PARTISAN REVIEW
433
varianl and inextinguishable and these alone refuted Buffon 's COnlen–
tion that in America "Ia nature est beaucoup moins agissante, beau–
coup moins forte."
And so Jefferson defended not only nature but America against
" this new theory of the tendency of nature
to
belittle her productions
on this side of the Atlanlic." In doing so he produced a patriotic war–
time version of the old
translatio
topic: England is in decline, "The
sun of her glory is fast descending
to
the horizon. Her philosophy has
crossed the channel , her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems pass–
ing
to
that awful dissolution whose issue is not given human foresight
to scan."
What has all this
to
do with the Pyncheon hens? Buffon , in his
fourth volume, uses the domestic hen
to
illustrate his thesis. The hen,
he explains, is not native to the new world, and this, in addition to
decline by domestication, has caused it greatly to diminish in size. In
the wild, he argues, the type is as large as a crow, but the American
exampl es have shrunk to the size of a pigeon. The sexual force of the
cocks is also much diminished by the Atlantic passage; ideally, each
should have a seraglio of fifteen hens. Buffon then passes
to
a con–
sideration of the native turkey .
The House of the Seven Gables
is undoubtedly a serious and topi–
cal book - which is what Melville meant when he spoke of its "appre–
hension of the absolute condition of presenl things"; and Hawthorne
was animated by a powerful sense of the historical crisis through
which he was living, and to which he referred, with conscious geologi–
cal extravagance, in
The Blithedale Romance:
"It was impossible ...
not
to
imbibe the idea . . . that the crust of the earth in many places was
broken, and its whole surface portentously heaving; that it was a day of
crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex" (XVI).
It
is as if
a Cuverian catastrophe, an epochal alteration of types, was upon him.
Yet he also saw that there was an elemenl of the ridiculous in what he
was attempting in
Seven Gables:
"Sometimes, when tired of it, it
strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning
to
end; but
the fa ct is, in writing. a romance, a man is always, or always ought
to
be, careening on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the
skill li es in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling
over. " The Pyncheon hens are an instance of such careening.
There had been no connection between the Pyncheons of the Old
and the New Worlds for two centuries (Cap. IV), and the same is of
