Mosses From An Old Manse – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1846 ★★★★★

 A Writer Arrives

In the annals of American literature, no eminence put himself down with more avidity than Nathaniel Hawthorne. Titling his second published collection of writings Mosses From An Old Manse after calling his first Twice-Told Tales is a clear sign of low self-esteem.

Which would you rather read? Some choice, right?

Mosses From An Old Manse is the less-known title, but a better book. Though not narratively connected, having been originally published over a number of years, they lay out Hawthorne’s compelling visions for the nature of art in society and the whole meaning of life. Not every short story in it is a masterpiece; not every masterpiece in it is a short story.

Take the opening essay. “The Old Manse” is only piece written specifically for the book, in which Hawthorne explains his title and connects it to the ephemerality of all things under the sun:

I took shame to myself for having been so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hordes of long-hidden gold which people seek for in mossgrown houses.

The house where Hawthorne wrote much of Manse still stands in Concord, Massachusetts. It had housed several Puritan ministers, one of whom Hawthorne suggested still haunts the place: "Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed with spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to."
Photo by Midnightdreary from https://www.nps.gov/places/the-old-manse.htm

He goes to movingly note the stacks of forgotten sermons written by the Puritan ministers who lived at this Concord, Massachusetts home before him, acknowledges the more recent Transcendentalist movement he is friendly to yet highly skeptical of, and reflects on “the humiliating fact that the works of man’s intellect decay like those of his hands.”

Nothing lasts for long in the world of Hawthorne; as the stories themselves begin, we find attachment can often be one of humankind’s deepest flaws.

This could be the case in the most famous story presented here, “Young Goodman Brown.” Then again, it is hard to be sure, as the story cuts in more than one direction. The allegories that gave Twice-Told Tales its pat charm are gone, replaced by deep ambiguity.

Is Goodman Brown really experiencing this upside-down diabolical reality we see presented? Is he the victim of a psychotic break, from accepting without question for too long the received wisdom of his community? 

Goodman Brown's midnight ramble through a dark forest leads to a terrible discovery that shatters all he believed in. "In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown," Hawthorne writes.
Painting "A Forest At Dawn With A Deer Hunt" by Peter Paul Rubens from https://quizlet.com/hn/572669666/allegory-in-nathaniel-hawthornes-young-goodman-brown-flash-cards/

People generally love this story as much as I do, but I wonder if most see it merely an exposé of Protestant certitudes, or else catch clues of deeper trouble, spoken by the Devil figure:

“Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness.”

The fallacy of human perfection is often the target of Hawthorne’s writing here. I find that a reason, beyond the brilliance of the author’s prose and the complexity of his imagination, why this work stands out.

Sometimes the perfection sought is spiritual, sometimes scientific. The next best-known story in this collection, “The Birthmark,” features Aylmer, “an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” fixated on removing a mole on his beautiful wife’s cheek. Hawthorne’s account of his dive into cosmetology is like Moby Dick in miniature.

It delivers a clear moral: Hawthorne calls the birthmark “the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.”

“What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?” If it's Hawthorne, the safe bet is both. Above, Kristoffer Tabori and Kathleen Beller in a 1980 television adaptation of "Rappaccini's Daughter."

Image from https://www.amazon.com/Rappaccinis-Daughter-Dennis-Boutsikaris/dp/B00V07A2BO

More satisfying for me, and certainly more ambiguous, is the similarly-themed “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Here the protagonist is also transfixed by the sight of a beautiful woman who is also the subject of a strange experiment. But this time, matters are more shaded, the motivations murkier, its tragic conclusion harder to pin down:

Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

In Twice-Told Tales, we got more than a hint of Edgar Allen Poe; “Rappaccini’s Daughter” looks forward to an author who openly wore Hawthorne’s influence, Henry James. Even the treatment of its Italian locale recalls the setting of Daisy Miller and The Aspern Papers.

I’ve never enjoyed reading Henry James. I find him static and windy. Yet he has a deft way of explicating the circuitous ways of the mind which connects him to Hawthorne. Like James, Hawthorne gets very deep regarding the motivations of his characters, yet Hawthorne is quicker to the point and ever-focused on developing his story.

Hawthorne was entering his forties and not yet launched as a novelist when he published Mosses From An Old Manse. His fame rested on tales and sketches written for periodicals.
Image from https://www.nps.gov/mima/learn/historyculture/thewaysidenathanielhawthorne.htm

Reading Hawthorne can still be an exercise. At first his prose can feel antiquated and too concerned about being polite. And we get a few pieces reminiscent of the much triter Twice-Told Tales.

“The Procession Of Life” takes in the ambit of mankind in the form of a hypothetical parade of human suffering of various kinds, and winds up a dead end. “Drowne’s Wooden Image” details the struggles of a wood carver creating a ship’s figurehead that appears to take on real life, but the exploration of art’s purpose is lost in a vague conclusion.

Still, most of what you get in this collection is very fine indeed. “Egotism, Or The Bosom Serpent” is not very complex or rewarding by itself as a story, but it shines as an extension of “Young Goodman Brown’s” take on the nature of sin. Roderick Elliston, we are told, suffers from his belief his heart is home to a snake, to the point of becoming rather smug about it: “Thus he drew his misery around him like a regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly monster.”

In "The Apple Dealer" Hawthorne sketches a simple merchant selling snacks at a railroad station, offering him up as a bleak example of the human condition. "He can never suffer the extreme of misery, because the tone of his whole being is too much subdued for him to feel any thing acutely."
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costermonger 

Though I love Hawthorne, I don’t think of him as a very humorous writer. I was happily proven wrong reading Mosses.

“Mrs. Bullfrog” has fun with the theme of deceptive surface appearances when a sheltered man wins the hand of a woman who is not all she seems. The ending is a hoot. “Monsieur du Miroir” playfully depicts the narrator at odds with his own reflection: “…if you offer him your hand, he extends his own with an air of the utmost frankness; but, though you calculate upon a hearty shake, you do not get hold of his little finger. Oh, this Monsieur du Miroir is a slippery fellow!”

The best work in this regard is “The Celestial Railroad.” It sends up the archaic moralisms of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but also echoes Bunyan’s withering attack on materialism in a broad lampoon that mocks the excesses of American capitalism before the Civil War.

“Railroad” delivers a delicious dig at Transcendentalism in the sight of a foggy giant that attempts to waylay our pilgrim narrator: “He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.”

The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1678, depicts a pilgrim's journey to the Celestial City, or Heaven. Hawthorne's "Celestial Railroad" imagines the same journey by locomotive, with all difficulties removed. Alas, so is the destination.
Image from https://reasonabletheology.org/all-about-pilgrims-progress-plus-resources-for-reading-it/

As with the other two pieces, we are treated to a bumbling obtuse narrator never quite clear as to what is going on. Hawthorne’s ability to deliver simultaneously on multiple levels is on frequent display. So is his versatility in adopting the thematic territory of other authors.

Poe and James have already been mentioned; there is also the mordant existentialism of Herman Melville. Hawthorne’s view of life was not as bleak, but he made death a frequent subject of his writings. In “The Intelligence Office” a clerk as blank-faced as Melville’s Bartleby dispenses destiny to a multitude of sad-faced characters. Life is a vale of tears, Melville believed, and the Hawthorne of Mosses concurs.

Then you get a story like “Feathertop,” which despite some moving overtones is as light as a Disney fable, or else something written by another contemporary American writer too often overlooked today: Washington Irving. It’s about a scarecrow brought to life by a dyspeptic witch. It is broad comedy written with a deftness and grace and apparently the last short fiction Hawthorne ever wrote, belately attached to a later edition of Mosses in 1854.

A century before L. Frank Baum and Bob Kane had their turns bringing scarecrows to life, Hawthorne did so in "Feathertop," vivified by a witch to imitate the people around her. “Thou shalt say a thousand things, and saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said nothing!” she declares.
Image from https://mashable.com/article/lasers-bird-deterrent-farmers-america-scarecrows

I noted at the beginning that not every masterpiece in this collection is a short story. “Earth’s Holocaust” presents a scenario where the world’s reformers succeed in burning every trapping of society, from crowns to Bibles. It feels as relevant today as ever:

“Now that they have kindled the bonfire, if these nonsensical reformers would fling themselves into it, all would be well enough!”

“Be patient,” responded a stanch conservative; “it will come to that in the end.

The best story has to be “The Artist Of The Beautiful.” On the surface, it is a standard if meticulously told yarn about a man obsessed in his quest for beauty. It revisits Hawthorne’s musings on the artist and society, and makes many of the same points. Yet there is a wisdom in Hawthorne’s telling, and especially in its final resolution:

When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to moral senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.

Hawthorne would go on to produce most of his best work in the 1850s, four great novels and some of his best short stories, too. But Mosses From An Old Manse is a unique endpoint in its own right, a great writer simultaneously finding himself and carving out a place on the pantheon. Don’t let the title fool you; the scrapings you get here are pure gold.