Chapter VIII: Psychological Studies 390 (9)

27. The accordion and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the snow, Mr. Oakhurst took the Innocent aside, and showed him a pair of snow-shoes, which he had fashioned from the old pack-saddle. “There’s one chance in a hundred to save her yet,” he said, pointing to Piney; “but it’s there,” he added, pointing toward Poker Flat. “If you can reach there in two days she’s safe.” “And you?” asked Tom Simson. “I’ll stay here,” was the curt reply.

[Sidenote: Preparation for climax.]

28. The lovers parted with a long embrace. “You are not going, too?” said the Duchess, as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany him. “As far as the cañon,” he replied. He turned suddenly, and kissed the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame, and her trembling limbs rigid with amazement.

29. Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and the whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that some one had quietly piled beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days longer. The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney.

[Sidenote: Characters in full change.]

[Sidenote: Note the repression of this entire climax. Simple, quiet sentences are enough.]

30. The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each other’s faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney, accepting the position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the Duchess’s waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day. That night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending asunder the protecting pines, invaded the very hut.

[Sidenote: No melodrama here.]

[Sidenote: SECOND CHARACTER CLIMAX.]

31. Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: “Piney, can you pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without knowing exactly why, felt relieved, and putting her head upon Piney’s shoulder, spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep.

[Sidenote: Local color in harmony with spirit of story.]

[Sidenote: Symbolism of physical nature.]

32. The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine-boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above.

[Sidenote: Poetic euphemism.]

33. They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned. Even the law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away, leaving them still locked in each other’s arms.

[Sidenote: MAIN CHARACTER CLIMAX, AND DENOUEMENT.]

34. But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine-trees, they found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie-knife. It bore the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:--

BENEATH THIS TREE
LIES THE BODY
OF
JOHN OAKHURST,
WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK
ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,
AND
HANDED IN HIS CHECKS
ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.

[Sidenote: SWIFT CONCLUSION.]

And pulseless and cold, with a derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

MAUPASSANT AND HIS WRITINGS

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy, France, in 1850. In that picturesque region he passed his youth, and returned thither for frequent sojourns in later life. Having finished his studies, he became an employé in the government service in Paris. This experience, his love for athletics, and his recollections of the Franco-Prussian war, he turned to good account in his fictional work. His literary education was conducted by Gustave Flaubert, his uncle and god-father, under whom he served so rigid an apprenticeship that when he produced his first short-story, “Tallow Ball” (_Boule de Suif_), his preceptor pronounced it a masterpiece, as indeed it is. He died in 1893, at the age of 43, by his own hand, his reason having failed after some years of increasing depression and gloom.

Though his productive period covered only ten years, Guy de Maupassant has left several notable novels, some fair poetry, and a large number of remarkable short-stories. Most of his work deals more frankly with the sordid side of life than American society approves, but many of his short-stories are unexceptionable. Among the best of these are “The Necklace,” “The Horla,” “Happiness,” “Vain Beauty,” “A Coward,” “A Ghost,” “Little Soldier,” “The Wolf,” “Moonlight,” and “The Piece of String.”

Technically, Maupassant was the most finished short-story writer of all; but he lacked spiritual power, and so he himself missed much of the world’s beauty, and disclosed but little to others. Rarely can the reader feel the least throb of sympathy of the author for his characters. Technically flawless, his work is too often cold, and the warm ideals of a tender heart are chiefly absent. An inflexible realist, he pressed his method farther than did Flaubert, a really strong novelist. From life’s raw materials Maupassant wove incomparably brilliant fiction-fabrics, equally distinguished for plot, characterization, and style; but it cannot be said that he interpreted life with a wholesome, uplifting spirit.

Happy are they whom life satisfies, who can amuse themselves, and
be content ... who have not discovered, with a vast disgust, ...
that all things are a weariness.--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.

He who destroys the ideal destroys himself. In art and in life
Maupassant lived in the lower order of facts, the brutal world of
events unrelated to a spiritual order. He drained his senses of the
last power of sensation and reaction; he plunged headlong into the
sensual life upon which they opened when the luminous heaven above
the material world was obliterated. Madness always lies that way as
a matter of physiology as well as of morals, and Maupassant went
the tragic way of the sensualist since time began.--HAMILTON W.
MABIE, in _The Outlook_.

Maupassant saw life with his senses, and he reflected on it
in a purely animal revolt, the recoil of the hurt animal. His
observation is not, as it has been hastily assumed to be, cold; it
is as superficially emotional as that of the average sensual man,
and its cynicism is only another, not less superficial, kind of
feeling. He saw life in all its details, and his soul was entangled
in the details. He saw it without order, without recompense,
without pity; he saw it too clearly to be duped by appearances, and
too narrowly to distinguish any light beyond what seemed to him the
enclosing bounds of darkness.--ARTHUR SYMONS, _Studies in Prose and
Verse_.

He has produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels;
but if the tales deserve the first place in any candid appreciation
of his talent it is not simply because they are so much the more
numerous: they are also more characteristic; they represent him
best in his originality, and their brevity, extreme in some cases,
does not prevent them from being a collection of masterpieces....
What they have most in common is their being extremely strong, and
after that their being extremely brutal.... M. de Maupassant sees
human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical,
but even the comedy is for the most part the comedy of misery, of
avidity, of ignorance, helplessness, and grossness.--HENRY JAMES,
_Partial Portraits_.

His short-stories are masterpieces of the art of story-telling,
because he had a Greek sense of form, a Latin power of
construction, and a French felicity of style. They are simple,
most of them; direct, swift, inevitable, and inexorable in their
straightforward movement. If art consists in the suppression of
non-essentials, there have been few greater artists in fiction
than Maupassant. In his Short-stories there is never a word
wasted, and there is never an excursus. Nor is there any feebleness
or fumbling. What he wanted to do he did, with the unerring
certainty of Leatherstocking, hitting the bull’s-eye again and
again. He had the abundance and the ease of the very great artists;
and the half-dozen or the half-score of his best stories are among
the very best Short-stories in any language.--BRANDER MATTHEWS,
_The Philosophy of the Short-Story_.

His firm, alert prose is so profoundly French, free from
neologisms, strong in verbs, sober in adjectives, every sentence
standing out with no apparent effort, no excess, like a muscle in
the perfect body of a young athlete.... He has that sense of the
real which so many naturalists lack, and which the care for exact
detail does not replace.... His predilection for ordinary scenes
and ordinary types is everywhere evident; he uses all kinds of
settings,--a café, a furnished room, a farmyard, seen in their
actual character without poetic transfiguration, with all their
vulgarity, their poverty, their ugliness. And he uses, too, all
kinds of characters,--clerks, peasants of Normandy, petty bourgeois
of Paris and of the country. They live the empty, tragic, or
grotesque hours of their lives; are sometimes touching, sometimes
odious; and never achieve greatness either in heroism or in
wickedness.

They are not gay, these stories; and the kind of amusement they
afford is strongly mixed with irony, pity, and contempt. Gayety,
whether brutal, frank, mocking, or delicate, never leaves this
bitter taste in the heart. How pitiful in its folly, in its
vanity, in its weakness, is the humanity which loves, weeps, or
agitates in the tales of Maupassant! There, virtue if awkward is
never recompensed, nor vice if skillful punished; mothers are not
always saints, nor sons always grateful and respectful; the guilty
are often ignorant of remorse. Then are these beings immoral? To
tell the truth, they are guided by their instincts, by events,
submissive to the laws of necessity, and apparently released by the
author from all responsibility.--FIRMIN ROZ, _Guy de Maupassant_,
in WARNER’S _Library of the World’s Best Literature_.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON MAUPASSANT

_French Fiction of To-day_, M. S. Van de Velde (1891); _Some French Writers_, Edward Delille (1893); _Studies in Two Literatures_, Arthur Symons (1897); _French Literature of To-day_, Yetta Blaze de Bury (1898); _A Century of French Fiction_, Benjamin W. Wells (1898); _Contemporary French Novelists_, René Doumic (1899).

FOR ANALYSIS

MOONLIGHT
(CLAIR DE LUNE)

BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT

_Translation by The Editor_[26]

The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His will, His purposes.

2. As with long strides he promenaded the garden walk of his little country presbytery, sometimes a question would arise in his mind: “Why did God create that?” And, mentally taking the place of God, he searched obstinately for the answer--and nearly always found it. It would not have been like him to murmur, in an outburst of pious humility: “O Lord, thy designs are impenetrable!” Rather might he say to himself: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reasons for what He does, or, if I know them not, I ought to divine them.”

3. To him all nature seemed created with a logic as absolute as it was admirable. The “wherefore” and the “because” always corresponded perfectly. Dawn was made to gladden our waking, the day to ripen the crops, the rain to water them, the evening to prepare for slumber, and the night was darkened for sleep.

4. The four seasons met perfectly all the needs of agriculture; and to the priest it was quite inconceivable that nature had no designs, and that, on the contrary, all living things were subjects of the same inexorable laws of period, climate, and matter.

5. But he did hate woman! He hated her unconscionably, and by instinct held her in contempt. Often did he repeat the words of Christ, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” And he would add, “One might think that God Himself did not feel quite content with this one work of his hands!” To him, indeed, woman was the child twelve times unclean of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who constantly kept up her work of damnation--she was a feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous creature. And even more than her accursed body did he hate her loving spirit.

6. He had often felt that women were regarding him tenderly, and even though he knew himself to be invulnerable, it exasperated him to recognize that need for loving which fluttered ever-present in their hearts.

7. In his opinion, God had created woman only to tempt man and to test him. She should never be even approached without those defensive measures which one would take, and those fears which one would harbor, when nearing a trap. In fact, she was precisely like a trap, with her lips open and arms extended towards man.

8. Only toward nuns did he exercise any indulgence, for they were rendered harmless by their vow. But he treated them harshly just the same, because, ever-living in the depths of their pent-up and humble hearts, he discerned that everlasting tenderness which constantly surged up toward him, priest though he was.

9. Of all this he was conscious in their upturned glances, more limpid with pious feeling than the looks of monks; in the spiritual exaltations in which their sex indulged; in their ecstasies of love toward Christ, which made the priest indignant because it was really woman’s love, carnal love. Of this detestable tenderness he was conscious, too, in their very docility, in the gentleness of their voices when they addressed him, in their downcast eyes, and in their submissive tears when he rudely rebuked them.

10. So he would shake his cassock when he left the convent door, and stride off, stretching his legs as if fleeing before some danger.

11. Now the abbé had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house near by. He was determined to make of her a sister of charity.

12. She was pretty, giddy, and a born tease. When he preached at her, she laughed; and when he became angry with her, she kissed him vehemently, pressing him to her bosom, while he would instinctively seek to disengage himself from this embrace--which, all the same, gave him a thrill of exquisite joy, awaking deep within his soul that feeling of fatherhood which slumbers in every man.

13. Often as they walked together along the foot-paths through the fields, he would talk with her of God, of his God; but she scarcely heard him, for she was looking at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy of life which beamed from her eyes. Sometimes she would dart away to catch some flying creature, crying as she brought it back: “See, my uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And that passion to kiss insects, or lilac flowers, disturbed, irritated, and repelled the priest, who recognized even in that longing the ineradicable love which blooms perennial in the heart of woman.

14. And now one day the sacristan’s wife, who was the Abbé Marignan’s housekeeper, cautiously told him that his niece had a lover!

15. He was dreadfully shocked, and stood gasping for breath, lather all over his face, for he was shaving.

16. When at length he was able to think and speak, he cried: “It is not true. You are lying, Mélanie!”

17. But the peasant woman laid her hand over her heart: “May our Lord judge me if I am lying, _monsieur le curé_. I tell you she goes out to meet him every night as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other down by the river. You need only go there between ten o’clock and midnight to see for yourself.”

18. He stopped rubbing his chin and began pacing the room violently, as was his custom in times of serious thought. When at length he did try to finish his shaving he cut himself three times, from nose to ear.

19. All day long he was silent, though almost exploding with indignation and wrath. To his priestly rage against the power of love was now added the indignation of a spiritual father, of a teacher, of the guardian of souls, who has been deceived, robbed, and trifled with by a mere child. He felt that egotistical suffocation which parents experience when their daughter tells them that she has selected a husband without their advice and in defiance of their wishes.

20. After dinner he tried to read a little, but he could not--he grew more and more exasperated. When the clock struck ten, he grasped his cane, a formidable oaken club which he always carried when he went out at night to visit the sick. With a smile he examined this huge cudgel, gripped it in his solid, countryman’s fist, and flourished it menacingly in the air. Then, suddenly, with grinding teeth, he brought it down upon a chair-back, which fell splintered to the floor.

21. He opened his door to go out; but paused upon the threshold, surprised by such a glory of moonlight as one rarely sees.

22. And as he was endowed with an exalted soul of such a sort as the Fathers of the Church, those poetic seers, must have possessed, he became suddenly entranced, moved by the grand and tranquil beauty of the pale-faced night.

23. In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance, his fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths their slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed breath--the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear night.

24. He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost forgotten.

25. When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad sweep of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned in that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams without thought--that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with kisses.

26. The Abbé moved again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted--he longed to sit down, to linger there, to glorify God for all His works.

27. A little farther on, following the winding of the little river, curved a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks, enwrapping the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light, transparent down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays, and transmuted by them into gleaming silver.

28. The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.

29. And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he discerned the birth of one of those questions which now and again came to him.

30. Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for slumber, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than dawn and sunset? And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic than the sun, so like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was created to irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater orb--why was it come to illumine all the shades?

31. Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now like the others, but sing in the unquiet dark?

32. Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?

33. Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep? For whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth of poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?

34. And the Abbé did not understand it at all.

35. But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching trees wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by side.

36. The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck; and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. They animated suddenly the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to his question, they moved toward the priest.

37. Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed as though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body--all the glowing romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing itself into his mind.

38. And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in order to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”

39. He withdrew before this pair, who went on arm in arm. True, it was his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he visibly encompass it with glory such as this?

40. And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated in a temple wherein he had no right to enter.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY

1. Precisely why do our surroundings affect our moods and actions? Give examples from your own experience.

2. Which seems to you to be the more frequent in fiction: harmony, or contrast of character with setting?

3. Which seems to you to be the more effective? Why?

4. Outline the motives which actuated at least three of the characters in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.”

5. Is the story overdrawn?

6. Is the influence of the moonlight enough to account for the change in the priest in “Moonlight,” or must we allow something for romance?

7. Trace the several physical crises of Harte’s story from the very beginning.

8. Do the same for the moral crises.

9. Show their inter-relation.

10. Select from a magazine a story in which setting influences in some way the actions of the characters, and point out precisely how.

TEN REPRESENTATIVE STORIES OF SETTING

“A Leaf in the Storm,” Ouida, in _Stories by English Authors_.

“Mrs. Knollys,” F. J. Stimson, _Century Magazine_, Nov., 1883.

“Up the Coulée,” Hamlin Garland, in _Main Travelled Roads_.

“The Girl at Duke’s,” James W. Linn, _McClure’s Magazine_, Aug., 1903.

“The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove,” Charles Egbert Craddock, _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1878.

“Twenty-Six and One,” Maxim Gorky, translated in volume of same title.

“The Unknown Masterpiece,” Honoré de Balzac, translated in _Little French Masterpieces, Balzac_.

“Red Bird,” Elizabeth Maury Coombs, _Lippincott’s Magazine_, Dec., 1911.

“The Wall Opposite,” Pierre Loti, translated in _Short Story Classics, Foreign_.

“The End of the Tether,” Joseph Conrad, in _Youth_.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] From the author’s _Writing the Short-Story_, p. 149, which see for a chapter on “The Setting of the Story.”

[25] _Writing the Short-Story_, pp. 151-152.

[26] Copyright, 1911, by J. B. Lippincott Co., and used by permission.

VI
IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES

_The White Old Maid._--NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
_The Fall of the House of Usher._--EDGAR ALLAN POE

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect_. Keeping
originality _always_ in view--for he is false to himself who
ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable
a source of interest--I say to myself, in the first place, “Of
the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the
intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what
one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a
novel first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it
can be best wrought by incident or tone, or the converse, or by
peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterwards looking about me
(or rather within) for such combinations of event or tone as shall
best aid me in the construction of the effect.--EDGAR ALLAN POE,
_The Philosophy of Composition_.

IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES

The value of a literary term lies in the comprehensive and precise picture which it calls up in the mind of him who reads it. So we must seek to limit, as well as seize upon, the meaning of this word “impressionistic.”

The first purpose in telling a story would seem to be the pleasure or the profit of the hearer--if we exclude the bore who tells a yarn chiefly to please himself. But a closer scrutiny of certain stories discloses other objects of the narrator, and these may be either subordinate or paramount to considerations of benefit or entertainment. The most important of these artistic purposes is to reproduce in the hearer the full effect which a certain mood, theme, character, situation, incident, or chain of incidents, originally made upon the story-teller himself. When he succeeds in reproducing in others his own feeling, by such means as we shall presently study, he does so by impressionistic means.

Poe, writing in _Graham’s Magazine_, May, 1842, says: “A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single _effect_ to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then combines such events--as may best aid him in establishing the preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preëstablished design.”

It does not seem probable that Poe meant to speak of impressionism as constituting so much a distinct type of story as to point out its importance as a method in all story-telling; and we must not overlook its usefulness in this respect. Indeed, nearly all good short-stories begin, in the mind of the author, and end, in the spirit of the reader, with a more or less clear and unified impression. Still, certain little fictions are, alike in theme and treatment, so decidedly conceived and told with the purpose of leaving the reader under the spell of a mood, a feeling, a character, or a situation, that they are IMPRESSIONISTIC stories, rather than impressionistic STORIES.

The natural tendency for the impressionistic writer is to subordinate incident and plot to tone--in a word, to emphasize a picture, whether internal or external, rather than a set of happenings, which in dealing with fiction we call the action. So an impressionistic narrative may really tell a story of situation, crisis, and denouement, or, as is more likely to be the case, it may tend decidedly toward the sketch. All depends upon the nature of the theme. Thus, the _beauty of sacrifice_ demands an action to illustrate that abnegation, and all the accessories must serve as high-lights and shadows to bring out this motive in strong relief; but the _tone of gloom_ may be conveyed without even the semblance of a plot.

Now a story may produce a gloomy effect without deliberately picturing an atmosphere of gloom--it may leave the reader with a vague, pessimistic distaste for joy, and yet present no such picture. Or it may marvellously delineate loneliness, without leaving that as the final impression of the story. This is not impressionism, though it may be very good story-telling. Impressionism is conscious art, art prepense, and, as will be seen in the two stories presented as examples in this section, subordinates everything to tonal effect; in other words, the impressionistic story symbolizes in human action some human mood or condition. For this reason such stories are often called stories of symbolism.

HAWTHORNE AND HIS WRITINGS

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4, 1804. His New England ancestors bore the name Hathorne, as did the author’s sea-captain father--also a Nathaniel--who died at Surinam, Dutch Guiana, when his son was four years old. In 1818 the family moved to Raymond, Maine, but most of the youth’s education was gotten at Salem, and there his family returned in 1820. The following year he entered Bowdoin College, from which he was graduated in 1825. At this time--when he was twenty-one--he had already begun _Twice-Told Tales_; it was then, too, that he inserted the _w_ into his name. He was now writing industriously, often under a pseudonym; he also did considerable hack and editorial work. During 1839 and a part of 1840 he served in the Boston Custom House; then he joined the Brook Farm Community in 1841, but remained there only a short time. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842. In 1846 he returned to the Customs service, in Salem, remaining this time about three years. In 1853 he was appointed by his classmate, President Pierce, as United States Consul at Liverpool. During the more than three years of his consulship he traveled widely in Great Britain, and later spent much time in Italy, where some of his best work was accomplished. During the last years of his life he wrote but intermittently, being a prey to depression and ill health. He died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, May 19, 1864, and is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a remarkable novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The Marble Faun_, are his greatest novels. _The House of the Seven Gables_ is a series of related sketches rather than a romance. Probably his best short-stories are “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” in _Mosses From An Old Manse_; “The Gray Champion,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Gentle Boy,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “The Ambitious Guest,” “Wakefield,” and “The White Old Maid,” from _Twice-Told Tales_; and “The Great Stone Face,” “Ethan Brand” and “The Snow-Image,” in _The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales_. These three collections contain also many charming sketches, while _The Wonder Book_, and _Tanglewood Tales_ are rich in interest for younger readers.

“The White Old Maid,” given herewith in full, was first published in the _New England Magazine_ for July, 1835, and was entitled “The Old Maid in the Winding Sheet, by the Author of The Gray Champion.”

* * * * *

Hawthorne enjoyed the distinction of winning in his day the almost unanimous approval of critics both at home and abroad, and this in a period when criticism was not a gentle art. Time, moreover, has only added to his praises. As a fiction writer he had depth, breadth, and height. Hawthorne alone among the fictionists of his era may justly be said to have a philosophy of his own; his themes cover a wide range; and the loftiness of his ideals is well recognized. As Longfellow discerned, and generously announced as early as 1837, Hawthorne was a poet who wrote prose. He knew a mood in nature to match every human emotion, and in her multiform life he saw images to enforce a thousand striking comparisons. He was a student of the soul, too, albeit a gloomy one, for the most part. But while the sombreness of lives beset by stern problems oppressed him, and but little humor brightens his pages, one searches in vain for a pessimistic spirit--Hawthorne’s knowledge of the human heart saddened him, but it did not make him misanthropic. One feels the reality, the vital bearing, of the things he writes about. It is impossible to read him appreciatively and not realize the sincerity of the man, and the fine earnestness, the upright though severe justness, with which he viewed life. Sweetness, beauty--haunting beauty, indeed--and a certain airy lightness, were not wanting in his work; but the big tones--resonant, solemn at times, and inspiring always--were poetic insight, fervid intensity, and lofty purpose. Hawthorne was a seer. The inside of things was disclosed to him. That which he could not see, he felt. And with a classic purity of style he worded the fantastic, gloomy, lightsome, or tragic pageantry of his creations in sentences that live and live.

I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny
book.--NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, _Letter to James T. Fields_.

Soon to be all spirit, I have already a spiritual sense of human
nature, and see deeply into the hearts of mankind, discovering what
is hidden from the wisest.... My glance comprehends the crowd, and
penetrates the breast of the solitary man.--NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
_My Home Return_, in _Tales and Sketches_.

He uses his characters, like algebraic symbols, to work out certain
problems with; they are rather more, yet rather less, than flesh
and blood.--H. A. BEERS, quoted in Tappan’s _Topical Notes on
American Authors_.

Hawthorne’s style, at its best, is one of the most perfect media
employed by any writer using the English language. Dealing, as it
usually does, with an immaterial subject-matter, with dream-like
impressions, and fantastic products of the imagination, it is
concrete without being opaque,--luminously concrete, one might
say. No other writer that I know of has the power of making his
fancies visible and tangible without impairing their delicate
immateriality. If any writer can put the rainbow into words, and
yet leave it a rainbow, surely that writer is Hawthorne.--RICHARD
LE GALLIENNE, _Attitudes and Avowals_.

In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural; and though
he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact,
nowhere does he violate the laws of nature.... A brutal misuse of
the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest degradation of the
art of fiction. But “to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight,
delicate, and evanescent flavour than as any actual portion of
the substance,” to quote from the preface to the _House of the
Seven Gables_, this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of
Short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he
strays in the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.--BRANDER MATTHEWS,
_The Philosophy of the Short-story_.

Hawthorne has been called a mystic, which he was not,--and a
psychological dreamer, which he was in very slight degree. He was
really the ghost of New England. I do not mean the “spirit,” nor
the “phantom,” but the ghost in the older sense in which that term
is used, the thin, rarefied essence which is to be found somewhere
behind the physical organization: embodied, indeed, and not by any
means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly tabernacle, but yet only
half embodied in it, endowed with a certain painful sense of the
gulf between his nature and its organization, always recognizing
the gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always more or
less unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly
spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit in them.
They are ghostly writings.... I may, perhaps, accept a phrase of
which Hawthorne himself was fond,--“the moonlight of romance,”--and
compel it to explain something of the secret of his characteristic
genius.--R. H. HUTTON, _Essays in Literary Criticism_.

This, too [“The White Old Maid”], is a story, in the sense that
something happens; and yet the real story, by which I mean the
narrative which would logically connect and develop these events,
is just hinted at, and is not very important. It is subordinated,
indeed, to a new aim. “The White Old Maid” is narrative for a
purpose, and this purpose is to suggest an impression, and to leave
us with a vivid sensation rather than a number of remembered facts.
In short, it is contrived, not to leave a record of such and such
an old woman who did this or that, but rather to stamp upon our
minds the impression of a mystery-haunted house, mysterious figures
entering, strange words, and a terrible sorrow behind all. Towards
such a result the structure of the plot, every bit of description,
every carefully chosen word, directly tends.--HENRY SEIDEL CANBY,
_The Book of the Short Story_.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON HAWTHORNE

_Hours in a Library_, Leslie Stephen (1874); _Study of Hawthorne_, George Parsons Lathrop (1876); _Life_, in the _English Men of Letters_ series, Henry James (1880); _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_, Julian Hawthorne (1885); _Life_, in the _Great Writers_ series, Moncure D. Conway (1890); _Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, Horatio Bridge (1893); _Memories of Hawthorne_, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897); _Nathaniel Hawthorne_, Anne Fields (1899); _Life_, in the _American Men of Letters_ series, George Edward Woodberry (1902).

THE WHITE OLD MAID
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

[Sidenote: Introduction of setting, giving atmosphere of story.]

[Sidenote: FIRST PLOT SITUATION.]

The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows, and showed a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the ghostly light, through the other, slept upon a bed, falling between the heavy silken curtains, and illuminating the face of a young man. But, how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! and how like a shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes; it was a corpse, in its burial clothes.

[Sidenote: This uncertainty strikes the tone of the story, which trembles constantly between the real and the fancied, the physical and the spirit world, keeping the reader in doubt as to whether he is witnessing a manifestation of the supernatural or is deceived by the mysterious atmosphere of the unusual.]

[Sidenote: TWO MAIN CHARACTERS INTRODUCED.]

2. Suddenly, the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt the dead face and the moonlight, as the door of the chamber opened and a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph, as she bent over the pale corpse--pale as itself--and pressed her living lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long kiss, her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved responsive to her own. Still an illusion! The silken curtain had waved, a second time, betwixt the dead face and the moonlight, as another fair young girl unclosed the door, and glided, ghostlike, to the bedside. There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between them. But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.

[Sidenote: Note the archaic, formal language, which sets the period in the long ago.]

3. “Away!” cried the lofty one. “Thou hadst him living! The dead is mine!”

[Sidenote: _Motif_ of story.]

4. “Thine!” returned the other, shuddering. “Well hast thou spoken! The dead is thine!”

5. The proud girl started, and stared into her face with a ghastly look. But a wild and mournful expression passed across the features of the gentle one; and weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head pillowed beside that of the corpse, and her hair mingling with his dark locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draught of sorrow had bewildered her.

6. “Edith!” cried her rival.

[Sidenote: Note “of the heart.”]

7. Edith groaned, as with a sudden compassion of the heart; and removing her cheek from the dead youth’s pillow, she stood upright, fearfully encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.

8. “Wilt thou betray me?” said the latter calmly.

[Sidenote: Full statement of the _motif_, ending with ¶12. FOUNDATION OF MAIN CRISIS.]

9. “Till the dead bid me speak, I will be silent,” answered Edith. “Leave us alone together! Go, and live many years, and then return, and tell me of thy life. He, too, will be here! Then, if thou tellest of sufferings more than death, we will both forgive thee.”

10. “And what shall be the token?” asked the proud girl, as if her heart acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.

11. “This lock of hair,” said Edith, lifting one of the dark, clustering curls that lay heavily on the dead man’s brow.

[Sidenote: End of first part of story.]

12. The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse, and appointed a day and hour, far, far in time to come, for their next meeting in that chamber. The statelier girl gave one deep look at the motionless countenance, and departed--yet turned again and trembled ere she closed the door, almost believing that her dead lover frowned upon her. And Edith, too! Was not her white form fading into the moonlight? Scorning her own weakness she went forth, and perceived that a negro slave was waiting in the passage with a wax-light, which he held between her face and his own, and regarded her, as she thought, with an ugly expression of merriment. Lifting his torch on high, the slave lighted her down the staircase, and undid the portal of the mansion. The young clergyman of the town had just ascended the steps, and bowing to the lady, passed in without a word.

[Sidenote: Second stage.]

[Sidenote: Hawthorne’s first title for this story.]

[Sidenote: Character delineation, largely mental and moral.]

[Sidenote: Key.]

[Sidenote: Contributory incident.]

[Sidenote: Note language of symbolism.]

[Sidenote: Key.]

13. Years, many years, rolled on; the world seemed new again, so much older was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped their hands across the bosom of the corpse. In the interval, a lonely woman had passed from youth to extreme age, and was known by all the town as the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.” A taint of insanity had affected her whole life, but so quiet, sad, and gentle, so utterly free from violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies, unmolested by the world, with whose business or pleasure she had nought to do. She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight, except to follow funerals. Whenever a corpse was borne along the street in sunshine, rain, or snow; whether a pompous train of the rich and proud thronged after it, or few and humble were the mourners, behind them came the lonely woman in a long white garment which the people called her shroud. She took no place among the kindred or the friends, but stood at the door to hear the funeral prayer, and walked in the rear of the procession, as one whose earthly charge it was to haunt the house of mourning, and be the shadow of affliction, and see that the dead were duly buried. So long had this been her custom that the inhabitants of the town deemed her a part of every funeral, as much as the coffin pall, or the very corpse itself, and augured ill of the sinner’s destiny unless the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet” came gliding, like a ghost, behind. Once, it is said, she affrighted a bridal party with her pale presence, appearing suddenly in the illuminated hall, just as the priest was uniting a false maid to a wealthy man, before her lover had been dead a year. Evil was the omen to that marriage! Sometimes she stole forth by moonlight and visited the graves of venerable Integrity, and wedded Love, and virgin Innocence, and every spot where the ashes of a kind and faithful heart were mouldering. Over the hillocks of those favored dead would she stretch out her arms, with a gesture, as if she were scattering seeds; and many believed that she brought them from the garden of Paradise; for the graves which she had visited were green beneath the snow, and covered with sweet flowers from April to November. Her blessing was better than a holy verse upon the tombstone. Thus wore away her long, sad, peaceful, and fantastic life, till few were so old as she, and the people of later generations wondered how the dead had ever been buried, or mourners had endured their grief, without the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.”

[Sidenote: Third stage.]

[Sidenote: Preparation for main crisis.]

[Sidenote: Opening of MAIN PLOT INCIDENT.]

[Sidenote: Local-color.]

[Sidenote: Central setting; return to original setting.]

[Sidenote: Development of setting, and TONE OF AN EMPTY HOUSE.]

14. Still years went on, and still she followed funerals, and was not yet summoned to her own festival of death. One afternoon the great street of the town was all alive with business and bustle, though the sun now gilded only the upper half of the church spire, having left the housetops and loftiest trees in shadow. The scene was cheerful and animated, in spite of the sombre shade between the high brick buildings. Here were pompous merchants, in white wigs and laced velvet; the bronzed faces of sea-captains; the foreign garb and air of Spanish creoles; and the disdainful port of natives of Old England; all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two back settlers, negotiating sales of timber from forests where axe had never sounded. Sometimes a lady passed, swelling roundly forth in an embroidered petticoat, balancing her steps in high-heeled shoes, and courtesying with lofty grace to the punctilious obeisances of the gentlemen. The life of the town seemed to have its very centre not far from an old mansion, that stood somewhat back from the pavement, surrounded by neglected grass, with a strange air of loneliness, rather deepened than dispelled by the throng so near. Its site would have been suitably occupied by a magnificent Exchange or a brick block, lettered all over with various signs; or the large house itself might have made a noble tavern, with the “King’s Arms” swinging before it, and guests in every chamber, instead of the present solitude. But owing to some dispute about the right of inheritance, the mansion had been long without a tenant, decaying from year to year, and throwing the stately gloom of its shadow over the busiest part of the town. Such was the scene, and such the time, when a figure unlike any that have been described was observed at a distance down the street.

[Sidenote: First main character.]

15. “I espy a strange sail, yonder,” remarked a Liverpool captain; “that woman in the long white garment!”

16. The sailor seemed much struck by the object, as were several others who, at the same moment, caught a glimpse of the figure that had attracted his notice. Almost immediately the various topics of conversation gave place to speculations, in an undertone, on this unwonted occurrence.

17. “Can there be a funeral so late this afternoon?” inquired some.

18. They looked for the signs of death at every door--the sexton, the hearse, the assemblage of black-clad relatives--all that makes up the woful pomp of funerals. They raised their eyes, also, to the sun-gilt spire of the church, and wondered that no clang proceeded from its bell, which had always tolled till now when this figure appeared in the light of day. But none had heard that a corpse was to be borne to its home that afternoon, nor was there any token of funeral, except the apparition of the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.”

[Sidenote: Key.]

19. “What may this portend?” asked each man of his neighbor.

[Sidenote: Contrast.]

[Sidenote: Impressionism vivid.]

[Sidenote: Direct character description.]

[Sidenote: Contrast.]

[Sidenote: Character delineation by suggestion.]

20. All smiled as they put the question, yet with a certain trouble in their eyes, as if pestilence or some other wide calamity were prognosticated by the untimely intrusion among the living of one whose presence had always been associated with death and woe. What a comet is to the earth was that sad woman to the town. Still she moved on, while the hum of surprise was hushed at her approach, and the proud and the humble stood aside, that her white garment might not wave against them. It was a long, loose robe, of spotless purity. Its wearer appeared very old, pale, emaciated, and feeble, yet glided onward without the unsteady pace of extreme age. At one point of her course a little rosy boy burst forth from a door, and ran, with open arms, towards the ghostly woman, seeming to expect a kiss from her bloodless lips. She made a slight pause, fixing her eye upon him with an expression of no earthly sweetness, so the child shivered and stood awe-struck, rather than affrighted, while the Old Maid passed on. Perhaps her garment might have been polluted even by an infant’s touch; perhaps her kiss would have been death to the sweet boy within a year.

[Sidenote: Tone of story summarized.]

21. “She is but a shadow,” whispered the superstitious. “The child put forth his arms and could not grasp her robe!”

[Sidenote: Crisis approaches.]

[Sidenote: The house mentioned in paragraphs 1, 12 and 14.]

22. The wonder was increased when the Old Maid passed beneath the porch of the deserted mansion, ascended the moss-covered steps, lifted the iron knocker, and gave three raps. The people could only conjecture that some old remembrance, troubling her bewildered brain, had impelled the poor woman hither to visit the friends of her youth; all gone from their home long since and forever, unless their ghosts still haunted it--fit company for the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.” An elderly man approached the steps, and, reverently uncovering his gray locks, essayed to explain the matter.

[Sidenote: Note “None--have.”]

[Sidenote: Contributory incident.]

[Sidenote: First mention of name.]

23. “None, Madam,” said he, “have dwelt in this house these fifteen years agone--no, not since the death of old Colonel Fenwicke, whose funeral you may remember to have followed. His heirs, being ill agreed among themselves, have let the mansion-house go to ruin.”

[Sidenote: Note atmosphere of vagueness.]

24. The Old Maid looked slowly round with a slight gesture of one hand, and a finger of the other upon her lip, appearing more shadow-like than ever in the obscurity of the porch. But again she lifted the hammer, and gave, this time, a single rap. Could it be that a footstep was now heard coming down the staircase of the old mansion, which all conceived to have been so long untenanted? Slowly, feebly, yet heavily, like the pace of an aged and infirm person, the step approached, more distinct on every downward stair, till it reached the portal. The bar fell on the inside; the door opened. One upward glance towards the church spire, whence the sunshine had just faded, was the last that the people saw of the “Old Maid in the Winding Sheet.”

[Sidenote: Tone of mystery.]

25. “Who undid the door?” asked many.

[Sidenote: See ¶12.]

26. This question, owing to the depth of shadow beneath the porch, no one could satisfactorily answer. Two or three aged men, while protesting against an inference which might be drawn, affirmed that the person within was a negro, and bore a singular resemblance to old Cæsar, formerly a slave in the house, but freed by death some thirty years before.

27. “Her summons has waked up a servant of the old family,” said one, half seriously.

28. “Let us wait here,” replied another. “More guests will knock at the door, anon. But the gate of the graveyard should be thrown open!”

[Sidenote: Preparation for climax.]

[Sidenote: No indication whence it came.]

[Sidenote: Setting.]

29. Twilight had overspread the town before the crowd began to separate, or the comments on this incident were exhausted. One after another was wending his way homeward, when a coach--no common spectacle in those days--drove slowly into the street. It was an old-fashioned equipage, hanging close to the ground, with arms on the panels, a footman behind, and a grave, corpulent coachman seated high in front--the whole giving an idea of solemn state and dignity. There was something awful in the heavy rumbling of the wheels. The coach rolled down the street, till, coming to the gateway of the deserted mansion, it drew up, and the footman sprang to the ground.

30. “Whose grand coach is this?” asked a very inquisitive body.

[Sidenote: Three raps signify a formal demand for entrance.]

31. The footman made no reply, but ascended the steps of the old house, gave three raps with the iron hammer, and returned to open the coach door. An old man, possessed of the heraldic lore so common in that day, examined the shield of arms on the panel.

[Sidenote: Setting.]