¹ I began this paper in a seminar at the Univ. of California, Davis, and concluded it with the help of a summer grant in 1965 from the University's Research Committee.

² Rage for Order (Chicago), p. 97.

³ Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941): Hawthorne notes traits, but does not reveal his characters “gradually through significant incidents. … Description nearly always usurps the place of immediate action” (p. 335); Arvin, Hawthorne (New York, 1961): “woodenness in … narrative movement” (p. 212), “sustained anticlimax” (pp. 213–214).

⁴ American Renaissance, pp. 331–332.

⁵ Hawthorne, p. 196.

⁶ The Death of the Artist (The Hague, 1955), p. 69.

⁷ NCF, xiv (1959), 59–70.

⁸ Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Holt, Rinehart), p. xv. His observation (same page) about a different incident: “This is not the only place in the book where the action would seem to contradict the message” appears to vitiate his statement that “For thematic reasons Hawthorne was absolutely forced …”

⁹ The House of the Seven Gables, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ii, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus, Ohio, 1965), p. 181. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

¹⁰ “The Fall of the House of Pyncheon,” NCF, xi (1956), 11.

¹¹ Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964, p. xviii.

¹² American Renaissance, p. 331.

¹³ The fondness for regularity which Holgrave acknowledges in Chs. xx and xxi revealed itself as early as Ch. vi, where his maintenance of the Pyncheon garden was described. Holgrave's “careful,” “daily,” and “systematic” labor kept “vagrant and lawless plants” from springing up again in “rank weeds” (p. 86). With his “scrupulously” bestowed attention the soil was kept “clean and orderly” (p. 87).

¹⁴ Darrel Abel, who is, I think, exactly right about principal features of the love story, does not connect the mollification of Holgrave's view of the House with his changed perspective as social reformer in Ch. xxi. Moreover, Abel adds: “in concluding chapters [Hawthorne] ties up loose ends of the realistic level of his narrative in his usual arbitrary and inept fashion”—“Hawthorne's House of Tradition,” SAQ, lii (1953), 576–577.

For Clark Griffith—“Substance and Shadow: Language and Meaning in The Bouse of the Seven Gables,” MP, i.i (1953–54), 187–195—Holgrave is “subdued” and “mellowed” in Ch. xiv, but Griffith as well does not see Holgrave's speech in the garden as an adumbration of his words in the final chapter. He censures heavily the plot of the novel, calling it “strained, hackneyed, and … ‘a tiresome nuisance’,” whose final movements are “a trick, a purely mechanical plotting device.” Because of such flaws “it seems permissible to shift away from the plot and to look for the meaning of the House in its pervasive symbolism rather than in its slight superficial story.”

Hubert H. Hoeltje has touched on the matter very briefly (one sentence in Inward Sky: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Durham, N. C., 1962) and does not indicate its relevance to the critical objections that have been leveled at the novel; but he does suggest that Holgrave's feeling that the world is good, being “early,” will hold significance for later events of the novel. “Indeed, as early as when Phoebe had said goodbye upon taking a temporary leave of the old house, Holgrave, carried away by the moonlight, the nearness of Phoebe, and the sentiment in his own heart, had felt that it was, after all, a good world to live in—how good, and beautiful!” (p. 350). When Holgrave utters these words, however, Phoebe had not yet told him of her intention to leave.

Alfred J. Levy refers to the garden speech as an example of Holgrave's views on reform but does not consider it a change from Holgrave's previous stance. Levy proposes that the artist “comes … to modify his earlier position” in Ch. xx—“The House of the Seven Gables: The Religion of Love,” NCF, xvi (1961), 195–196.

¹⁵ For example, pp. 22, 39, 44, 66, 68, 69, 75.

¹⁶ The 1883 Riverside edition, the standard text for over eighty years before the appearance of the Centenary edition, originated a very important variant which probably obscured for commentators on the novel the significance of the earlier garden scenes between Phoebe and Holgrave. The Riverside text elided “soon” and thus read: “These influences hastened the development of emotions, that might not otherwise have flowered so.” This sentence allows the possibility that at the time (Ch. xx) it was still possible for Holgrave not to love Phoebe at all, though the statement which follows it mitigates this somewhat. By contrast, with “soon” restored to the text, we recognize a very exact allusion on Hawthorne's part. The “germs” of love already existed in Holgrave, and furthermore (as I argued from Ch. xiv) he knew it—for the author says it might have been the artist's “purpose” to let them die without further development. What his closeness to Phoebe in the knowledge of Judge Pyncheon's death (“These influences”) did was to cause the “germs” (seeds) to “flower” sooner than they would have otherwise.

¹⁷ Seven Gables (Houghton Mifflin), p. xiv.

¹⁸ Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Tex., 1957), pp. 126, 131. I hope I am not misrepresenting Male's views. He points up the “urgent necessity for her [Hepzibah] to adapt herself” and says “Hepzibah … is … bizarre and inadaptive.” Later, however, he speaks of her “metamorphosis” (p. 135).

¹⁹ Tragic Vision, p. 133. In this Male followed Griffith—“Substance and Shadow,” p. 194.

²⁰ A cloud landscape had represented Hepzibah's spiritual condition at the opening of the cent-shop (p. 52).

²¹ American Renaissance, p. 332.

²² Matthiessen, for example: “Hawthorne overlooked the fact that he was sowing all over again the same seeds of evil”—American Renaissance, p. 332.

²³ Arvin: “the forces of disintegration are represented as in full play—so truly in full play that the happy outcome must be felt to be far too little organic”—Eawthorne, p. 192.

²⁴ Inward Sky, pp. 350–357.

²⁵ “It is not probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving Clifford in a charge of murder; knowing that his uncle did not die by violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis, that such an inference might be drawn” (p. 312).

²⁶ Discounting an imputation that violence had been committed, Hawthorne calls this, of all the events of Pyncheon history which precede his story, “the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race” (p. 22).

²⁷ Above, n. 21.

²⁸ Three times (pp. 59, 65, 66) in his chapter on The House of the Seven Gables, Von Abele proposes that an early sign of such decay is Holgrave's marrying Phoebe for her money. But when Holgrave proposes to Phoebe, she is not wealthy, and he has no reason to believe she is. Two of Judge Pyncheon's sons are mentioned in the novel, and though one, a reprobate, had died (p. 231), the other, for all Holgrave knew, was alive and heir at the time he pledged his love to Phoebe. The death of the Judge's remaining son from cholera was not known until the arrival of a Cunard steamer about a week after his own death. But Holgrave had become betrothed to Phoebe the morning after the Judge's vigil in the great chair.

²⁹ It had been this passage which ended: “God is the sole worker of realities.”