PARTISAN REVIEW
435
be explained. He has designs on her whole stock of "natural history,"
those gingerbread animals made in moulds, or types.
As an emblem of time the urchin is supported by jaffrey's watch
and by the sundial, whose "shadow looks over the shoulder of the sun–
shine" (XIII). Time destroys the exemplar; what resists it, though per–
haps not without variation in the exemplar, is the type. This is, in a
sense, Hawthorne's subject, the degree to which withered "bygones"
must be a part of the present and future. They are of the old world,
types of it, whether they are human, vegetable, social - for armorial
bearings are types too, yet their owners preserve them, like genetic
traits, into a plebeian future. One sees why Melville stressed the mod–
ernity of the book, and why Hawthorne used so many devices to foster
its uncertainty, its ambiguity, its hesitancy, allowing the text
to
waver
in authority, equivocating about tradition and history, falsely em–
phasising some points and letting others slip by unstressed.
That Holgrave belongs to a new age, arid enjoys its considerable
discontinuity with the old, is frequently emphasised, at any rate until
the book's strange conclusion. He is modern, rootless, so much so that
the text takes on an unusual note of authority in condemning him for
desiring
lOO
revolutionary a change, too
viole~ll
an abandonment of
the past, too ready a belief in the "golden era" about to begin. "Alto–
gether in his culture, and want of culture - in his crude, wild and
misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some
of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his
recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf; in
his faith and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked -
the artist might fitfully stand forth as the representative of many com–
peers in his native land" (XII). In Holgrave we see how millennial and
translational myths survive the supersession of their old-world cultur–
al and religious contexts. Henry James rightly found in him some–
thing of Hawthorne himself, "American of the Americans," one
whom " the idea of long perpetuation and survival always appeared
to
have filled ... with a kind of horror"; but he is also, like Hawthorne,
shadowed by the perpetuities he has rejected.
Later Hawthorne was to meditate, in the
Marble Faun,
on Rome
as an image of these perpetuities: timeless, the type of the City and of
human civility, yet, in the aspect of time, a place of filth, corruption
and superstition. In Holgrave's New England the perpetuities are less
evident. The types survive in their shadowy way, culturally or geneti–
cally transmitted; but Holgrave is one who records the whole, on a
