale Ro–
mance
is a great political statement, but Hawthorne's "original prob–
lem," in this romance as in very nearly all his works, is to deal with
the Hawthorne image: a cultural image of sexual love and moral com–
munity.
The most common cliche about Hawthorne is that he thought
solitude a crime and believed in the brotherhood of man and in man's
"dependence on society." This is good liberal doctrine. But, as it is
usually presented, it is also such a vaporous idea that you cannot imagine
a serious writer of fiction worrying about it. Of course Hawthorne him–
self was a solitary man much of the time (though he was also a worldly
man who died, with well-contrived symbolism, practically in the arms
of an ex-president of the United States). As an artist and moralist,
Hawthorne is not really interested in solitude as such or in the estrange–
ment of the artist. He is interested, like many great writers, in Fraud.
His villains-Aylmer, Chillingworth, Ethan Brand, Hollingsworth-are
guilty of fraudulently involving themselves with other human beings
without accepting the tragic moral implications of the involvement
(this is the last theme we wish to discover in the author we are criticiz–
ing). Mr. Cowley has incidentally endowed Hawthorne's morality with
a kind of liberalized Moscow-Trials legalism. Ethan Brand deserved
his fate, he says; but some of Hawthorne's other villains "might be
taught human brotherhood by their very crimes and, if they publicly
confessed, might be taken back into the community." This unconscious
note of modernism (for surely it hasn't much to do with Hawthorne or
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