Selected Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne Page A

American Faust who has never ceased to be a Puritan, if only malgré lui.
    When we ask, as we must, what it means for Ethan Brand to have begun his notorious search for the “unpardonable sin” in a spirit not of arrogance but of brotherhood, the answer keeps coming back that—like Melville’s Ahab, whose creation he plainly helped to inspire—Brand has hoped to act as a sort of representative human hero, a kind of latter-day, backwoods New England Prometheus. Fire having already been snatched from the jealous gods, and long since harnessed to the civilized arts of environmental engineering, what daring task remained? Or else, more defiantly formulated, what secret remained, within the fire, to remind the brooding humanist of the awful uncertainty that still enshrouded human life? Not death, apparently, but only the knowledge of that one supposed sin which of its very nature defied the mercy of even a thoroughly encovenanted Jehova. Perhaps the secret was not entirely past finding out.
    No doubt the question was, in itself, impious in the last degree, like Ahab’s monomaniac inquisition into the mystery of universal iniquity. No doubt Brand looked “too long into the fire.” So that the fiery conclusion—of suicide at the moment of cosmic blasphemy—may seem predictable enough. Yet the sense of triumph over all the world’s “half-way” sinners is one that would have to develop. Himself, at last, a “Brand [Un]Plucked from the Burning,” still this ultimate neopuritan rebel appears to have begun with a concern for the reason of human despair as plausible as that of Cotton Mather himself. Nor, as the insistent allusions to writers of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism make clear, had the matter of malignity been entirely settled or left behind; from which observation, we may infer, the author of Moby-Dick took considerable aid and comfort.
    If Hawthorne’s own effort proved “abortive,” the explanation must surely lie in some temperamental inability to sustain a Melvillean protest against the enduring legacy of Calvinist orthodoxy. More historical than speculative, finally, Hawthorne’s circumspect intelligence could see at once that the transcendence promised by perfect negation was as illusory as any other: one denied what one knew, then lapsed to the elements of universal process. Others endured, if not to tell the tale, at least to gather up the fragments.
    Appropriately, therefore, The Scarlet Letter —the first and most compelling of the longer fictions—would return to the world whose moral shape Hawthorne knew best, the world of the Puritans as it functioned in the second decade of John Winthrop’s model “City on a Hill.” The laws of this would-be Utopia are strict, but they are known; and sinners must bear the burden of social cause and effect. No one need wish, as Hawthorne makes clear in “Main-Street,” to repeat the lives of ancestors whom experience had taught so much “amiss”: Winthrop’s vaunted “liberty” seemed more “like an iron cage,” and its “rigidity” appears to have generated even further “distortions of the moral nature.” Yet the tale might still be retold, if only to illustrate the moral premise of historicism as such: even the most repressive ideologies had seemed like a good idea at the time; and no “self” entirely escapes the limits of its correlative world.
    Not even the artist escapes. His domain might be divided between past and present, inner and outer. But gestures of ultimacy remained empty. His subject could be only his own world-in-process. And America was no exception.

A Note on the Text
    All the texts printed here are those established by the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne’s Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press): Twice-told Tales (IX, 1974); Mosses from an Old Manse (X, 1974); The Snow-Image and Uncollected