Selected Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne

worldly work; but augmented, as well, by the discovery that the Transcendentalist logic of “idea” had solved the problem of the world no better than the Puritan premise of “grace.”
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    After 1846 Hawthorne published only a handful of new tales, and indeed “The Old Manse” explicitly promises that the Mosses will be the author’s “last collection of this nature.” Possibly Hawthorne was already meditating a second, more remunerative career, as novelist. Or perhaps he felt some more artistic sense of diminishing returns in the ironic short form he had both invented and perfected: “Unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind.” In any case, the promise was substantially kept.
    The Scarlet Letter seems once to have been intended for inclusion in a collection to be titled “Old-Time Legends; together with sketches, experimental and ideal.” But then, of course, “The Custom-House” came along to help it stand alone. Subsequently, The Snow-Image (1851) gathered up the four tales Hawthorne had produced in 1849 and 1850; but as the volume is filled out with a much larger number of earlier pieces hitherto uncollected, the whole seems more a publishing convenience than a literary, project. And the second edition of the Mosses (1854) continues this same activity of universal self-collection-largely at the urging of now eager editors, and at some prejudice to the anti-transcendental unity of that remarkable work. By that date, of course, Hawthorne was the accomplished author of his “Three American Romances” and, searching in England for the theme of yet another extended romantic fiction, he was proportionately less concerned about the significance of his “obscure” years.
    Of the post-1846 tales, several were solicited by friendly magazine editors. At least one, “The Snow-Image” (1850), was explicitly designated a “childish” performance; and it may be that “The Great Stone Face” (1850) was also meant to reach Hawthorne’s secondary audience of youthful readers. An extended sketch called “Main-Street” (1849) reveals once again the full wickedness of Hawthorne’s mature historical irony, but it reads best as a self-conscious defense of the earlier career as “moral” (rather than “positivistic”) historian of the Puritans; or else as a self-imposed review of the Puritan themes to be reactivated in The Scarlet Letter. And as it remains perfectly safe to regard “Ethan Brand” (1850) just as Hawthorne subtitled it, “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance,” so it seems fair to accept the 1846 Mosses as a sort of formal conclusion to Hawthorne’s career as writer and collector of tales and sketches. The novels were delayed, of course—in part, at least, by the second and more famous tour of custom-house service. But when they came, they came in a bunch. And in coming to constitute a sort of “Major Phase,” they have fully overshadowed the last, scattered attempts at short fiction.
    Yet no survey of Hawthorne’s tales can afford to omit “Ethan Brand”—not only because it may signal Hawthorne’s first, unsuccessful transition from tale to romance, but also, and more significantly, because it makes clear, one last time, that Hawthorne’s most romantic imaginings are never quite free of historical source and local application. One powerful reason for believing “Ethan Brand” indeed survives as but a fragment of a longer work is that it draws on and virtually exausts the wealth of particular observation Hawthorne had set down in a 50,000-word notebook of his 1838 trip to western Massachusetts: bad policy, if one brief tale were all he had originally intended. But the best reason for valuing the actual achievement of “Ethan Brand” is that in it all this “local color” is deployed in the career of an