430
FRANK KERMODE
For the word itself implies an event to be fulfilled in the future,
and that future no one could now predict. Consequently its current
senses imposed themselves in very curious ways on the old ones. Ety–
mologically "type" derives from the Greek
tuptein,
to incise or in–
scribe; for centuries it was believed that God had provided two books,
the Bible and Nature, and that Nature too was inscribed with divine
hints - the plants bOlle each a sign indicating its use, just as history
revealed God's will to men. Before those times were effectively over the
characters of printing had come to be called types; each was inscribed
with the letter which was its function. And since the type is the fount
of innumerable identical letters, the word has also the sense of the
central or original members of its class.
Types were engraved with an instrument called a puncheon ("an
instrument driven to make a hole or impression," says Johnson 's
Dic–
tionary)
and one tapped it with a mallet or maul. These tools provide
the family names used by Hawthorne in
The House of the Seven
Gables,
Pyncheon and Maule. So Hawthorne was, for his purposes,
punning discreetly on the printing sense of "type."
The earliest photographers called their plates "types," partly no
doubt because they were in a sense engraved by light, partly because
they were the source of many identical examples. Oaguerre's method,
invented in 1839, does not allow of replication, but he called his device
the Daguerrotype; it was a silver plate sensitised by iodine, exposed to
ligpt, and developed by exposure to mercury. Daguerrotypes enjoyed a
great vogue in the Forties; one made of Hawthorne in 1848 survives.
They were valued for their delicacy, but also for their accuracy; they
eliminated the style and flattery of the portrait painter, on the fallibil–
ity of whom Hawthorne commented, while sitting for his own portrait
in May, 1850: "there is no such thing as a true portrait; they are all
delusions and I never saw any two alike." This was written three
months after he finished
The Scarlet Letter,
and shortly before he
began
The House of the Seven Gables.
The daguerrotype also made
unnecessary that sequence of operations by which a portrait is made
reproducible in the form of an engraving, every workman in the chain
adding his own distortions. Hawthorne was to complain, in
The Mar–
ble Faun,
of the loss entailed in the sculptor's use of assistants who
worked on the marble, and to argue for the force and a,ccuracy of the
hasty sketch as against the finished work.
