t was his calling to tell stories to readers of the
English language in the nineteenth century, his power is exercised in a
different sphere. No modern writer has the same skill in so using the
marvellous as to interest without unduly exciting our incredulity. He
makes, indeed, no positive demands on our credulity. The strange
influences which are suggested rather than obtruded upon us are kept in
the background, so as not to invite, nor indeed to render possible, the
application of scientific tests. We may compare him once more to Miss
Bronte, who introduces, in 'Villette,' a haunted garden. She shows us a
ghost who is for a moment a very terrible spectre indeed, and then, very
much to our annoyance, rationalises him into a flesh-and-blood lover.
Hawthorne would neither have allowed the ghost to intrude so forcibly,
nor have expelled him so decisively. The garden in his hands would have
been haunted by a shadowy terror of which we could render no precise
account to ourselves. It would have refrained from actual contact with
professors and governesses; and as it would never have taken bodily
form, it would never have been quite dispelled. His ghosts are confined
to their proper sphere, the twilight of the mind, and never venture into
the broad glare of daylight. We can see them so long as we do not gaze
directly at them; when we turn to examine them they are gone, and we are
left in doubt whether they were realities or an ocular delusion
generated in our fancy by some accidental collocation of half-seen
objects. So in the 'House of the Seven Gables' we may hold what opinion
we please as to the reality of the curse which hangs over the Pyncheons
and the strange connection between them and their hereditary
antagonists; in the 'Scarlet Letter' we may, if we like, hold that there
was really more truth in the witch legends which colour the imaginations
of the actors than we are apt to dream of in our philosophy; and in
'Transformation' we are left finally in doubt as to the great question
of Donatello's ears, and the mysterious influence which he retains over
the animal world so long as he is unstained by bloodshed. In 'Septimius'
alone, it seems to me that the supernatural is left in rather too
obtrusive a shape in spite of the final explanations; though it might
possibly have been toned down had the story received the last touches of
the author. The artifice, if so it may be called, by which this is
effected--and the romance