The movement from unity into multiplicity between 1200 and 1900 was unbroken in sequence and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer it would require a new social mind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution, it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react—but it would need to jump.
Of course Adams, if he were still alive, might consider (or recognize) the Internet and all it entails as the “jump” he said would have to occur. At any rate he would have been not only astonished but also amused. On the other hand, it might have made him even more unhappy.
chapter eleven
Some Victorians and
Others
Not all late-nineteenth-century authors were sourpusses like those we met in the previous chapter. Despite everything, good things were happening. Some very good books were being written by very interesting people. Two classic American novelists started and ended the century. More importantly for the world, three Russian giants emerged on the scene. Two English poets came and went, but we mustn’t forget them. Two American brothers, so unlike one another it’s hard to imagine them as brothers, bestrode the epoch. Two British tellers of tales amused and shocked their countrymen. Another British writer wrote a book whose fame will never die. His name wasn’t really Lewis Carroll, nor did his heroine really exist, but it doesn’t matter, because we all think she did, especially if we’re still young at heart.
Hawthorne and Melville were friends, at least to the extent that anyone could befriend the stone-faced author of The Scarlet Letter. The differences between these two men were as great as those between William and Henry James. And yet, in a sense, they loved one another. I hardly know whether Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were friends. They were born within a decade of one another, but their genius separated them. Certainly Turgenev and Dostoevsky knew about Tolstoy, as did almost everyone in the world, then and since.
Browning and Hardy were also a strange pair, both great poets but neither sufficiently known in their own or later times. I mean by my lights. Not everyone will agree about either of them.
Finally, Conan Doyle and Kipling—another strange and wonderful pair. Both sold millions of copies of their books, but neither was really respected. Both were to some extent looked down upon, Conan Doyle because he was just an entertainer, Kipling—even with his Nobel Prize—because he backed the wrong side in a war that reminds historians of Vietnam and Iraq.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
1804–1864
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Salem in 1804, spent most of his life in Massachusetts. His best stories are about the life in New England two centuries before he was born. They are among the best stories anyone has ever written about New England, and they go far toward defining our idea of New England as the home of refined moral sentiments and tortured, suffering souls.
Hawthorne himself was a tortured, suffering soul. He had three good friends. One was his wife, Sophia Peabody of Salem, whom he adored until the day he died and to whom he may have been able to reveal something of the churning torment within him. Another was Franklin Pierce, a college classmate who later became perhaps the least distinguished of all the Presidents of the United States and who sent Hawthorne to Liverpool as U. S. Consul, whence he wandered off to Italy for a few years—but he was no happier far away from New England (he carried New England within him wherever he went). The third friend was Herman Melville, who managed to escape from the same origins as his friend’s.
Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1849; it was published early the next year. He was very ill while he was writing it and grieving deeply over the death of his mother, whom he loved. The writing came easily that summer and fall, but he was worried about the book: probably at the same time that he knew how good it was, he was also afraid of what it said.
Melville was one of the first to read The Scarlet Letter and he felt exalted because he knew immediately how great a book it was; he felt that it allowed all American writers thenceforth to be free. Melville said things like that to Hawthorne, with his customary enthusiasm, but Hawthorne was more embarrassed than pleased.
The Scarlet Letter is about a man who has done a terrible thing that he is dying to confess.
Not everyone will agree that what Arthur Dimmesdale has done is so terrible. He has bedded a brilliant, passionate, and beautiful young woman, who loves him, and she has had a child. Why does he take no joy in this? For one thing, because she was and is married to another man; for another, because he is a clergyman and the very symbol of moral purity for his flock. It is worth remembering, furthermore, that adultery, in those old strict days, was a crime punishable by death.
The main reason why the minister suffers is not because he feels his crime is in itself so heinous, but because he cannot bring himself to reveal that he has committed it. Hester Prynne does not enjoy the luxury of secrecy; her belly has already betrayed her. Would she have remained quiet if her body had permitted it? Probably not. She is one of the great, proud women of fiction and wears with fierce defiance the letter “A,” for Adulteress, embroidered in scarlet and gold upon the bosom of her dress; she has somehow converted her punishment into a triumph.
Still, she will not reveal her lover if he will not reveal himself. She watches, in loving sympathy, as he struggles to do so. And what a struggle it is! We all watch with sympathy, and pity too, and fear, for all of us have done things that we wish to confess but cannot. (Not you, you say? Well then, everyone else.)
The Scarlet Letter is an important book not because it accurately describes how Americans lived in New England during the early seventeenth century (does it do that, after all?) but because it searches out the truth—or a truth—in human hearts, yours and mine.
Aristotle was wrong about many things, but he was right about many things, too, and one of the things he was most right about is the nature of tragedy. You see before you a man or woman, he said, who is worthy of respect—as is Hawthorne’s hero—but who is also fallible, like you. You see him fall, because he is human and therefore weak, not strong like a god. And you pity him, said Aristotle, because like you he is human and weak; and you are fearful, because you too might fall. You feel these emotions very deeply, to your heart’s core, and you are therefore purged of them, emerging from the theater where you have viewed the tragic events a better person, refreshed, more able to deal with the life that you must lead.