Mosses from an Old Manse

This is a wonderful set of more stories and sketches. It is a great book to either read cover to cover, to to pick and chose stories.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had a leaning towards humility, phony or not. After calling his previous collection of short stories "Twice-Told Tales" (1837), he went the lichen route with his next installment, calling his 1846 collection "Mosses From An Old Manse". Get out that scraper? Not quite. Unlike "Twice-Told Tales", a collection of somewhat hit-and-miss stories that owes some of its culture notoriety to its quaint title and much of the rest of it to one story ("The Minister's Black Veil"), "Mosses" catches Hawthorne's engaging genius at full flower. Right from the first of the Manse stories, the wonderful Poe-like "The Birthmark", about a scientist who risks losing his lovely bride in pursuit of perfection, Hawthorne shows himself in utter command: "In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul." Actually, Hawthorne begins the demonstration earlier than in his first proper story, with his introductory sketch about the house where he composed his stories, "The Old Manse" in Concord, Massachusetts. It's the only piece here that didn't see prior publication, and has Hawthorne ruminating, lightly but memorably, about the perishability of human thought. It also establishes the strong ambiance of time and place, crusty New England in its post-Puritan period, that undergirds much of what follows. "Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer," he explains. More false humility? Maybe. But Hawthorne gives the impression, here and elsewhere in "Manse", of being utterly sincere. It's his blessing and curse. Even when he writes a story where the allegory, the moral point of the matter, is developed clearly enough, he feels a need to underscore his points with narrative rumination. At least he doesn't capitalize key words as he did in "Twice-Told Tales". Yet unlike the stories in "Tales", which are often quite beautiful but easier to reduce, there is greater ambiguity and depth in "Manse". You have to take Hawthorne's messaging here with a grain of salt. Sure, there's a point in "The Birthmark", about being content with nature's imperfections, but there's also sympathy for the erring, striving doctor that complicates the picture, and connects it up with Hawthorne's own vocation. One of the last stories here, "The Artist Of The Beautiful", is a marvelous bookend in that regard, regarding the attainment of perfection, and as open-ended a story as Hawthorne ever wrote. It's a crushing tale, and yet quite positive, a miracle of creation by itself. In between, Hawthorne's variety is on full display, as it was in "Twice-Told Tales", only the work is uniformly better. Not only do you have a stronger body of celebrated stories, like "Young Goodman Brown" and "Roger Malvin's Burial", but the less-heralded stories are nearly all brilliant. No dated bits of patriotic ephemera like "Gray Champion" or strained symbolism like "The Maypole Of Merry Moun

First published in 1846, Hawthorne's second collection includes 26 stories, most of them written after the publication of the second (1842) edition of "Twice-Told Tales," as well as "Young Goodman Brown" and "Roger Malvin's Burial," two great tales from the 1830s that were inexplicably left out of the earlier book. The only "new" piece (that is, the only one not previously published in a periodical) is the opening sketch, which took Hawthorne nearly a year to write; it is a leisurely tour of the "old Manse," his newly acquired historical estate in Concord and Emerson's childhood home. Interesting mostly from a biographical perspective, the essay tries hard--but largely fails--to share with the reader Hawthorne's enthusiasm for his new home. The rest of the volume, fortunately, is filled with grand, eerie, humorous, and memorable allegories. Every reader and critic has his or her own favorites, but a few stand out for their uniqueness. "A Select Party" recounts a dinner hosted by a "Man of Fancy" in "one of his castles in the air"; the guests are such improbable personages as "an incorruptible Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without world ambition, and a Beautiful Woman without pride or coquetry." The thoughts and desires of the partygoers are as ethereal as the clouds they inhabit. In a similar vein, "The Intelligence Office" is a comic pre-Kafkaesque allegory of a parade of customers who seek the whereabouts (and the worth) of their long-lost desires; only a man seeking Truth unveils the Intelligencer as "merely delusive," a bureaucrat who makes wishes come true by simply acknowledging, not fulfilling, them. "The Celestial Rail-road," the full implications of which I appreciated only after a second reading, is a retelling of "Pilgrim's Progress," in which devilishly clever entrepreneurs have repackaged Christian's journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and to the Celestial City as a Disneyland-style theme park and tourist attraction. Some of the stories can be read as prototypes in the genres of horror and science fiction. In the futuristic "Earth's Holocaust," a great bonfire is lit to "consume every human and divine appendage of our mortal state": medicine, liquor, literature, weapons, money, art, jewelry, scriptures--so that there "is far less both of good and evil." "The Artist of the Beautiful" pits Owen, a watchmaker who struggles to create a true-to-life mechanical butterfly, against a powerful village blacksmith; both contenders vie for the attentions of a beautiful woman in a classic struggle of intelligence and beauty versus technology and brute strength. Two of Hawthorne's most well-known tales--"The Birth-mark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter"--are unsettling in their macabre Poe-like finales. Both feature scientists whose quest for what can be discovered override moral considerations of whether something should be done: the alchemist in the first story concocts a method to remove a birthmark from his wife'