350
LIONEL TRILLING
sense of dependence on an efficacious but largely unfathomed 'back–
ground' of human experience.... When our naive ideas of God or
Nature have been stripped of their pictorial and emotional accretions,
what we are left with is the defiant core of both these ideas: the
ineradicable conviction of primordial Might that impinges upon and
ought to control the ambition of the distressed mind."
Whose is the shout we hear, the angry cry of protest at these
words? Whose else could it be but the outraged spirit of William Blake,
in whose existence we all now participate? The great offended voice is
raised to assert the power of the artist's imagination to deny the reality
of the primordial Might, or to challenge and overcome it, or to inter–
pose between
it
and us a dream, which, perhaps in the degree that it
terrifies, commands our assent and holds out the promise of freedom.
If
that is indeed what ideally we expect the imagination of the
artist to do, Hawthorne does not satisfy our expectation. Again and
again, in what we judge to be his too limited faith in the imagination,
he admits, even insists, that the world is there, that we are dependent
upon it. His quick response to the non-rational, his lively awareness
of the primitive and chthonic, of the dark roots of life, does not deflect
the naturalistic and humanistic tendency of his mind. At his very most
powerful he does not interpose his imagination between us and the
world; however successfully he may project illusion, he must point
beyond it to the irrefrangible solidity.
He feared "the ambition of the distressed mind" and before the
primordial Might he maintained an attitude of almost studied modesty,
we might say of childlikeness when we remember what irony and
malice he was capable of attributing to a child. Like a child, he takes
liberties and plays tricks; he amuses himself and entertains us; he
takes somber moral principles and makes them into toys--we have
but to give to the idea of play the consideration it deserves to see
that Henry James's description of his activity is not so deficient in
justice as at first it seems. Of his playfulness the ambivalence and
ambiguity which are so often noted of him are essential aspects.
But his ambivalence and ambiguity do not, I think, bring him close
to Kafka's mute, riddling power- through them, rather, he approaches
to Montaigne's "Que sais-je?", the ironic childlike question, the ques–
tion which conscious or calculated modesty asks, out of which all
the questions come.
