The Good-Luck Charm of Introductory Pages

Following on the heels of The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a far sunnier book than its predecessor and one that would illustrate “the folly” of tumbling down on posterity “an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate.” Many critics have faulted the novel for its explaining away of hereditary guilt or its contradictory denial of it. In his introduction to The John Harvard Library edition of The House of Seven Gables, Denis Donoghue finds a fresh appreciation of the novel. Here is a brief excerpt from Donoghue’s piece discussing Hawthorne’s interest in writing prefaces.

Hawthorne evidently enjoyed writing prefaces, if we may judge by the frequency with which he wrote them. He was reluctant to send his books into the world without the good-luck charm of introductory pages. Even in his fictions, he often inserted little essays, paragraphs of rumination, a device facilitated by his having garrulous narrators. His standard method in fiction was to move from one picture to an- other; narrative thrust was not congenial to him. Sometimes he would use a preface to describe the house in which the book was written, its setting, a stream nearby, the weather, his writing nook at the bottom of the garden. Or he would comment on his work, often self- deprecatingly: “How little have I told! — and, of that little, how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it exclusively my own!” Mosses from an Old Manse, he said, was “but the scattered reminiscences of a single summer.” He also discovered, in writing a preface, how to turn an apology, by a flick of irony, into a claim:

So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face; nor am I, nor have ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people, who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.

The stories in Twice-told Tales, he said, “have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade — the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch.” One sad word borrowing another, he continued:

Instead of passion, there is sentiment; and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood, as to be taken into the reader’s mind without a shiver.

The book, “if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.” It was a bleak conclusion, since Hawthorne claimed that the sketches were not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart, (had it been so, they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.

In the prefaces, Hawthorne regularly asked his readers to be gentle with the book in hand. He instructed them how to read it, indicated the expectations they should bring to it and the prejudices they should put aside. In the preface to The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales he described himself as “a person, who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance,” and he declared himself innocent of any charge of egotism for researching “in that dusky region.” He wanted to achieve a certain tone; he wrote as if he would not for the world give offense, even though he sometimes gave offense, as in his essay “Chiefly about War Matters, by a Peaceable Man,” in which he exhibited mainly his indifference to the Civil War, his contempt for Lincoln, and his pleasure in seeing John Brown hanged. But generally in the prefaces he tried to assure his readers that, despite many appearances to the contrary, he lived in the same world as they did. He lived there, however, with studied reserve: privacy was his choice way of being alive. Often he seemed not to accept the conditions attached to being in the world. There is still a question of his lassitude, “the fault of laziness,” as T. S. Eliot said, “for which Hawthorne can chiefly be blamed.” Hawthorne admired Trollope’s novels, but he did not have his abundance or Balzac’s. By those comparisons, he lacked energy. “The soil which produced him with his essential flavor,” Eliot said, “is the soil which produced, just as inevitably, the environment which stunted him.” In his later years he would start upon novels, only to find that he could not finish them — Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret; Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life; The Ancestral Footstep. These occupied his mind as images and ideas for which he could not invent enabling stories or characters sufficient to drive the fateful motifs for- ward. Several of these motifs were completed, in the sense of being embodied or fulfilled, not by Hawthorne but by Henry James. In an easier world Hawthorne would have been content to live by doing nothing.

The preface to The House of the Seven Gables distinguishes, too sharply I think, between Novel and Romance and says that the book is Romance. The difference is that Novel “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.” And Romance, while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart — has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

Hawthorne doesn’t say what those laws are, unless we are to assume that they are the common laws of aesthetic and artistic creation, in which case they apply just as forcibly to Novel as to Romance. Nor does he say what he means by “the truth of the human heart”; he refers to it as if it were a well-known and agreed value, but in his fictions the question of the truth of the heart is at best ambiguous. He doesn’t say either whether Romance has a particular privilege in presenting that truth. The romancer, according to Hawthorne, is like a painter: “if he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.”