348
LIONEL TRILLING
actually does have. Despite the best efforts of the critics, the con–
temporary reader must always, I think, be somewhat disappointed by
Hawthorne. With so much readiness to apprehend the dark, the
unregenerate, and evil itself, why must he be so quick to modulate
what he sees? He is capable of conceiving the terrible black veil that
Mr. Hooper wears over his face, and of pointing to the
guilt
that
we each incur and hide and long to reveal-why, having triumphed
in the creation of the dread emblem, must he raise the question of
whether the veil is not an egotism, an object of irony? His most famous
single utterance loses its great potential force in its rhetoric of qualifica–
tion: "'Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world,
if
not
your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!'"
Why not, we ask, actually your worst?
If
it is correct to say with
Professor Davidson that the "special distinction" of Hawthorne lies
in his "moral insights," we are
in
effect saying that he was concerned
to look into something that is there to be looked into, and for our
time an investigation of objective reality cannot have the same im–
aginative freedom and force as an affirmation or a negation, which
has only a subjective obligation. Hawthorne's vision of the moral life,
although it does indeed reach in one direction to the transcendental
or spiritual, reaches also in the other direction to the psychological,
leading the reader to ask, "Is this true to the fact as I know it?"
To the readers of Hawthorne's own time, the psychological observa–
tion of the novelist, especially when it discovered the dark and sub–
versive elements of the mind, served as a liberation; but we are
becoming inured to psychology-to the typical "highly developed"
reader of our time, it does not bring the old liberation of surprise,
and one may even detect in our literary opinion the belief that, insofar
as it is a knowledge derived from observation and susceptible of being
systematized, made into a science, it constricts rather than enlarges
our imagination of man.
6
A critic whose interpretation of our author
must always be listened to with especial respect has remarked of
Hawthorne that he was concerned with sin only in its pragmatic
aspect-"not sin," F. O. Matthiessen said, "but its consequences for
6. On the contemporary status of psychology, as we)) as on the contemporary
status of "the world," see in Hans Jonas's
The Gnostic Religion
(revised
edition, The Beacon Press, 1963) the Epilogue, "Gnosticism, Nihilism and
Existentialism."
