The Hawthorne Centenary

Abstract

A U HUNDRED YEARS AGO this May Nathaniel Hawthorne died quietly in a New Hampshire inn. As we go to press the extravagant barrage of birthday tributes to Shakespeare is slackening, on the academic front at least, and now that the air is clearing we may be able to discern the retiring shade of Hawthorne, patiently waiting his turn, consoled perhaps by the thought that his friend Melville once mentioned him in the same breath with Shakespeare and by the fact that in the annual May sweepstakes conducted by PMLA he is running a good fourth among the American entries, trailing Melville, James, and Faulkner, but holding his own with Twain and Hemingway. The renewed interest in Hawthorne cannot be explained simply by the inflationary trend in scholarly publication, by Matthiessens' influential essay in American Renaissance, or by the extraordinary current reputation of Faulkner which in some quarters has led to a redefinition of the great tradition of American fiction in terms of his peculiar genius. What also seems apparent is that both Hawthorne and Faulkner have profited from a deep change in the national psyche as reflected in our literature. Is it too much to say that it required a second world war within a quarter of a century, with all it revealed about that common human nature on which Hawthorne loved to muse, to precipitate the change and to make it possible for us to readmit into our literature the complex problems of guilt and responsibility that the determinism of the preceding decades had obscured or at best transferred to the collective level? There is no lack of testimony from contemporary writers as to what happened. To be reminded that war may be a permanent condition of human nature rather than a recurrent crisis and to contemplate Buchenwald and Dachau and the starving hordes of India and China is to reincur the guilt,