[In the following essay, Stoehr examines “Young Goodman Brown” in light of Hawthorne's ideas on the relationship between spiritual and natural truth, and the dangers implicit in confusing the two.]

The tellers of tales—in America, writers like Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and later Mark Twain—construct their fictions around some single and striking figure of speech, at once abstract and concrete, an idea embodied in an action, object, circumstance, or the like, so that it becomes, as it were, a trope of life. The tale's main “effect”—to use Poe's term for it—reduces again and again to some bizarre image: a house collapsing with the death of its owner, a woman dying with the removal of her birthmark, a stutterer whose speech is act, a package of limburger cheese mistaken for the putrescence of a corpse, a chandelier of human torches, a “Pygmalion” figurehead for a ship, a “writer” who would “prefer not,” a burglar-alarm system with a will of its own. This is in contrast with authors like James, who write a different genre, the short story, and who are concerned with character, situation, life or a slice of it. The teller of the tale carefully leads up to or surrounds his central conception with a series of events which may sometimes look like a realistic plot, but which differ in that they comprise something like a closed system, the elements interconnected and interdefined (like a perfectly logical language), and all organized by the dominant image. If there is often a good deal of ornament along the way, it is neither naturalistic nor gratuitous. Detail is not offered for its own sake, nor in the interests of verisimilitude, but is part and parcel of the “effect.” Generally in Poe and Twain the end of the tale is the final clicking into place of the essential cog, for the sake of which everything else exists—the revelation of the secret, the discovery of the truth, the magic word, the punch line, the gimmick or nub or snapper. In Hawthorne and Melville it is the reader's job to discover the key; then, as in the analysis of dreams, the fantastic filigree of secondary elaboration collapses to a single symbolic image, the dream-thought or hidden content.

Clearly this is not realism, nor is the purpose of these writers to hold the mirror up to nature. And yet it would not be fair to say that their tales have nothing to do with life or reality or truth. What sort of an imagination is it, and what sort of a vision of the world does it imply, when an author is continually blowing up fictional balloons only to pop them or to invite the reader to reduce them to a neat little bang?

The comparison to dreams may be helpful at this point, for these writers used the analogy themselves. Poe addressed himself “to the dreamers and those who put their faith in dreams as in the only realities.” Hawthorne said he chose Brook Farm as the scene of The Blithedale Romance because, “being certainly the most romantic episode of his own life,—essentially a day-dream and yet a fact,” it thus offered “an available foothold between fiction and reality,” and Melville approvingly described his reading of Mosses from an Old Manse as being spun “round about in a web of dreams.” Twain too finally came to rest on similar insubstantial ground, for example in The Mysterious Stranger, where Satan pronounces the final truth toward which everything in that gloomy story (and much in Twain's development as an author) has been heading: “Life itself is only a vision, a dream. … Nothing exists save empty space—and you! … And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination.” We are reminded of Ishmael on the mast-head, White-Jacket in the water, or Pierre, who did not see “that all the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own things.”

Already we will be noting differences in the views of our authors, but we may begin in general by saying of them that the solipsistic bent is in none of them a genuinely philosophical attitude. It is instead a particular artistic stance, in its most extreme version a promotion of fiction to a rank of reality above life, and a conception of experience as predominantly verbal, or at least gaining its significance from expression in language rather than from acting-out in life. It is not so much that these writers can believe in nothing but the reality of their own fantasies—though Poe often pretends to such a view and Twain bitterly toys with it at the end of his career—but rather that the sense that they are able to make of the world automatically frames itself in fantasy, and that this is by virtue of some very specialized uses of language to render experience. It should be emphasized that “dreams, visions, fiction,” a triad of equivalencies found in The Mysterious Stranger, are terms closely related, if not synonymous, in all four writers; accordingly the correspondences of dream and reality are to a great extent problems of verbal imagination, referential language, and literary mimesis. “To dream” is to use language about life and the world in special ways.

In brief, these special uses of language may be stated as follows: for Poe, a kind of word-magic built chiefly on metonymies, in which words are treated as if they were naturally or supernaturally rather than conventionally and arbitrarily attached to their referents; for Hawthorne, a heavily metaphorical style, in which whatever is described seems always on the verge of turning into its metaphorical description, and in which one often cannot tell the difference between the imaginary and the real; for Melville, a similar ambiguity, based on irony rather than metaphor, words turned against themselves, until reference disappears at the other end of Poe's blind alley; for Twain, a hyperbolic use of language, in which most expressions turn out to be heightened and distorted inventions, exaggerations, even lies, about the ordinary world.

The center or kernel of Poe's tales is frequently a visual pun taken literally and in deadly earnest—as Hop-frog puts the torch to the human chandelier, or Dupin finds “The Purloined Letter” in plain sight on the thief's letter rack. In Hawthorne some metaphor, such as “Life figures itself to me as a festal or funeral procession” (“The Procession of Life”), is allowed to flower into or to cap with one all-encompassing emblem a series of similar images. Melville focuses on bits of human speech—or the lack of it, in “Billy Budd”—and reiterates until all meanings have been canvassed, and none are left. Twain in his turn tells the tall tale, built on a succession of whoppers, and reserving some monstrously inflated absurdity to ring down the curtain.

Poe and Twain typically end their tales with a sort of explosion—it is the dreaded revelation in Poe, when, as in “Morella,” the name calls the thing named into being, and the narrator's consciousness goes blank in horror (this blankness or blotting out is the familiar abyss or maelstrom in Poe—“the end”); in Twain, it is the deflation of the hyperbolic balloon, when the last great puff of hot air from the narrator, who has gone too far this time, leaves the audience collapsing with laughter. In both cases, the end of the fictional structure is likely to come with a sudden neatness; the last words fall into place and, with a shock, we are back in our own reality again, where we become aware that we are holding our breath, or our sides.

Some of Hawthorne's tales go this way also, emphasizing the literal boundaries of fiction, the beginning and the end. More often, however, and especially in his best pieces, Hawthorne (like Melville) puts the confrontation between the imaginary and the real directly into his plots, as the focus of interest rather than as the means to an effect. One might even say—and this will be a large part of our concern in what follows—that a tale like “Young Goodman Brown” is about the relations of fiction and reality, a study of the true-to-life, a sketch for a theory of mimesis.

The structure of events in Hawthorne's tales is not linearly, that is to say temporally, conceived as in Poe's, where disaster awaits at the end, but rather cyclically or spatially, as befits thematic rather than anecdotal organization; and of course the built-in predispositions of emblematic art lend themselves to such a method. Hawthorne's tales sometimes have plots, but when they do they are mere pretexts for the configurations which he wants to present. Most of his tales exist for the sake of a single scene or image, and the reverberations he can make it echo with. One thinks of “The Minister's Black Veil,” “The Bosom Serpent,” “The Wedding Knell,” “The Birthmark,” and so on. In some cases, as for example the processional “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” the crucial image is reserved for the climax, but more usually it is present from the beginning, an emblem which Hawthorne can constantly refer to as a source of moral comment and fanciful speculation. The emblematic moment recurs again and again in different guises and contexts. Very often it builds to some physical confrontation of the characters, standing in different moral planes, for example the deathbed scene in “The Minister's Black Veil” or the final coming-true of the prediction of “The Prophetic Pictures.” This is the methodology of Hawthorne's novels as well, which are rather like collections of tales strung together as series of tableaux showing the characters in a variety of physical and moral postures vis à vis one another. One almost wants to say that nothing else happens in the novels; all the action takes place behind the scenes and in the wings.

The central images on which Hawthorne bases his tales are easy to isolate and study; many of them are precisely formulated in the American Notebooks, for example:

A man to swallow a small snake—and it to be a symbol of cherished sin.

(“The Bosom Serpent”)

The semblance of a human face to be found on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturae. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and by and by a boy is born, whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait. At some critical juncture, the resemblance is found to be perfect. A prophecy may be connected.

(“The Great Stone Face”)

To make one's own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story.

(“Monsieur du Miroir”)

… An essay on the misery of being always under a mask. A veil may be needful, but never a mask.

(“The Minister's Black Veil”)

Here as in Poe we see a fondness for the bizarre or grotesque image, but unlike Poe, Hawthorne usually conceives his emblem as having a moral, as embodying some truth, and in the actual working out of the tale he invariably directs it to some meaning for ordinary life. One need only compare the morals pointed at the ends of “Drowne's Wooden Image” or “The Prophetic Pictures” or “Edward Randolph's Portrait” with the more simply fantastic treatment of the same sort of idea in Poe's “The Oval Portrait” to see the difference in intention—all the more strongly highlighted in this case by a similarity in both design and effect. Pursuing the comparison a bit further, it is surprising to discover the number of entries in Hawthorne's American Notebooks which suggest or actually parallel tales developed by Poe. Had he had access to them, there are several entries that would have made Poe hesitate, in his review of Twice-told Tales, before accusing Hawthorne of transcendentalist symbol-hunting and (what is more ironic) unconscious plagiarism. Here are some examples which show how far toward the purely fantastic Hawthorne might have gone, had he not been committed to the “metaphor run-mad,” as Poe called his rival's technique:

To make literal pictures of figurative expressions;—for instance, he burst into tears—a man suddenly turned into a shower of briny drops. An explosion of laughter—a man blowing up, and his fragments flying about on all sides. He cast his eyes upon the ground—a man standing eyeless, with his eyes on the ground, staring up at him in wonderment &c &c &c.

(Cf. Poe's “A Predicament”)

Questions as to unsettled points of History, and Mysteries of Nature, to be asked of a mesmerized person.

(Cf. Poe's “Mesmeric Revelation”)

The strange incident in the court of Charles IX (sic, for VI), of France: he and five other maskers being attired in coats of linen covered with pitch and bestuck with flax to represent hairy savages. They entered the hall dancing, the five being fastened together, and the king in front. By accident the five were set on fire with a torch. Two were burned to death on the spot, two afterwards died, one fled to the buttery, and jumped into a vessel of water. It might be represented as the fate of a squad of dissolute men.

(Cf. Poe's “Hop-Frog”; Hawthorne had this idea from Froissart's Chronicles in 1838 and Poe probably from a secondary source when he later developed the anecdote.)

There are dozens more of these grotesque ideas recorded in the American Notebooks, the majority of which never found their way into Hawthorne's tales. Of those that finally did grow to full treatment, most of them have a moral already pointed in the first conception, and if they do not originally have moral significance, are given it in their fictional elaborations. This, of course, was what Poe found offensive and “transcendental” in Hawthorne. Probably he would have been all the more vexed to find that the image or emblem ordinarily occurred first to Hawthorne, and was then pressed for some symbolic meaning or significance. Often one sees him groping unsuccessfully for a meaning in the notebooks—“A person to catch fire-flies, and try to kindle his household fire with them. It would be symbolical of something”—and it was precisely this difficulty of finding a meaning adequate to his symbols that, in his last years, proved Hawthorne's stumbling block (see Davidson's editions of Dr. Grimshawe's Secret and the other unfinished manuscripts). The central struggle of his art is to maintain a tension between the terms of his symbols, to enliven dead metaphors, to force his daydreams into a certain relation with everyday life without giving up their essential strangeness. Hawthorne's typical stance may further be distinguished from Poe's in that the narrative point of view of a moral tale is outside the tale itself, whereas in the tale of pure fantasy the teller is not only part of the tale, but, in Poe at any rate, peculiarly identical with it. The usual Poe narrators—men like the morbid husband of Ligeia—become the characters in Hawthorne—like Ethan Brand or Young Goodman Brown or Rev. Hooper. (Rappaccini and Hawthorne's other evil scientists are like Poe's Dupin, or like Poe the poet-critic of “The Philosophy of Composition”; and it is interesting that the ratiocinative figure in Poe is rarely the narrator unless Poe is speaking in his own voice—the women are generally the abstruse and metaphysical ones.) Hawthorne maintains a certain essayistic distance from his characters and their stories. He presents his tales as purported translations, parts of an unpublished book, stories told him by others, imagined historical events, and so forth, and his prose is full of little reminders of the narrator's essential uninvolvement: “It only remains to say …,” “the historian of the sect affirms …,” “at that moment, if report be trust-worthy. …”

Hawthorne's narrative stance is different from Poe's because Hawthorne wants to bridge the gap between imagination and reality while Poe prefers to fall in. The former's emblems are of something, have bearing on life, while the latter's are grotesque climaxes marking the boundary-line of fantasy and its sharp division from the ordinary world, which, so far as his tales are concerned, might as well not exist. In Poe there is no distinction between the expressions of language and what those expressions express. All reality but that of language is denied, and Poe is like his character in “The Power of Words” who speaks the stars into existence. Whereas Hawthorne does not deny extra-linguistic reality, he does assign it a peculiar status in his view of things. He does not believe “in dreams as the only realities,” as Poe does, but he says—or allows his narrator in Blithedale to say—that their “airiest fragments impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme.” The contrast between dream and reality is what interests Hawthorne. The world, he writes in “The Old Manse,” is “tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose.” His advice to the world, to “take an age-long nap,” is fancy carried to Hawthorne's most annoying extreme of whimsy, but serious analyses of the relations between dream and reality occur in tale after tale. In these, Hawthorne sometimes trusts the dream, sometimes the reality, sometimes cannot decide between them. Perhaps he is more often found on the side of the dreamer than that of the realist—Clifford rather than Judge Pyncheon, Owen Warland rather than Robert Danforth, Violet and Peony rather than their father—and moreover, the whole evidence of his choice of subject matter and method—the preponderance of tales over essays, fables over sketches—attests his nearness to Poe's stance as a pure fantast. But while Poe wants to blot out reality and allow fantasy to fill the consciousness, Hawthorne is more interested in exploring the relations between the two.

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Probably the most interesting of Hawthorne's tales, seen in this light, is “Young Goodman Brown.” The core of the plot is a pun—not taken with perverse literalness as it would be in Poe, but preserved as a pun and pressed to its full ambiguity in the course of the tale. Young Goodman Brown, an ordinary young and good man, has a sweet and doting wife whose name is Faith. By the end of the narrative, Brown has grown old, is no longer good in any ordinary way, and has lost his Faith, that is, his religious faith, his faith in his fellowmen, his faith in his wife. The story opens with Brown taking leave of his wife for an overnight trip. She begs him to remain, says she fears that bad dreams will visit her in his absence, but he tells her to say her prayers and no harm will come to her. He himself, as it turns out, is off to a Witches' Sabbath, a gathering of the devil's own in the forest, where tonight several converts are to be admitted to the communion. On his way he meets the devil, who looks very like Brown's own father. Disconcerted by his companion and his “serpent” staff, Brown hesitates, finally refuses to go on to the meeting, even though he has meanwhile discovered that he is to be in the company of all the most valued of his religious guides and counselors—Goody Cloyse, Deacon Gookin, and even the village pastor himself. Apparently everyone he respects is a hypocrite, actually a partaker of the devil's sacrament. Still reluctant, he is next astonished to hear what seems to be the voice of his own wife as she prepares to join with Satan's revellers in the distant clearing, and, as a token of her apparent defection, a pink ribbon which she wore “fluttered lightly down through the air.”

“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupified moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”

Brown now proceeds to the clearing where the whole town appears to be gathered, including his wife. Even yet there seems to be one more chance for Brown and his Faith. They approach Satan's altar where they are to pledge themselves to him. Satan welcomes them:

“Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

At the last moment Brown calls out to his Faith: “‘look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.’” Immediately his surroundings change, take on their ordinary appearance, and he is alone. Apparently he is saved. He does not know whether his wife has saved herself too or not. Indeed, it seems equally possible that he has merely “fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting.” Yet, dream or no, the experience produces a profound change in Brown. Although his wife greets him with unsuspecting joy the next morning, his faith is gone. He now mistrusts all men, his life becomes a succession of suspicions and secret judgments, and “his dying hour was gloom.”

Even this bare outline of the tale presents us with some interesting puzzles. If, as seems apparent, Brown does look up to heaven at the last moment, with the consequence that the whole evil scene disappears and he is left alone in the woods, is not this circumstance an indication that he has preserved his faith after all, by refusing the devil's communion? How then are we to explain his later behavior? Alternatively perhaps we are to take the whole episode as a dream. Hawthorne has a plan in the American Notebooks for a tale to be composed like a dream:

To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations, which are all taken as a matter of course, its eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing ever has been written.

But if “Young Goodman Brown” is an outgrowth of this idea, it has surely changed considerably. Among other things we are missing the “eccentricities and aimlessness,” although we have the “matter of course.” Further, “Young Goodman Brown,” if it has a dream in it, must also have a reality, and there are no very clear boundaries marking the one off from the other. Where does it begin? And what does it mean?

If we do take Brown's experience as a dream, we must then regard his loss of his faith, both wife and virtue, as a kind of wish—at least we may say that he imagines the loss, and thus far chooses it. He similarly imagines the worst of all mankind, and by so imagining these horrors, he wakes into the condition of believing them. If the reader has trouble distinguishing the boundary between dream and reality here, all the more is Brown unable to discern it, for his dream becomes his waking life—what he imagines comes true for him.

The ambiguity of Brown's experience, both chosen and forced upon him, imaginary and real, is worth dwelling on, for it is at the center of the problem of faith as Hawthorne conceives it. So far as we know, Brown himself never questions the reality of his adventure in the woods. And, if we suppose with him that it all really happened, I think we have to admit that Brown has good reason for his loss of faith—at least in his fellowman—since everyone except himself seems to be in the devil's service. Supposing, however, that it was only a dream, then we must judge Brown harshly, as having chosen his loss, just as Ethan Brand seems to choose his fate in that tale. But Hawthorne seems to leave the question in the air; he will not say for sure, nor give us any certain evidence, that Brown's experience was either dream or reality. Nor is it somewhere in-between the two (whatever that could mean); in a way it is both. To make this clear, we must return again to the text.

The language of Hawthorne's tales is particularly abundant with expressions of apparent circumstance: “as if,” “as though,” “it appeared that,” “it seemed that,” “it might have been,” “it must have been,” “doubtless,” “perhaps,” “were such a thing possible,” “he fancied that,” “as it were,” “some affirm that,” and so forth. There are at least thirty such expressions in this tale, not counting subtler versions. Going hand in hand with these is the vocabulary of surfaces—faces, facades, visages, countenances, aspects, images, tokens, types, symbols, and the like—all quite appropriate to the presentation of fantasy and dream-vision. In most writers we expect such expressions to signal statements and descriptions which we are not to take literally but rather metaphorically. Moreover, in a case like Hawthorne's, where the tales are so thoroughly permeated with “as if” and “as though” constructions, we are tempted to take the whole as allegorical, a highly organized saying of one thing to mean another. In Hawthorne, however, this is not quite the effect. His emblematic technique is less allegorical than “hypothetical,” less a matter of systematically reading other meanings into the literal statement than a matter of withholding judgment on all apparent meanings, which are nonetheless offered as possibilities.

In proposing the term “hypothetical” to characterize Hawthorne's method, I wish to emphasize that it must be taken here in the loosest sense. Hawthorne does not present a hypothesis which he expects in any way to be verified or verifiable, as, for example, a writer of utopian fiction like Bellamy or a Chicago realist like Henry Blake Fuller might. In most of Hawthorne's tales—certainly in “Young Goodman Brown”—the statements put forth are not to be regarded as either true or false, or even possibly so, except in the broadest meaning of “truth-to-life.” We are not to imagine that what happened to Goodman Brown really happened to someone, or will, although much of the account Hawthorne gives could stand just as it is, had there been such a person with such a history. Nor are we asked to “suspend our disbelief” in reading the tale—not at least in any strict sense of that expression. In reading Hawthorne, as a matter of fact, we are constantly to bear in mind that it is only a fiction we are engrossed in. We take the story as neither true nor false, not by agreeing to leave such questions in abeyance, but by recognizing (and in Hawthorne, even concentrating on) the fact that such questions do not apply in the ordinary way. As with certain other kinds of imaginative accounts—for instance daydreams or jokes—we are required to put an “as if” construction on everything, to begin the experience with a silent “Supposing that …” which determines our attitude toward what we read. Again as in daydreams, jokes, and so forth, it is obvious that our attitude of “supposing” is quite different from an attitude of “believing” or even “pretending to believe.” Imagine believing or pretending to believe in “Young Goodman Brown”! This does not mean that we do not take such fiction seriously, for certainly we do; but only that our serious reaction to it is different from what it would be in the case of non-fiction. One does not write letters to the Times protesting the outrages committed in a tale (unless one happens to be a literary critic); one does not pass the hat for the relief of fictional orphans. Like as not, one takes thought rather than action.

Obviously there is much more to say about the logical implications and psychological effects of fiction as opposed to non-fiction. We have gone far enough, however, to see that “Young Goodman Brown,” with its insistence on its own “as-ifness,” is a rather special sort of tale, peculiarly about itself, about the nature of belief in imagined realities, and about the status of such realities. What happened to Young Goodman Brown in the woods is, first and foremost, a part of a fiction invented by Hawthorne. Brown of course cannot know this; that would be a twist for a modern novelist or playwright. Brown can know that his experience is in direct contradiction to his everyday sense of things, and that one or the other of them must be false—if they are to be regarded as matters of truth and falsity at all. This is just his difficulty. Logically, either Satan is right when he says, “ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind,” or else Brown had “fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting.” But how is Brown to decide which of the two accounts to trust? Remembering always that this is a logical question only if the accounts are true or false, let us go on to see what criteria or means of deciding are open to him. Perhaps he has some subtle moral sense, some faculty of intuition that could tell him. Hawthorne sometimes seemed to believe in such a faculty, as in this passage from the American Notebooks:

A person, while awake and in the business of life, to think highly of another, and place perfect confidence in him, but to be troubled with dreams in which this seeming friend appears to act the part of a most deadly enemy. Finally it is discovered that the dream-character is the true one. The explanation would be—the soul's instinctive perception.

Such an “explanation” might fit “Young Goodman Brown.” Assuming for the moment that it does, we should observe that it is not necessarily the apparent dream that is to be distrusted; distrust itself, to put it another way, is likely to lead to mistakes about reality:

Distrust to be thus exemplified [another entry in the Notebooks reads]: Various good and desirable things to be presented to a young man, and offered to his acceptance—as a friend, a wife, a fortune; but he to refuse them all, suspecting that it is merely a delusion. Yet all to be real, and he to be told so, when too late.

Back again with a character who needs “to be told” which is dream, which reality, we see Hawthorne here identifying the lack or loss of faith with a sort of suspicious pessimism—rather like that which Young Goodman Brown is said to arrive at as a consequence of his loss of faith. Perhaps instead it constitutes that loss.

Let us look at one more striking example of the sort of dilemma posed in these entries and in “Young Goodman Brown”—a situation in “Rappaccini's Daughter” that is so instructive an illustration of the problem that we must quote from it at some length. The hero, Giovanni, has fallen in love with the beautiful but deadly Beatrice. He has discovered that Beatrice is so imbued with the poisons of her father's garden that her very breath is fatal. At first unbelieving, he exclaims, “It is a dream … surely it is a dream,” but

he could not quite forget the bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid the sunny air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather by the necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and generous faith on his part. But now his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the earthly enthusiasm had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice's image.

As it turns out, so far as the reader can tell, Giovanni was quite right to be suspicious of Beatrice. Although he is certainly cruel to her, and although his attempt to achieve earthly happiness with her by administering powerful antidotes to the poison in her system is unquestionably fatal to her, yet surely he made no mistake about her potent infirmity. Yet Hawthorne says, “had Giovanni known how to estimate” Beatrice's virtues properly, they “would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion.” If we ask what difference that could have made, considering the realistic circumstances, the only answer that presents itself—and it is surely a curious one—is that Hawthorne could have invented some sort of loophole for his hero, if only his hero had had the “high faith” worthy of such a miracle. This may sound like the literary critic grasping at straws, but I believe that it is somehow Hawthorne's point—that after all, it is only a story, that the characters might have acted differently, the outcome might have been whatever they wanted, had they only realized it.

Both here and in “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne seems to throw the blame on his characters, while at the same time he gives them no possible means of saving themselves. He undermines his condemnation of them by telling their dreams as realistically as he does their actual experiences, so that even the reader can see little difference between the two. Were the author not on hand to put us right, by dropping an “as if” here and there, or, in “Rappaccini's Daughter,” by explicitly telling us what to think, would we know that Brown and Giovanni are to be condemned for their tragic losses—any more than Brown and Giovanni know it themselves? Hawthorne's technique puts us in nearly the same position as his characters, except that we are given some additional hints as to how we should come to terms with our dream, the tale we are reading.

For us it is a case of “supposing,” which we are to take seriously but not literally. We are to learn from it, as another of Hawthorne's notebook characters who never made it into fiction:

A person to look back on a long life ill-spent, and to picture forth a beautiful life which he would live if he could be permitted to begin his life over again. Finally to discover that he had only been dreaming of old age,—that he was really young, and could live such a life as he had pictured.

For this character, as for his readers, the typical Hawthorne illusion turns out well enough, but the Young Goodman Browns have no kindly author looking out for their interests, allowing them to “discover” that all is a dream. One feels that Hawthorne would have preferred to have all his tales come out so luckily for their characters. He worried over the unrelieved gloominess of The Scarlet Letter and wanted to include a few lighter pieces with it. Persuaded to separate publication by Fields, he followed it with an attempt at a book with more sunshine in it, The House of the Seven Gables, and if one reads through the complete works, the surprising thing is how many dreary cheerful things he did write—often for children. But at his best he invariably sees things at their worst. For a man who is always complaining about his characters' lack of faith, Hawthorne himself is singularly dubious about the possibilities of life and human nature. To quote the Notebooks one last time, he frequently seems to be in the following situation:

A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate,—he having made himself one of the personages.

One suspects that Hawthorne had his own experience in mind here. In any case, it is certainly related to the experience of Young Goodman Brown, whose dream turns into his reality merely by virtue of his belief in it. If Brown “strives” at all, it is certainly “in vain” to avert his catastrophe; ditto his creator.

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Hawthorne's tales are attempts to find meanings adequate to the emblems of life with which he fills his notebooks. In this respect he may be said to be rather like his Concord neighbor Thoreau, taking the measure of worldly facts, reading them as signs, and worrying a transcendental meaning out of them. But even in The Seven Gables Hawthorne's beans come up with scarlet blossoms, and his pond is a Maule's well. Thoreau uses language to create a world in which his spirit can breathe, which is neither entirely factual, past, and dead, nor entirely fanciful and unattainable. To borrow the rather Thoreauvian pun with which Hawthorne concludes one of his tales, he tries to “look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and living once for all in eternity, … find the perfect future in the present.” But Hawthorne, like the protagonist of “The Birthmark” so enjoined, cannot live up to such advice, or, as almost seems to come to the same thing for him, his characters cannot live up to it. Looking into the hearts of his Giovannis and Young Goodman Browns, Hawthorne finds no warrant for the faith he seeks. His “supposings” for them regularly issue in disaster.

Hawthorne's tales do tell us that things need not be what they seem, that there is always another, better world possible to faith. But contrariwise, the means to this faith is itself through fiction and related activities of the imagination, dreams and visions. As he also says in “The Birthmark,” à propos of Aylmer's dream: “Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.” This, especially in the context of Aylmer's experiment, is a gloomy version of something Emerson says in Nature, “that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.” Hawthorne's position is in some wise an Emersonian or Thoreauvian optimism, but without the grace to find his faith supported by the dreams which he and his characters are assailed by. Not that their dreams don’t come true, but that they turn out nightmares, like Aylmer's or Young Goodman Brown's.

While exploring the problem of faith through his characters, Hawthorne does not hesitate to probe the question of his own disappointment in them. He seems to recognize that if the fault is somehow in his characters, it is no less in himself, in his very decision to explore and experiment with their moral natures. Here we come at last to the perennial crux in Hawthorne, what in one way or another keeps him from being a transcendentalist—the unpardonable sin. Among the speeches of Satan to Brown and his wife, as they are welcomed to the communion, is the following:

“This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds. … By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds.”

Despite his refusal to join the devil's communion, Brown comes out of his experience—be it dream or reality—with precisely the power here promised him. The knowledge of good and evil (mainly evil) which he thereby gains is a curse. In it consists his loss of faith—in all senses of the word—for he now sees the sin in his wife and in his fellowmen, and he believes that the world is the devil's. The exercise of this power of secret knowledge is what, in the Notebooks and later in “Ethan Brand,” Hawthorne calls the “Unpardonable Sin”—“a want of love and reverence for the Human Soul; in consequence of which, the investigator pried into its dark depths, not with a hope or purpose of making it better, but from a cold philosophical curiosity.”

Although Hawthorne uses the phrase “cold philosophical curiosity,” it should be noted that the unpardonable sin, breaking the “magnetic chain of humanity,” is not the exclusive propensity of the calculating scientists in Hawthorne; the artists too are liable to pry too deeply into the “mystery of sin” in others, with the result that they are as much responsible for that sin as the sinners themselves. So the painter of “The Prophetic Pictures” asks himself, “Was not his own the form in which that destiny had embodied itself, and he a chief agent of the coming evil which he had foreshadowed?” And yet, how can the painter help seeing what he sees, foretelling what his power of vision reveals?

The difference between Hawthorne's artists and his scientists is that while the former, men like the painter of “The Prophetic Pictures” or Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, have the ability to transcend the here and now through a kind of artistic clairvoyance, the latter, like Aylmer, Rappaccini, and Chillingworth, are meddlers with time and space, Dupin-like reasoners who, since they can never get beyond the alchemical confines of their methodology, end up destroying the subjects of their experiments. As Aylmer discovers in “The Birthmark,” “… our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make.” The artists are also tempted to act on their special knowledge of “the mystery of sin,” the “dark depths” of the human soul, but the best of them characteristically refuse to go so far, or, if they do allow themselves even the painter's mimetic act, they are by so much the less possessors of the “high faith” that is the ultimate value in Hawthorne.

What disturbs Hawthorne most, and in fact gives rise to his conception of the unpardonable sin, is that his artists, like his scientists, may after all be guilty of attempting to “make” reality, and consequently, by virtue of their insight into the recesses of the human heart and their power to portray what they see with Pygmalion-like verisimilitude, they may actually call into being what would otherwise lie dormant, may sacrilegiously “commit” the sins they “imagine” in others. Obviously this fear has special import for Hawthorne's own situation. As Melville said in his review of Mosses from an Old Manse, one cannot finish reading “Young Goodman Brown” “… without addressing the author in his own words—‘It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin.’” But this is a question for a more psychoanalytic reading of him than I am now attempting.

One might extract from Emerson a fuller view of language to help explain how Hawthorne gets out of his mimetic dilemma, in so far as he does get out.

Words [Emerson says] are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history; the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.

In like manner, the memorable words of history and the proverbs of nations consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth.

By this account, truth-to-life is a necessary result of the proper use of language. The emblematic writer like Hawthorne cannot help but be in touch with reality. This is not a matter of mere factual or literal description; on the contrary, Emerson tells us we must “rise above the ground line of familiar facts,” to figurative language, images, and metaphors.

As the American Notebooks amply testify, Hawthorne believed with Emerson that “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact,” and that “The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.” It is only a little step further to a thorough reversal of the Realist's theory of mimesis; holding the mirror up to nature becomes, in Romantics like Hawthorne, not a means of seeing nature, but a means of seeing, reflexively, back into the seer himself, which is the point of the passage from Pierre cited at the beginning of this study. To quote Emerson again,

These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.

The ordinary Realist, a writer of short stories, wants to “reproduce” reality, or some aspect of it, in language. Words are thus conceived and valued as indicators of things, referring to the various “facts” of life and nature, and the writer is advised, for example by Henry James (though it was not exactly his practice), to take notes on his experience, the better to render it later in fiction. Ordinary Realism is premised on the view, whether tenable or not, that the writer can “match up” the things in his fiction to the things of life, through the agency of words, which act as neutral conductors, like the “half-tone dots” of a newspaper photograph. By contrast, in Hawthorne's mimesis with its dependence on emblematic language, what is “imitated” is not nature at all, but the supernatural—“moral law,” “spiritual fact,” “the beings and changes of the inward creation”—and these by means of natural emblems. In Emerson, this is one way of defining faith itself, “man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it.” “[P]icturesque language,” he says, “is at once a commanding certificate that he who employes it is a man in alliance with truth and God.” For him it is the essence of faith to find the natural world only a metaphor for the spiritual: he can act in this world enlivened by imagination; there is a universe for him. Belief, desire, and act are amalgamated, and one creates reality as one goes along: I make things happen, and thus prove my existence and the existence of what happens.

But for Hawthorne these “creative imitations” of the spirit are always accompanied by the admonition not to take them as reality, not to act upon them as upon evidence or fact. The products of the imagination, though they may comprise the highest truths of all, are only “supposed” truths, “as ifs” which crumble at the touch or disappear in the daylight, as Hawthorne coyly warned the reader of Twice-Told Tales. This is not regarded as a disadvantage so much as a safeguard, nor is he so sure of its invariable efficacy. As we have seen, his emblems carry a somber meaning, one which produces in him a nagging sense of guilt, as if he were to blame (and who else?) for the truths he divines. He keeps reminding us of the danger of taking the symbolic burden of an emblem literally, like Ahab in Moby-Dick, and thus destroying oneself in pursuit of an illusion—which for Melville too is tantamount to calling it magically into life. Less concerned with faith than with its loss, Hawthorne offers the following analysis: once we treat a spiritual truth as a natural truth, as something to act on, it immediately becomes a chimera breathing real fire; active belief is fatal to desire, and we are left with only half of faith, if not doubt then horror. His refuge was a theory of mimesis, or the rudiments of one: fictions, and their truths, are not matters of truth or falsity at all. For him, faith depends on remaining out of doubt, on maintaining the aesthetic distance.