Adventures among Books

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Smollett never reached that goal, and even the shadow of decency never
haunted him so as to make him afraid with any amazement. Smollett avers
that he "has had the courage to call in question the talents of a pseudo-
patron," and so is charged with "insolence, rancour, and scurrility." Of
all these things, and of worse, he had been guilty; his offence had never
been limited to "calling in question the talents" of persons who had been
unsuccessful in getting his play represented. Remonstrance merely
irritated Tobias. His new novel was but a fainter echo of his old
novels, a panorama of scoundrelism, with the melodramatic fortunes of the
virtuous Monimia for a foil. If read to-day, it is read as a sketch of
manners, or want of manners. The scene in which the bumpkin squire rooks
the accomplished Fathom at hazard, in Paris, is prettily conceived, and
Smollett's indignation at the British system of pews in church is
edifying. But when Monimia appears to her lover as he weeps at her tomb,
and proves to be no phantom, but a "warm and substantial" Monimia,
capable of being "dished up," like any other Smollettian heroine, the
reader is sensibly annoyed. Tobias as _un romantique_ is absolutely too
absurd; "not here, oh Tobias, are haunts meet for thee."

Smollett's next novel, "Sir Launcelot Greaves," was not published till
1761, after it had appeared in numbers, in _The British Magazine_. This
was a sixpenny serial, published by Newbery. The years between 1753 and
1760 had been occupied by Smollett in quarrelling, getting imprisoned for
libel, editing the _Critical Review_, writing his "History of England,"
translating (or adapting old translations of) "Don Quixote," and driving
a team of literary hacks, whose labours he superintended, and to whom he
gave a weekly dinner. These exploits are described by Dr. Carlyle, and
by Smollett himself, in "Humphrey Clinker." He did not treat his vassals
with much courtesy or consideration; but then they expected no such
treatment. We have no right to talk of his doings as "a blood-sucking
method, literary sweating," like a recent biographer of Smollett. Not to
speak of the oddly mixed metaphor, we do not know what Smollett's
relations to his retainers really were. As an editor he had to see his
contributors. The work of others he may have recommended, as "reader" to
publishers. Others may have made transcripts for him, or translations.
That Smollett "sweated" men, or sucked their blood, or both, seems a
crude way of saying that he found them employment. Nobody says that
Johnson "sweated" the persons who helped him in compiling his Dictionary;
or that Mr. Jowett "sweated" the friends and pupils who aided him in his
translation of Plato. Authors have a perfect right to procure literary
assistance, especially in learned books, if they pay for it, and
acknowledge their debt to their allies. On the second point, Smollett
was probably not in advance of his age.

"Sir Launcelot Greaves" is, according to Chambers, "a sorry specimen of
the genius of the author," and Mr. Oliphant Smeaton calls it "decidedly
the least popular" of his novels, while Scott astonishes us by preferring
it to "Jonathan Wild." Certainly it is inferior to "Roderick Random" and
to "Peregrine Pickle," but it cannot be so utterly unreal as "The
Adventures of an Atom." I, for one, venture to prefer "Sir Launcelot" to
"Ferdinand, Count Fathom." Smollett was really trying an experiment in
the fantastic. Just as Mr. Anstey Guthrie transfers the mediaeval myth
of Venus and the Ring, or the Arabian tale of the bottled-up geni (or
djinn) into modern life, so Smollett transferred Don Quixote. His hero,
a young baronet of wealth, and of a benevolent and generous temper, is
crossed in love. Though not mad, he is eccentric, and commences knight-
errant. Scott, and others, object to his armour, and say that, in his
ordinary clothes, and with his well-filled purse, he would have been more
successful in righting wrongs. Certainly, but then the comic fantasy of
the armed knight arriving at the ale-house, and jangling about the rose-
hung lanes among the astonished folk of town and country, would have been
lost. Smollett is certainly less unsuccessful in wild fantasy, than in
the ridiculous romantic scenes where the substantial phantom of Monimia
disports itself. The imitation of the knight by the nautical Captain
Crowe (an excellent Smollettian mariner) is entertaining, and Sir
Launcelot's crusty Sancho is a pleasant variety in squires. The various
forms of oppression which the knight resists are of historical interest,
as also is the contested election between a rustic Tory and a smooth
Ministerialist: "sincerely attached to the Protestant succession, in
detestation of a popish, an abjured, and an outlawed Pretender." The
heroine, Aurelia Darrel, is more of a lady, and less of a luxury, than
perhaps any other of Smollett's women. But how Smollett makes love! "Tea
was called. The lovers were seated; he looked and languished; she
flushed and faltered; all was doubt and delirium, fondness and flutter."

"All was gas and gaiters," said the insane lover of Mrs. Nickleby, with
equal delicacy and point.

Scott says that Smollett, when on a visit to Scotland, used to write his
chapter of "copy" in the half-hour before the post went out. Scott was
very capable of having the same thing happen to himself. "Sir Launcelot"
is hurriedly, but vigorously written: the fantasy was not understood as
Smollett intended it to be, and the book is blotted, as usual, with
loathsome medical details. But people in Madame du Deffand's circle used
openly to discuss the same topics, to the confusion of Horace Walpole. As
the hero of this book is a generous gentleman, as the most of it is kind
and manly, and the humour provocative of an honest laugh, it is by no
means to be despised, while the manners, if caricatured, are based on
fact.

It is curious to note that in "Sir Launcelot Greaves," we find a
character, Ferret, who frankly poses as a _strugforlifeur_. M. Daudet's
_strugforlifeur_ had heard of Darwin. Mr. Ferret had read Hobbes,
learned that man was in a state of nature, and inferred that we ought to
prey upon each other, as a pike eats trout. Miss Burney, too, at Bath,
about 1780, met a perfectly emancipated young "New Woman." She had read
Bolingbroke and Hume, believed in nothing, and was ready to be a "Woman
who Did." Our ancestors could be just as advanced as we are.

Smollett went on compiling, and supporting himself by his compilations,
and those of his vassals. In 1762 he unluckily edited a paper called
_The Briton_ in the interests of Lord Bute. _The Briton_ was silenced by
Wilkes's _North Briton_. Smollett lost his last patron; he fell ill; his
daughter died; he travelled angrily in France and Italy. His "Travels"
show the choleric nature of the man, and he was especially blamed for not
admiring the Venus de Medici. Modern taste, enlightened by the works of
a better period of Greek art, has come round to Smollett's opinions. But,
in his own day, he was regarded as a Vandal and a heretic.

In 1764, he visited Scotland, and was warmly welcomed by his kinsman, the
laird of Bonhill. In 1769, he published "The Adventures of an Atom," a
stupid, foul, and scurrilous political satire, in which Lord Bute, having
been his patron, was "lashed" in Smollett's usual style. In 1768,
Smollett left England for ever. He desired a consulship, but no
consulship was found for him, which is not surprising. He died at Monte
Nova, near Leghorn, in September (others say October) 1771. He had
finished "Humphrey Clinker," which appeared a day or two before his
death.

Thackeray thought "Humphrey Clinker" the most laughable book that ever
was written. Certainly nobody is to be envied who does not laugh over
the epistles of Winifred Jenkins. The book is too well known for
analysis. The family of Matthew Bramble, Esq., are on their travels,
with his nephew and niece, young Melford and Lydia Melford, with Miss
Jenkins, and the squire's tart, greedy, and amorous old maid of a sister,
Tabitha Bramble. This lady's persistent amours and mean avarice scarcely
strike modern readers as amusing. Smollett gave aspects of his own
character in the choleric, kind, benevolent Matthew Bramble, and in the
patriotic and paradoxical Lieutenant Lismahago. Bramble, a gouty
invalid, is as full of medical abominations as Smollett himself, as ready
to fight, and as generous and open-handed. Probably the author shared
Lismahago's contempt of trade, his dislike of the Union (1707), his fiery
independence (yet he _does_ marry Tabitha!), and those opinions in which
Lismahago heralds some of the social notions of Mr. Ruskin.

Melford is an honourable kind of "walking gentleman"; Lydia, though
enamoured, is modest and dignified; Clinker is a worthy son of Bramble,
with abundant good humour, and a pleasing vein of Wesleyan Methodism. But
the grotesque spelling, rural vanity, and _naivete_ of Winifred Jenkins,
with her affection for her kitten, make her the most delightful of this
wandering company. After beholding the humours and partaking of the
waters of Bath, they follow Smollett's own Scottish tour, and each
character gives his picture of the country which Smollett had left at its
lowest ebb of industry and comfort, and found so much more prosperous.
The book is a mine for the historian of manners and customs: the novel-
reader finds Count Fathom metamorphosed into Mr. Grieve, an exemplary
apothecary, "a sincere convert to virtue," and "unaffectedly pious."

Apparently a wave of good-nature came over Smollett: he forgave
everybody, his own relations even, and he reclaimed his villain. A
patron might have played with him. He mellowed in Scotland: Matthew
there became less tart, and more tolerant; an actual English Matthew
would have behaved quite otherwise. "Humphrey Clinker" is an astonishing
book, as the work of an exiled, poor, and dying man. None of his works
leaves so admirable an impression of Smollett's virtues: none has so few
of his less amiable qualities.

With the cadet of Bonhill, outworn with living, and with labour, died the
burly, brawling, picturesque old English novel of humour and of the road.
We have nothing notable in this manner, before the arrival of Mr.
Pickwick. An exception will scarcely be made in the interest of Richard
Cumberland, who, as Scott says, "has occasionally . . . become
disgusting, when he meant to be humorous." Already Walpole had begun the
new "Gothic romance," and the "Castle of Otranto," with Miss Burney's
novels, was to lead up to Mrs. Radcliffe and Scott, to Miss Edgeworth and
Miss Austen.




CHAPTER X: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


Sainte-Beuve says somewhere that it is impossible to speak of "The German
Classics." Perhaps he would not have allowed us to talk of the American
classics. American literature is too nearly contemporary. Time has not
tried it. But, if America possesses a classic author (and I am not
denying that she may have several), that author is decidedly Hawthorne.
His renown is unimpeached: his greatness is probably permanent, because
he is at once such an original and personal genius, and such a judicious
and determined artist.

Hawthorne did not set himself to "compete with life." He did not make
the effort--the proverbially tedious effort--to say everything. To his
mind, fiction was not a mirror of commonplace persons, and he was not the
analyst of the minutest among their ordinary emotions. Nor did he make a
moral, or social, or political purpose the end and aim of his art. Moral
as many of his pieces naturally are, we cannot call them didactic. He
did not expect, nor intend, to better people by them. He drew the Rev.
Arthur Dimmesdale without hoping that his Awful Example would persuade
readers to "make a clean breast" of their iniquities and their secrets.
It was the moral situation that interested him, not the edifying effect
of his picture of that situation upon the minds of novel-readers.

He set himself to write Romance, with a definite idea of what Romance-
writing should be; "to dream strange things, and make them look like
truth." Nothing can be more remote from the modern system of reporting
commonplace things, in the hope that they will read like truth. As all
painters must do, according to good traditions, he selected a subject,
and then placed it in a deliberately arranged light--not in the full
glare of the noonday sun, and in the disturbances of wind, and weather,
and cloud. Moonshine filling a familiar chamber, and making it
unfamiliar, moonshine mixed with the "faint ruddiness on walls and
ceiling" of fire, was the light, or a clear brown twilight was the light
by which he chose to work. So he tells us in the preface to "The Scarlet
Letter." The room could be filled with the ghosts of old dwellers in it;
faint, yet distinct, all the life that had passed through it came back,
and spoke with him, and inspired him. He kept his eyes on these figures,
tangled in some rare knot of Fate, and of Desire: these he painted, not
attending much to the bustle of existence that surrounded them, not
permitting superfluous elements to mingle with them, and to distract him.

The method of Hawthorne can be more easily traced than that of most
artists as great as himself. Pope's brilliant passages and disconnected
trains of thought are explained when we remember that "paper-sparing," as
he says, he wrote two, or four, or six couplets on odd, stray bits of
casual writing material. These he had to join together, somehow, and
between his "Orient Pearls at Random Strung" there is occasionally "too
much string," as Dickens once said on another opportunity. Hawthorne's
method is revealed in his published note-books. In these he jotted the
germ of an idea, the first notion of a singular, perhaps supernatural
moral situation. Many of these he never used at all, on others he would
dream, and dream, till the persons in the situations became characters,
and the thing was evolved into a story. Thus he may have invented such a
problem as this: "The effect of a great, sudden sin on a simple and
joyous nature," and thence came all the substance of "The Marble Faun"
("Transformation"). The original and germinal idea would naturally
divide itself into another, as the protozoa reproduce themselves. Another
idea was the effect of nearness to the great crime on a pure and spotless
nature: hence the character of Hilda. In the preface to "The Scarlet
Letter," Hawthorne shows us how he tried, by reflection and dream, to
warm the vague persons of the first mere notion or hint into such life as
characters in romance inherit. While he was in the Civil Service of his
country, in the Custom House at Salem, he could not do this; he needed
freedom. He was dismissed by political opponents from office, and
instantly he was himself again, and wrote his most popular and, perhaps,
his best book. The evolution of his work was from the prime notion
(which he confessed that he loved best when "strange") to the short
story, and thence to the full and rounded novel. All his work was
leisurely. All his language was picked, though not with affectation. He
did not strive to make a style out of the use of odd words, or of
familiar words in odd places. Almost always he looked for "a kind of
spiritual medium, seen through which" his romances, like the Old Manse in
which he dwelt, "had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material
world."

The spiritual medium which he liked, he was partly born into, and partly
he created it. The child of a race which came from England, robust and
Puritanic, he had in his veins the blood of judges--of those judges who
burned witches and persecuted Quakers. His fancy is as much influenced
by the old fanciful traditions of Providence, of Witchcraft, of haunting
Indian magic, as Scott's is influenced by legends of foray and feud, by
ballad, and song, and old wives' tales, and records of conspiracies, fire-
raisings, tragic love-adventures, and border wars. Like Scott, Hawthorne
lived in phantasy--in phantasy which returned to the romantic past,
wherein his ancestors had been notable men. It is a commonplace, but an
inevitable commonplace, to add that he was filled with the idea of
Heredity, with the belief that we are all only new combinations of our
fathers that were before us. This has been made into a kind of pseudo-
scientific doctrine by M. Zola, in the long series of his Rougon-Macquart
novels. Hawthorne treated it with a more delicate and a serener art in
"The House of the Seven Gables."

It is curious to mark Hawthorne's attempts to break away from
himself--from the man that heredity, and circumstance, and the divine
gift of genius had made him. He naturally "haunts the mouldering lodges
of the past"; but when he came to England (where such lodges are
abundant), he was ill-pleased and cross-grained. He knew that a long
past, with mysteries, dark places, malisons, curses, historic wrongs, was
the proper atmosphere of his art. But a kind of conscientious desire to
be something other than himself--something more ordinary and popular--make
him thank Heaven that his chosen atmosphere was rare in his native land.
He grumbled at it, when he was in the midst of it; he grumbled in
England; and how he grumbled in Rome! He permitted the American Eagle to
make her nest in his bosom, "with the customary infirmity of temper that
characterises this unhappy fowl," as he says in his essay "The Custom
House." "The general truculency of her attitude" seems to "threaten
mischief to the inoffensive community" of Europe, and especially of
England and Italy.

Perhaps Hawthorne travelled too late, when his habits were too much
fixed. It does not become Englishmen to be angry because a voyager is
annoyed at not finding everything familiar and customary in lands which
he only visits because they are strange. This is an inconsistency to
which English travellers are particularly prone. But it is, in
Hawthorne's case, perhaps, another instance of his conscientious attempts
to be, what he was not, very much like other people. His unexpected
explosions of Puritanism, perhaps, are caused by the sense of being too
much himself. He speaks of "the Squeamish love of the Beautiful" as if
the love of the Beautiful were something unworthy of an able-bodied
citizen. In some arts, as in painting and sculpture, his taste was very
far from being at home, as his Italian journals especially prove. In
short, he was an artist in a community for long most inartistic. He
could not do what many of us find very difficult--he could not take
Beauty with gladness as it comes, neither shrinking from it as immoral,
nor getting girlishly drunk upon it, in the aesthetic fashion, and
screaming over it in an intoxication of surprise. His tendency was to be
rather shy and afraid of Beauty, as a pleasant but not immaculately
respectable acquaintance. Or, perhaps, he was merely deferring to Anglo-
Saxon public opinion.

Possibly he was trying to wean himself from himself, and from his own
genius, when he consorted with odd amateur socialists in farm-work, and
when he mixed, at Concord, with the "queer, strangely-dressed,
oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
agents of the world's destiny, yet were simple bores of a very intense
water." They haunted Mr. Emerson as they haunted Shelley, and Hawthorne
had to see much of them. But they neither made a convert of him, nor
irritated him into resentment. His long-enduring kindness to the
unfortunate Miss Delia Bacon, an early believer in the nonsense about
Bacon and Shakespeare, was a model of manly and generous conduct. He
was, indeed, an admirable character, and his goodness had the bloom on it
of a courteous and kindly nature that loved the Muses. But, as one has
ventured to hint, the development of his genius and taste was hampered
now and then, apparently, by a desire to put himself on the level of the
general public, and of their ideas. This, at least, is how one explains
to oneself various remarks in his prefaces, journals, and note-books.
This may account for the moral allegories which too weirdly haunt some of
his short, early pieces. Edgar Poe, in a passage full of very honest and
well-chosen praise, found fault with the allegorical business.

Mr. Hutton, from whose "Literary Essays" I borrow Poe's opinion, says:
"Poe boldly asserted that the conspicuously ideal scaffoldings of
Hawthorne's stories were but the monstrous fruits of the bad
transcendental atmosphere which he breathed so long." But I hope this
way of putting it is not Poe's. "Ideal scaffoldings," are odd enough,
but when scaffoldings turn out to be "fruits" of an "atmosphere," and
monstrous fruits of a "bad transcendental atmosphere," the brain reels in
the fumes of mixed metaphors. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, "get a
bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott," and,
in fact, write about things less impalpable, as Mr. Mallock's heroine
preferred to be loved, "in a more human sort of way."

Hawthorne's way was never too ruddily and robustly human. Perhaps, even
in "The Scarlet Letter," we feel too distinctly that certain characters
are moral conceptions, not warmed and wakened out of the allegorical into
the real. The persons in an allegory may be real enough, as Bunyan has
proved by examples. But that culpable clergyman, Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale,
with his large, white brow, his melancholy eyes, his hand on his heart,
and his general resemblance to the High Church Curate in Thackeray's "Our
Street," is he real? To me he seems very unworthy to be Hester's lover,
for she is a beautiful woman of flesh and blood. Mr. Dimmesdale was not
only immoral; he was unsportsmanlike. He had no more pluck than a church-
mouse. His miserable passion was degraded by its brevity; how could he
see this woman's disgrace for seven long years, and never pluck up heart
either to share her shame or _peccare forliter_? He is a lay figure,
very cleverly, but somewhat conventionally made and painted. The
vengeful husband of Hester, Roger Chillingworth, is a Mr. Casaubon stung
into jealous anger. But his attitude, watching ever by Dimmesdale,
tormenting him, and yet in his confidence, and ever unsuspected, reminds
one of a conception dear to Dickens. He uses it in "David Copperfield,"
where Mr. Micawber (of all people!) plays this trick on Uriah Heep; he
uses it in "Hunted Down"; he was about using it in "Edwin Drood"; he used
it (old Martin and Pecksniff) in "Martin Chuzzlewit." The person of
Roger Chillingworth and his conduct are a little too melodramatic for
Hawthorne's genius.

In Dickens's manner, too, is Hawthorne's long sarcastic address to Judge
Pyncheon (in "The House of the Seven Gables"), as the judge sits dead in
his chair, with his watch ticking in his hand. Occasionally a chance
remark reminds one of Dickens; this for example: He is talking of large,
black old books of divinity, and of their successors, tiny books,
Elzevirs perhaps. "These little old volumes impressed me as if they had
been intended for very large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted at
an early stage of their growth." This might almost deceive the elect as
a piece of the true Boz. Their widely different talents did really
intersect each other where the perverse, the grotesque, and the terrible
dwell.

To myself "The House of the Seven Gables" has always appeared the most
beautiful and attractive of Hawthorne's novels. He actually gives us a
love story, and condescends to a pretty heroine. The curse of "Maule's
Blood" is a good old romantic idea, terribly handled. There is more of
lightness, and of a cobwebby dusty humour in Hepzibah Pyncheon, the
decayed lady shopkeeper, than Hawthorne commonly cares to display. Do
you care for the "first lover," the Photographer's Young Man? It may be
conventional prejudice, but I seem to see him going about on a tricycle,
and I don't think him the right person for Phoebe. Perhaps it is really
the beautiful, gentle, oppressed Clifford who haunts one's memory most, a
kind of tragic and thwarted Harold Skimpole. "How pleasant, how
delightful," he murmured, but not as if addressing any one. "Will it
last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open window! An open
window! How beautiful that play of sunshine. Those flowers, how very
fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how blooming. A flower
with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dewdrops . . . " This comparison
with Skimpole may sound like an unkind criticism of Clifford's character
and place in the story--it is only a chance note of a chance resemblance.

Indeed, it may be that Hawthorne himself was aware of the resemblance.
"An individual of Clifford's character," he remarks, "can always be
pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious
than through his heart." And he suggests that, if Clifford had not been
so long in prison, his aesthetic zeal "might have eaten out or filed away
his affections." This was what befell Harold Skimpole--himself "in
prisons often"--at Coavinses! The Judge Pyncheon of the tale is also a
masterly study of swaggering black-hearted respectability, and then, in
addition to all the poetry of his style, and the charm of his haunted
air, Hawthorne favours us with a brave conclusion of the good sort, the
old sort. They come into money, they marry, they are happy ever after.
This is doing things handsomely, though some of our modern novelists
think it coarse and degrading. Hawthorne did not think so, and they are
not exactly better artists than Hawthorne.