HAWTHORNE
347
example of the characteristic weakness. The informing idea of this
story is superb, and its execution is adequate to its conception up to
the moment when we are asked to consider "whose guilt had blasted"
the topmost bough of the oak, that withered bough which is to fall at
the moment when Reuben Bourne has expiated his sin. Perhaps no
other work of literature proposes so forcibly the idea that morality is
not bounded by the pragmatic, that it creates a habitation for itself
which is not only of this world, that it moves, by some process of
transcendence, from practicality into absoluteness, or at least to un–
reasoning piety. The morality that Hawthorne has been conceiving
has, as it were, the power of the dream, for it is indeed spontaneous,
peremptory, and obligatory; but the incident of the falling bough,
which is intended to enforce upon us the belief that the moral law
has just these qualities as its defining attributes, is itself merely
gratuitous;
it
seems scarcely the work of the imagination at all, rather
of the author's will; so far from strengthening the credence we give
to the preternatural world, it leads us to think that the author's own
belief is seeking support.
Eventually Hawthorne lost all power of belief in the other world,
and with it all power of creation. The last years of his life are terrible
to contemplate. His labor seems to have been as devoted as it ever was,
but he confronted white paper with the knowledge that nothing he now
might put on it could have value. We have Kafka at hand to suggest
the dreadfulness of the doom: it was as if Hawthorne's gift had been
confiscated in punishment for some indiscernible sin, perhaps one that
to all appearances was a virtue. "By 1860 he had worked himself dry,"
Edward H. Davidson tells us in the introduction to his edition of
Dr. Grimshawe's Secret,
one of the several gray chaotic efforts of the
last period. "The 'present, the actual,' he confessed, was too pressing,
and in
Grimshawe
he tried to write a sermon for his time without any
of the moral insights which had been his special distinction in the
years before he had gone to England."
Yet if we set aside the misery of the decline-that fate which must
sometimes seem all too peculiarly American I-and set aside too the
instances of esthetic failure in the great period, we have to say that
Hawthorne, even when he was not intimidated by the "present, the
actual," must be judged to lack the power of imagination which we
expect him to have when we respond to the degree of power he
