340
LIONEL TRILLING
function, as being charged to make some contribution to the effort
of spiritual discovery of our time, one may not surrender one's right
to press each work as hard as one can in order to make it yield the
full of its possible meaning.
Henry James's Hawthorne will not suit the purposes of the teacher
or critic, neither his strictly professional nor his larger cultural and
spiritual purposes. What can we do with a Hawthorne who, in dealing
with the heavy moral burden which was his ancestral heritage, not
only refused to accept it as his own but contrived to make it "evaporate
in the light and charming fumes of artistic production," a sort of
ethical prestidigitator?
I confess to being of the opinion that in establishing our Haw–
thorne as against Henry James's Hawthorne we have lost something
of considerable value. But I am constrained to heed the contention
that we have gained more than we have lost. I must even be aware
that we have acquired an augmented canon. For us today none of
Hawthorne's stories surpasses in interest "My Kinsman, Major Moli–
neux." James does not mention this great story. And indeed it
is
only in relatively recent years that it presents itself as demanding
inclusion in any selection of Hawthorne's work that might be made
-when Austen Warren in 1938 and Newton Arvin in 1946 prepared
selected editions of the tales, neither of the two editors, whose literary
intelligence is of a very high order, included the story we have come
especially to prize. Its Dionysian darkness, its brilliant, bitter, am–
bivalent humor, were presumably not yet available to them, not yet
available to us.
.
Let us, then, stay confirmed in our belief that the Hawthorne we
now have is the right one. But it may be worth asking why it
is
that
James's Hawthorne is so different from ours. I said earlier that james's
view was not merely personal, that it was controlled by a cultural
assumption. Remembering the year of the monograph, 1879, at the
apogee of Victorianism, we are tempted to say that
this
assumption
is part of the ideology of Philistinism which always hovered over even
the best thought of the Victorian era. What we mean by Philistinism
surely accommodates James's almost angry insistence that our author
is not possibly to be thought of as dark or bitter or pessimistic,
is
not
to be called "tragical," virtually not serious, that he is childlike in the
indulgence of his fancy, that his only concern
is
to amuse himself and
