HAWTHORNE
351
It is questions that Hawthorne leaves us with.
It
is, really, not
at all clear why Young Goodman Brown must live out his life in
sullenness because he refuses to sign the Devil's pact; nor is it clear
why Robin must join the violent mob in laughter at his kinsman before
he is his own master, and indeed it is not clear why being his own
master is a wholly admirable condition. And when we consult ourselves
for answers, we become aware of our dependence upon that part of
the "efficacious but largely unfathomed background of human ex–
perience" which lies very close at hand, within our very selves, and
which reminds us of our dependence upon its further reaches.
And in the degree that he does not dominate us, Hawthorne
cannot wholly gratify us, moderns that we are. Exquisite artist though
he be, he yet suggests to us the limitations of art, and thus points to
the stubborn core of actuality that is not to be overcome, and seems
to say that the transaction between it and us is after all an unmediated
one. And by his ambiguities and ambivalences he seems to imply that
we--each one of us alone- must make our investigations and our
terms as best we may. He has no great tyrant-dream in which we can
take refuge, he leaves us face to face with the ultimately unmodifiable
world, of which our undifferentiated human nature is a part. He does
not even permit us what seems a complete view of the desperateness
of our situation- nothing complete, nothing ultimak.
No, it is not gratifying. Yet
if
we tell the truth about our ex–
perience of Hawthorne, some of us will say that as we read him-or at
moments as we read him- we have a sensation of having been set at
liberty. It is not an entirely comfortable condition. We find ourselves
at a loss and uncertain when we are in the charge of an artist so
little concerned to impose upon us the structure of his imagination.
We look for a more coercive
will,
and are insecure in its lack. Yet
perhaps we feel, too, an impulse of exhilaration charged through our
art-saturated minds, a new pleasure in being led carelessly or playfully
to one or another dangerous place and being left alone to look at the
danger in our own way. The pleasure cannot last long- probably
more is needed in the life around us before such independent con–
frontations of our dependence will seem natural to us, and a kind of
joy. Our judgment of Hawthorne may have to be that he is not for
us today, and perhaps not even tomorrow. He is, in Nietzsche's
phrase, one of the spirits of yesterday- and the day after tomorrow.
