They come into money, they marry, they are happy ever after.
This is doing things handsomely, though some of our modern novelists
think it coarse and degrading. Hawthorne did not think so, and they are
not exactly better artists than Hawthorne.
Yet he, too, had his economies, which we resent. I do not mean his not
telling us what it was that Roger Chillingworth saw on Arthur
Dimmesdale's bare breast. To leave that vague is quite legitimate. But
what had Miriam and the spectre of the Catacombs done? Who was the
spectre? What did he want? To have told all this would have been better
than to fill the novel with padding about Rome, sculpture, and the Ethics
of Art. As the silly saying runs: "the people has a right to know" about
Miriam and her ghostly acquaintance. {10} But the "Marble Faun" is not
of Hawthorne's best period, beautiful as are a hundred passages in the
tale.
Beautiful passages are as common in his prose as gold in the richest
quartz. How excellent are his words on the first faint but certain
breath of Autumn in the air, felt, perhaps, early in July. "And then
came Autumn, with his immense burthen of apples, dropping them
continually from his overladen shoulders as he trudged along." Keats
might have written so of Autumn in the orchards--if Keats had been
writing prose.
There are geniuses more sunny, large, and glad than Hawthorne's, none
more original, more surefooted, in his own realm of moonlight and
twilight.
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