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human lives is Hawthorne's major theme." I would demur a little
from this judgment, for I think that sin itself held a strong fascination
for Hawthorne. But there can be no doubt that his awareness of the
consequences of sin was never far distant from his concern with sin
itself. In short, he always consented to the power of his imagination
being controlled by the power of the world.
So far as James was able to perceive the submission to this con–
trol, he admired Hawthorne and made him one of the masters of his
own art. His discomfort began and his rather irritable condescension
came into play when he saw the control somewhat lessen and the
signs of an assertion of autonomy appear, when Hawthorne moved
toward imaginative intransigence. We reverse James's judgment. The
modern consciousness requires that an artist have an imagination
which is more intransigent than James could allow, more spontaneous,
peremptory, and obligatory, which shall impose itself upon us with
such unquestionable authority that "the actual" can have no power
over us but shall seem the creation of some inferior imagination, that
of mere convention and habit. Our modern piety-I use the word in
its good sense- is of the autonomous self, or at least of the self as it
approaches autonomy in its tortured dream of metaphysical freedom.
Hawthorne could indeed conceive of our longed-for autonomy, and
to some considerable extent exemplify it in his art; and in the degree
that he does so, he is our possession and invites us to try to possess
him ever more intimately. Yet we cannot but be aware that he resists
us who are of the modern dispensation, that his own piety is not
committed where ours is.
There is an episode in Daniel Cory's recent book about Santayana
which suggests the nature of Hawthorne's piety as I comprehend it.
Mr. Cory tells us how, as a young man, he could not understand why
Santayana should have described
The Realm of Matter}
the first of the
four volumes of
The Realms of Being}
as " 'essentially the work of a
moralist,' " and, with a touch of impatience, Santayana said to him,
"'Don't you understand by now that the real object of piety is
matter- or Nature, if you prefer. It is the idea of Might-the in–
eluctable Yahveh of the Hebrews, when this primitive notion has
been freed of its local and superstitious accretions.' " And Mr. Cory
goes on to say that "all his life Santayana had been convinced that the
religious attitude of
respect for God
is at bottom the same thing as our
