Jack Lewis and His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study of Instructive Affinities

By D. G. Kehl

When he was a student at Oxford University, C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend expressing his great admiration of and enthusiasm for the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly The House of the Seven Gables and Transformation (British title of The Marble Faun). This study examines the parallels between these two kindred spirits and their works, focusing on their similar worldviews, their personal backgrounds and lifestyles, and the "Ultimates" they both pondered. It discusses common themes in their works, such as myth, scientism, and "the great power of blackness." Their respective attitudes toward these issues and others, such as faith, repentance, heaven and hell, confession, church attendance, the clergy, and Puritanism are strikingly similar. Considerable attention is given to "companion pieces" of the two writers, with discussion of the so-called "Fortunate Fall" in The Marble Faun and Perelandra, veil imagery in "The Minister's Black Veil," The Blithedale Romance, and Till We Have Faces, influence of Bunyan's allegory on The Pilgrim's Regress and "The Celestial Railroad," and multiform love in The Four Loves and The House of the Seven Gables. Examination of such affinities between these two writers and their works provides mutual illumination and enhanced appreciation of each.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Mar 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621896128

D. G. Kehl

D. G. Kehl is Professor of English Emeritus at Arizona State University, Tempe, where he taught courses in American literature, a variety of interdisciplinary courses, and courses on C. S. Lewis. His published works include four books and over a hundred articles in scholarly journals and such Christian periodicals as Christianity Today. Kehl is an associate editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal.

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Introduction: Instructive Affinities

Southern poet and critic Allen Tate delivered a major address titled Our Cousin, Mr. Poe before the Poe Society of Baltimore on October 7 , 1949 , and later repeated the address as a Bergen Lecture at Yale University. In this seminal essay, Tate discussed the recognition of a relationship, almost of the blood, which we must in honor acknowledge, concluding that we may ‘place’ him [Poe] but we may not exclude him from our board . . . He is so close to me that I am sometimes tempted to enter the mists of pre-American genealogy to find out whether he may not actually be my cousin. ¹ The same could be said of Jack Lewis in relation to his American cousin, Nat Hawthorne. Surprisingly, no one has acknowledged and discussed this relationship, almost of blood, thus unwittingly excluding him from the English board.

The basis for what may initially seem a fantastic claim of cousinage can be found in Lewis’s early letters to his friend Arthur Greeves. Lewis expressed great admiration for Hawthorne’s work, particularly for The House of the Seven Gables, which he called the most glorious (almost) novel that I have ever read . . . I really think I have never enjoyed a novel more . . . I intend to read all Hawthorne after this, though Lewis is quick to add, praising with a not-so-faint damn, What a pity such a genius should be a beastly American!² Similarly, eleven years later, in a letter to his brother Warnie, Lewis wrote: Hawthorn [sic] I admire beyond words. Then, drawing a contrast to Longfellow, for whom he admits only a sneaking affection, Lewis adds: "Hawthorne takes some old building dating from the New England times and weaves out of the very few centuries at his disposal an air of antiquity which is not often attained even in Europe where we have so much arithmetically greater a past to conjure with."

³

Lewis seemed especially to admire the Gothic horror of Hawthorne’s novel, noting: I love the idea of a house with a curse! And although there is nothing supernatural in the story itself there is a brooding sense of mystery and fate over the whole thing: Have you read it?⁴ A week later he writes,

Although by experience I am somewhat shy of recommending books to other people I think I am quite safe in earnestly advising you to make ‘the Gables’ your next purchase. By the way I shouldn’t have said ‘mystery’, there is really no mystery in the proper sense of the word, but a sort of feeling of fate & inevitable horror as in ‘Wuthering Heights’. . . There is one lovely scene where the villain—Judge Phycheon [sic]—has suddenly died in his chair, all alone in the old house, and it describes the corpse sitting there as the day wears on and the room grows darker—darker—and the ticking of his watch. But that sort of bald description is no use! I must leave you to read that wonderful chapter to yourself.

⁵

The following year, 1917, Lewis again mentions that he is reading Hawthorne: "At present I am engaged on Hawthorne’s ‘Transformation’ [the English title of The Marble Faun]. Then he chides his friend for apparently not heeding his advice to read Hawthorne: In spite of repeated advice from me I don’t think you have ever read this man. This one is very good indeed & has a lot about painting in it & some fine descriptions of Italian scenery. Surprisingly, he adds, It is better than ‘The Scarlet Letter’, but, of course, not so good as ‘The House with [sic] the Seven Gables’."

⁶

Of the eight American writers Lewis mentions to Greeves,⁷ what was it about this beastly American’s work that struck such a responsive chord in Lewis, what specifically did he admire about Hawthorne’s work, and how does exploration of affinities between the two writers illuminate the beliefs and art of each?

The life and work of C. S. Lewis has been much discussed in relation to various other writers and their work, such as George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien (along with other Inklings, such as Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) and, more recently, Francis Schaeffer and even Sigmund Freud.⁸ Thomas L. Martin’s Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis, predicated on Lewis as a literary touchstone, has offered brief essays on major periods of English literature and various genres, with the intent of providing new insights into both Lewis’s work and the literature he so cherished. The essay on Modern Literature devotes just four pages to American writers (though the author remarks that Lewis read a number of American authors⁹) and briefly discusses only Henry James and T. S. Eliot. Similarly, John Stuart Bell’s From the Library of C. S. Lewis: Selections from Writers Who Influenced His Spiritual Journey¹⁰ includes only brief selections from just three American writers (John Woolman, T. S. Eliot, and not surprisingly Joy Davidman). The omissions seem especially surprising in view of the fact that Lewis’s library, housed at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, includes numerous volumes by more than forty different American writers.

The attempt to trace influence, the supposed impact that a writer or literary work has on other writers or works, was quite common in the early twentieth century, but because it was often tenuous and far-fetched the practice fell into some disrepute.¹¹ Rather than influence, this study explores what might be called instructive affinities¹²—that is, parallels, connections, relationships, commonalities, or consanguinities between Lewis and Hawthorne, for the purpose of mutual illumination. Striking parallels between the two writers include their spiritual beliefs, their personal backgrounds and lifestyles, their worldviews, the central motifs in their writings, their major characters, and various works that can be examined as companion pieces for mutual illumination. The parallels are so uncanny, or so preternaturally pervasive, to borrow a favorite term of Hawthorne’s, that Nat and Jack might be called kindred spirits. A careful examination of the parallels can provide mutual illumination of each writer.

1. Tate, Our Cousin, Mr. Poe, in Robert Regan, Editor, Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays,

40

,

50

. Cf. Hyatt H. Waggoner, who refers to Hawthorne as "first cousin to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren (The Presence of Hawthorne,

13

).

2. Lewis, Letter of

15

November

1910

and Letter of

29

November

1919

,

152

–

53

.

3. Lewis, Letter of

12

December

1927

, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, I,

743

.

4. Lewis, Letter of

22

November

1916

, They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves,

152

.

5. Ibid., Letter of

10

November

1916

,

153

.

6. Ibid., Letter of

28

October

1917

,

200

.

7. The eight are Hawthorne, Melville, Irving, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, James, and London.

8. See, for example, Jeff McInnis, Shadows and Chivalry: Pain, Suffering, Evil and Goodness in the Works of George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis (Eugene, OR,

2008

); Michael H. Macdonald and Andrew A. Tadie, Eds. G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy (Grand Rapids,

1989

); R. J. Reilly, Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien (Athens, GA,

1971

); Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (New York,

1981

); Harry Lee Poe and James Ray Veneman, The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends (Grand Rapids,

2009

); Gareth Knight, The Magical World of the Inklings: J. R. R.. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield (Element,

1991

); Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (Mahwah, NJ,

2003

); Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent, OH,

2007

); Martha C. Sammons, War of the Fantasy Worlds: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien on Art and Imagination (Santa Barbara,

2010

); Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis’ ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield (Cumbria, UK,

2002

); Scott R. Burson and Jerry L. Walls, C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer (Downers Grove,

1998

); Armand M. Nicholl Jr., The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (New York,

2002

);

9. Christopher, Modern Literature,

257

.

10. Bell, From the Library of C. S. Lewis: Selections from Writers Who Influenced His Spiritual Journey.

11. Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford,

1973

) posits a theory involving misprision (misreading), one trope being kenosis (emptying, the Greek term borrowed from Paul in Philippians

2

:

7

), whereby the writer empties the original text and fills the subsequent text with, ordinarily, a lower meaning. For application of this theory to fiction see D.G. Kehl, "Kenosis of Biblical Texts: Method and Meaning in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God," MAWA, The Middle- Atlantic Writers Association Review, Vol.

16

, December ,

2001

,

40

–

51

.

12. The phrase is derivative of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, the title of his third novel (Die Wahlvenwandstschaften,

1809

), a scientific phrase once used to describe the tendency of certain chemical species to combine with certain substances or species in preference to others, compounds that only interacted with each other under certain circumstances. (For use of the phrase as an organizing metaphor, see Rene Magritte’s

1933

painting Elective Affinities, Tom Stoppard’s

1993

play Arcadia, and Paolo Taviani’s

1996

film The Elective Affinities.)

Hawthorne’s familiarity with the writings of Goethe has been well documented (e.g., see Roy R. Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision,

33

; Hubert H. Hoeltje, Inward Sky: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne,

391

,

511

,

515

et al.), as has Lewis’s (e.g., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. I,

97

, Vol. II,

441

,

737

, Vol. III,

597

).

Part I

Personal Backgrounds and Worldviews

1

Pondering the Ultimates, Things That Lie Beyond Human Ken

Scholars have drawn a multiplicity of differing conclusions about Hawthorne’s religious beliefs, and few seem to agree.¹ Was he a quasi-Calvinist or Calvin’s ironic stepchild? Was he a rebellious Puritan or a bastardly Puritan malgre lui? Was he a faux-Unitarian or a semi-orthodox Trinitarian? Was he a qualified Transcendentalist or a Transcendental Symbolist? The uncertainty, the disagreement, the ambivalence indicate the impossibility and undesirability of summarily labeling either Hawthorne or Lewis—or any great artist.

Hawthorne was more reticent than Lewis about his personal beliefs, but, at least in the minds of some, he seemed to think of himself, and inspired others to think of him, as a devoted, if not devout Christian. His son, Julian, wrote that his father believed in God, but never sought to define him.² The choice of the word define seems especially pertinent etymologically, from the Latin verb definire, to set a limit to, to delimit, to set bounds or boundaries. Would it not be presumptuous to set limits on the Almighty? Several years after Hawthorne’s death, his wife Sophia wrote about her husband’s belief in Christ: ‘I remember my husband saying once that he could not do without the warmth of his best image of His Father.’ Further, when Emerson is reported to have told Hawthorne that they must get rid of Christ, Hawthorne replied, No, Mr. Emerson, we cannot do without Christ.³ Though Hawthorne never asserted his beliefs in a systematic way, he did, as did Lewis, ponder, discuss, and write about the four great storylines or major motifs, along with variations and ramifications thereof: Divine Providence, the diabolic adversary, human mutiny and fall, and potential redemption and restoration, or, expressed another way: creation, fall, redemption, restoration.

One of the few attempts to summarize Hawthorne’s beliefs specifies two of the storylines and implies the others: His own religious beliefs were limited to a few points, never systematically stated. He had a sure faith in Providence, in a Providence that knows better than man. He thought of Jesus as the Redeemer of mankind, though in what sense explicitly he seems not to have recorded . . . He had, finally an unwavering belief in the immortality of the soul.⁴ Another critic has this to say: "The philosophy of Hawthorne is a broadly Christian scheme which contains heaven, earth, and hell. Whether heaven and hell are realities or only subjective states of mind is one of Hawthorne’s crucial ambiguities. I do not call him a Christian humanist, as do some excellent critics, for it seems to me that heaven and hell are real to him and play too large a part in his fiction to be relegated to the background."

⁵

While Hawthorne was serving as U.S. consul in Liverpool (1853–1857), Herman Melville visited, and the two took a long walk along the shore in Southport, settling in to talk in a hollow among the dunes. Hawthorne later recorded their discussion in his English Notebooks, perhaps revealing as much about himself and his beliefs as about Melville and his:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason about Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief, and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

⁶

Here Hawthorne implies the desirability, even the need, for a definite belief, which can bring rest and comfort, as well as his admiration for religiosity and reverence, his own belief in immortality, and his disagreement with the idea of annihilation hereafter. Further, his metaphoric reference to the monotonous and dismal experience of reasoning about everything that lies beyond human ken, likening it to continuous wandering in a desolate wasteland, suggests much about his view of spiritual epistemology, about reason and revelation, about reasoning and imagining, about head and heart.

In a strikingly similar instance, Lewis, writing in 1922 (before his conversion, even to Theism), recorded having a long conversation with Owen Barfield: We then drifted into a long talk about ultimates. Like me, he has no belief in immortality etc., and always feels the materialistic pessimism at his elbow. He is most miserable. He said however that the ‘hard facts’ which worried us, might to posterity appear mere prejudices de siecle, as the ‘facts’ of Dante do to us. Our disease, I said, was really a Victorian one. The conversation ranged over many topics and finally died because it was impossible to hold a court between two devil’s advocates.⁷ As with the Hawthorne-Melville duologue, this one reveals a similar, if not identical, subject being discussed—the ultimates, including immortality, a range of many topics, the unspecified etc. Writing at this time as an unbeliever, recorder Lewis, unlike recorder Hawthorne, reveals his concurrence in unbelief and even skepticism, but, like Hawthorne, he notes his friend’s lack of rest and comfort, saying that he is most miserable, apparently due to materialistic pessimism. He refers to their unbelief, their struggle with the hard facts, as their disease, even a siecle pandemic, part of the zeitgeist. Whereas there seems to be no evidence that either party in the first duologue is playing devil’s advocate—perversely or merely for sake of argument upholding the opposing side or supporting an indefensible cause—, in the second duologue the diabolic advocacy strategy is said to be mutual but the topics and tactics are not specified.

Although he apparently never explicitly attested to a personal conversion as Lewis did, Hawthorne wrote of redemption not through some utopian meliorism (like Brook Farm, the cooperative community, established by the Transcendental Club near West Roxbury, MA, 1841–1847, which Hawthorne wrote about in The Blithedale Romance) but through a changed heart: The heart, the heart, —there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward . . . will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream.⁸ Randall Stewart has suggested that Hawthorne may have remembered these thoughts from Jonathan Edwards’s treatise on Religious Affections: Hawthorne and Edwards were agreed that regeneration must come from within; that it was an affair of the heart, the religious affections, and not of the intellect merely; that the inward sphere must be purified.⁹ Hawthorne believed redemption is necessary because one of the old verities and truths of the heart, to borrow William Faulkner’s phrase, ¹⁰ is that the heart is depraved, as the Old Testament prophet attests: The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). Accordingly, in The American Notebooks Hawthorne included the following idea for a possible future work: The human Heart to be allegorized as a cavern; at the entrance there is sunshine, and flowers growing about it. You step within, but a short distance, and begin to find yourself surrounded with a terrible gloom, and monsters of divers kinds; it seems like Hell itself. You are bewildered, and wander long without hope. Unmistakably, this metaphor of the heart conveys the idea of horrific gloominess, frightening denizens, and chthonian hopelessness. But further down and further into the cavern of the human heart, a light suddenly shines, reproducing the flowers and sunny beauty of the entrance. Hawthorne concludes: the gloom and terror may lie deep; but deeper still is this eternal beauty.¹¹ What, then, is one to conclude about Hawthorne’s view of human depravity? He was seemingly haunted by the Puritan/Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity, which provided a pervasive tension in his fiction and prompted the creation of such depraved monsters as Roger Chillingworth, Mistress Hibbins, Ethan Brand, Giacomo Rappaccini, Judge Pyncheon, and others, but his inveterate ambivalence and Romantic idealism are evident here, as elsewhere.

Lewis is less equivocal in his view of total depravity, stating in his discussion of Human Wickedness in The Problem of Pain:This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature.¹² Hawthorne would almost certainly concur with Lewis’s assessment of human nature, for the light shining deep within the metaphoric cavern renders it bright, peaceful, and eternally beautiful. Perhaps it is the same radiance, a sacramental expression of nature, which illuminates the interior of the church which Robin Molineux visits, a beam hovering around the pulpit and resting upon the open page of the great Bible, causing Robin’s heart to shiver with an intense feeling of loneliness and nostalgia for home.¹³ What Lewis states explicitly, Hawthorne illustrates implicitly with allegorical, or sometimes symbolic, word pictures.

If human nature is depraved but not totally, in the sense that a light-beam of truth is retained in the heart, enabling humans to perceive right, the Law’s goodness, and to rejoice in it according to the inward man,¹⁴ how do these two writers view the solution to the problem of human depravity? The concluding paragraph of Hawthorne’s Fancy’s Show Box provides evidence of his belief in the need of repentance for mercy and redemption: Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity. He must feel that, when he shall knock at the gate of heaven, no semblance of an unspotted life can entitle him to entrance there. Patience must kneel, and Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate will never open!¹⁵ Hyatt H. Waggoner has well said of this passage: Repent and ask God’s mercy: If this is ‘Puritan, ’ it is also Pauline, and orthodox . . . [epitomized in] a single short prayer, the ‘Jesus Prayer’: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner’ . . . Hawthorne inclined toward the orthodox formulation derived from St. Paul, ‘justification by grace through faith.’

¹⁶

Though he apparently believed in their necessity, Hawthorne only hinted at his own repentance and redemption. For example, in a letter to Sophia Peabody, his future wife, he wrote: We are all but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart is touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to be—thereby we are beings of reality, and inheritors of eternity.¹⁷ It is not clear if Hawthorne is attributing this essential creative touch of the heart, a prerequisite to real life and inheritance of eternity, to the Almighty or to Sophia, to both, or most likely, to the former through the instrumentality of the latter.

Lewis was much more explicit about his conversion, recounting it first in the often cited passage from Surprised by Joy: In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: Perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England . . . Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to ‘know of the doctrine.’¹⁸ This was his conversion to Theism, belief in the existence of one infinite, personal God conceived as Ruler of the universe, as evidenced through general revelation (nature) and special revelation (God’s Word). Two years later, on September 28, 1931, as Lewis rode to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his brother Warnie’s motorcycle, he took what he called the final step. When we set out, he said, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.¹⁹ In a letter to Arthur Greeves, written on October 1, 1931, Lewis spoke of his first step in far deeper mysteries and stated, How deep I am just now beginning to see: for I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. He promised to try explaining it further another time, acknowledging that his long night talk with [Hugo] Dyson and [J. R. R.] Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.

²⁰

There is abundant evidence that Lewis pondered the meaning and implications of conversion, regeneration, salvation—and wrote explicitly of these doctrines, whereas Hawthorne depicted them implicitly in his tales, which shall be discussed subsequently. For example, Lewis spoke of the stages of regeneration: As Charles Williams says there are three stages: (1.) The Old Self on the Old Way. (2.) The Old Self on the new [sic] Way. (3.) The New Self on the New Way,²¹ but he never elaborated on the stages. In another letter he stresses the grace and sovereignty of God in conversion: "Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel—and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true—‘It is not I who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, wh. I have done nothing to earn.’ That is the Pauline account; and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical & natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule ‘All conversions depend on God’s choice’."

²²

How might Lewis have responded to Hawthorne’s reticence in attesting to a conversion experience? Perhaps these comments in a 1955 letter are pertinent: Some Protestants have a whole programme of ‘conviction’, ‘conversion’ etc. marked out, the same for everyone, & will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so’. But . . . God has His own unique way with each soul. There is no evidence that St. John even underwent the same kind of ‘conversion’ as St. Paul. Lewis concludes by echoing a statement from George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie (1879): The time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.

²³

Just as Hawthorne spoke, as noted above, of the need for the inward sphere, the heart, to be purified, Lewis has meister-devil Screwtape describe the human as a series of concentric circles, with the heart and will at the real center, the intellect coming next, followed by fantasy on the outside.²⁴ Lewis emphasizes the necessity of engaging the whole self, which must be cleansed, in one’s relationship with God: . . . the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.²⁵ Significantly, both authors emphasize the need for cleansing—from the inside out. In another letter Hawthorne wrote that no man is safe from sin and disgrace till by divine assistance he has thoroughly cleansed his heart—which few of us take the pains to do, though many satisfy themselves with a shallow and imperfect performance of that duty.²⁶ Hawthorne seems to suggest that the cleansing is a joint effort of humans and God—human effort assisted by the Divine—whereas Lewis states more explicitly that the guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ . . .

²⁷

Both authors seem to agree that the only solution to human depravity requires a radical change of the heart, not mere external reformation, perhaps what Hawthorne meant by a shallow and imperfect performance. Again, Lewis states explicitly, We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world and might even be more difficult to save. For mere improvement is not redemption . . . God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.²⁸ Hawthorne illustrates and dramatizes these truths in various works, such as The Celestial Railroad (to be discussed in chapter 11).

Relative to the redemption and restoration storyline/motif, what are the two writers’ views and practices of church attendance? This question could be answered with more certitude if Lewis had critiqued Hawthorne’s sketch Sunday at Home, collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837, enlarged in 1842). Of course, Hawthorne, after his Unitarian upbringing, is reported to have ordinarily stayed away from all churches.²⁹ The sketch, which is generally overlooked or summarily dismissed as simply an ironic narrative mocking staid Sunday Christians, merits a closer examination, perhaps to be enhanced by consideration in relation to what Lewis said about church attendance.

The narrator of Hawthorne’s sketch is a first-person persona and participant, apparently the author himself, peeking on a Sabbath morning from his chamber window on Herbert Street in Salem, observing the adjacent East (or Second) Church as the sunshine steals downward from the steeple’s weathercock to the street below. He is gladdened when he spies scores of little girls and boys decked out in colorful array, an old woman in black and an old man with darksome brow, two long lines of people streaming into the church, followed by the slow and solemn clergyman. When the gray sexton closes the door, the chambered spy imagines the congregants standing to pray and questions whether he can bring his own heart into unison with a fervor of supplication, but no distinct request, perhaps the safest kind of prayer, that is, one so indistinct that it anticipates no definite answer and therefore cannot disappoint if / when none comes. Surely, there is some cogent irony at work here and elsewhere in the sketch. The narrator’s imagined prayer, Lord, look down upon me in mercy! is undercut by the language in the following reference to "that sentiment gushing from my soul. He hears the hymn but says he can enjoy it better in his solitary chamber than in the church, where the full choir and the massive melody of the organ would fall with a weight upon me," and he concludes that reading the printed sermons is preferable to hearing them declaimed. Though he has imagined that the earth is hallowed by the Sabbath sunshine, assuring that his soul can never lose the instinct of its faith, in the final paragraph he questions if it was really "worth while to rear this massive edifice, to be a desert in the heart