The Powers that Be

I

 

The action of The Scarlet Letter takes place in the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1640s.  Hester Prynne, married in England, has come to the colony in advance of her husband and has been there two years without him at the beginning of the story.  She has a baby as the result of an illicit affair, and is condemned to wear a scarlet letter A on her breast for the rest of her life.  The father, the well-respected minister Arthur Dimmesdale, does not confess his involvement, and Hester is the only one who knows.  While she is on display on the scaffold during the first part of her sentence, she recognizes her husband in the crowd, a man who will call himself Roger Chillingworth.  She is the only one who knows who he is.  He takes up residence in the colony as a physician, with a view to finding out with whom she had the affair and taking revenge on him.

 

Dimmesdale suffers extremely from guilt and his health declines.  Chillingworth, treating him at first as his physician, discovers his guilt and works to make him suffer even more.  Hester meanwhile earns a living sewing, looks after her daughter Pearl, and provides nursing and charity of various kinds to the community.  She remains an outcast without friends, but finds some acceptance on account of her sewing prowess and her good deeds.  At last, Hester tells Dimmesdale who Chillingworth is, and they plan together to escape him by leaving the colony.  He discovers their plan and foils it by arranging to ship with them.  Dimmesdale at last makes a public confession and dies.  A short coda follows in which Chillingworth dies and we learn what eventually happens to Hester and Pearl.

 

The narration is straight forward.  The first three chapters follow Hester.  In four, she undertakes not to tell anyone who Chillingworth is, and Chillingworth vows to discover who her lover was and take revenge on him.  Five through seven follow Hester and Pearl, then in eight they visit the governor, who is attended by Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and some others.  The principal question for the governor is whether Hester should be allowed to keep her child.  Dimmesdale speaks strongly in favour of her, and Chillingworth notices his zeal.  Nine through eleven establish Chillingworth as Dimmesdale's personal physician, and they take up residence together, ostensibly for the patient's benefit.  In twelve, Dimmesdale spends an evening standing alone on the scaffold, joined at the end by Hester and Pearl, and the three are discovered there by Chillingworth.  Hester is alone again in thirteen, then in fourteen she speaks with Chillingworth, asking him to stop tormenting Dimmesdale, and advising him that now she will tell Dimmesdale who he really is.  Hester and Pearl take up fifteen and sixteen, at the end of which they meet Dimmesdale in the forest, and the three of them are together through nineteen.  Dimmesdale is then the focus from twenty through twenty-three, with glimpses of the others, and at the end of twenty-three, Dimmesdale dies.  Twenty-four wraps things up.  We thus follow primarily one character at a time for long instalments, and the end of one instalment introduces the character who will be the main subject of the next.

 

The simplicity of the plot, the small number of main characters, and the division of the story into large instalments, encourage an impression of weights and balances and the relation of the parts.  We see Hester mainly by herself or with Pearl; her interactions with either Dimmesdale or Chillingworth are very limited; she is concerned about them, but most of what we see of her doesn't directly involve them.  Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, on the other hand, are always together imaginatively if not in person.  We thus see Hester as one part of the story, and the two men as the other part, and to some extent we can't but be conscious of the cuckolded husband, the cuckolder, and the woman in the middle.  But the main division is a moral one.  Dimmesdale lacks courage, Chillingworth lacks compassion, and both are proud, while Hester shows courage, compassion and humility.  As the story proceeds, the moral situation solidifies.  Dimmesdale withers further and further into his weakness, while Chillingworth deteriorates into little more than a tormenting demon.  The picture is reinforced ironically by the ways the community judges the two men.  Dimmesdale's sermons become more powerful as his ill-health and moral failure continue, and he comes to be seen as a sort of saint generating holiness from suffering.  Chillingworth is taken for an astonishingly dedicated healer, perhaps even provided by God himself to minister to the saint's needs, although perhaps working through Satan but with God's permission.  All the while, Hester takes the community's ostracism and abuse and in return makes quiet and steady contributions to its health, need, and even adornment.  She earns a place for herself but accepts her station, and the only right she ever asserts is to be Pearl's mother.

 

Pearl, although she takes up quite a bit of space in the book, isn't a fully realized character and can't have been intended as one, and she has no real weight in the plot.  She is expressly called a sprite, and she engages only fitfully with those around her.  She supports Hester, but almost as a bemused goddess might treat a favoured mortal.  She is often little more than a device, a sort of chorus voice who articulates, for instance, that Dimmesdale is unwilling ever to let others see him with Hester and Pearl.  We're not concerned about how Pearl will turn out; we're concerned only very briefly with whether she will stay with Hester, and that is for Hester's sake, not for Pearl's.  There is no Pearl sub-plot.  The entire plot of the story belongs to Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth.

 

It is a bit reminiscent of Greek tragedy in its simplicity.  Compare it, for instance, with Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy.  Both are sustained by a handful of unrelenting facts.  Agamemnon has killed his daughter; his wife then kills him; their son then kills her; and the Furies torment the son until Apollo reconciles them to a different resolution.  Hester's adultery, evidenced by her illegitimate daughter, has removed her from Plymouth Bay society.  Dimmesdale cannot bring himself to admit that he is the other party.  Chillingworth, the injured husband, takes revenge on Dimmesdale.  Finally, Dimmesdale confesses and dies, and Chillingworth dies not long after.  A handful of characters, lit brilliantly, course through their fates, and the story ends. 

 

But that resemblance is superficial.  The Oresteian trilogy, and most Greek tragedy, is propelled by competing ethical imperatives.  Agamemnon wrongs his wife by killing their daughter.  When his wife requites the wrong by killing Agamemnon, she wrongs their son.  He in turn kills her, and his matricide earns him the wrath of the Furies.  The ethical forces are much weaker in Hawthorne's story, and they scarcely conflict.  Hester is, by community standards, rightly punished - in fact there is some question of whether she deserved much worse - and her shaming, by itself, requires no response from anyone.  Dimmesdale, if he lacks the courage to own his involvement, deserves to suffer.  Chillingworth is, at least arguably, entitled to satisfaction from Dimmesdale.  Moreover, if each of them chose differently, the suffering wouldn't be extinguished.  Hester's lot wouldn't be improved by resentment.  If Dimmesdale confessed early on, he would suffer differently, but he would still suffer.  And if he confessed, the opportunity for Chillingworth's special revenge would not obtain.  Without any compelling forces working on and through the characters, there isn't anything tragic about what happens to them.  At most, we could make the story out to be a "tragedy of suffering."

 

It couldn't, after all, be a tragedy of action, because the principal characters do very little.  The plot configuration results mainly from the liaison of Hester and Dimmesdale, which takes place before the story begins.  Chillingworth arrives and is recognized, and looks for Hester's lover.  There is one small bit of suspense in the middle of the book, about whether Pearl will be taken from Hester.  It isn't until almost the end that Hester and Dimmesdale suddenly decide to go away, and that gets quashed quickly.  By subtraction, as it were, most of the action must then occur in Hester's development on the one hand, and in Dimmesdale's deterioration, aggravated by Chillingworth, on the other.  And that comports with the way the narrative is deployed; those are precisely the main subjects of what I called the instalments of the story.  But we don't ever see even the main characters, especially Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, doing very much.  There is a certain amount of activity, even progressive activity, on Hester's part, although the best of it is unconscious, and certain elements somewhat spoil it.  But we very seldom see Dimmesdale and Chillingworth actually doing what we're often told they are doing.

 

Henry James thinks that the interaction of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale is precisely the most dynamic part of the story.  He does think the novel is a particularly quiet one in terms of action.  "The people strike me not as characters," he says, "but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged,  of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move."  For Henry James, this isn't a serious drawback in a novel.  He goes on to say that Hawthorne's imagination "plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a dance through the moonlighted air of his intellect, that the thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing effects much more exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of having handled a splendid piece of silversmith's work."  This seems just, although it's hard not to be reminded of H. G. Wells's famous remark about James's own novels.  But then, in James's evaluation, Hester nearly drops out; the story "is in a secondary degree that of Hester Prynne; she becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure; it is not upon her the dénouement depends."  Chillingworth and Dimmesdale instead come forward:

 

The story goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband - the tormented young Puritan minister ... - between this more wretched and pitiable culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, and the older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulates them by malignant arts.

 

But this isn't as straightforward a claim as it might seem at first, if we look closely at Dimmesdale and Chillingworth.

 

After their initial early appearances, they are reintroduced in the eighth chapter.  The husband is now "old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who, for two or three years past, had been settled in the town.  It was understood that this learned man was the physician as well as the friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered, of late, by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labors and duties of the pastoral relation."  Chillingworth is also altered; Hester "was startled to perceive what a change had come over his features, - how much uglier they were, - how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen, - since the days when she had familiarly known him."  In the ninth chapter we learn that since the opening scenes Chillingworth has established a substantial reputation as a physician and begun to associate closely with Dimmesdale, whose health begins to fail about the time of Chillingworth's arrival.  There are hints that Chillingworth has begun to suspect Dimmesdale's secret before Dimmesdale's outburst at the governor's residence.

 

Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character ... [Chillingworth] strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern.  Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up ... At some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.

 

But there has been nothing definite yet - "No secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness into his companion's ear.  The latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had never been revealed to him."  Meanwhile, others claim to have noticed in Chillingworth what Hester will soon notice.  "At first, his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like.  Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight, the often they looked upon him."  But this observation is explicitly connected with the view that Chillingworth is in league with Satan, and in any case the change in Chillingworth has taken place before he discovers Dimmesdale's secret.  At the beginning of the tenth chapter, Chillingworth himself still seems very uncertain.  Dimmesdale, he says to himself, "pure as they deem him, - all spiritual as he seems, - hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother.  Let us dig a little further in the direction of this vein!"  The digging, though, doesn't yet turn up anything determinative, and "he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another point."

 

Eventually - at the end of the tenth chapter - Chillingworth finds what he has been after.  He wants Dimmesdale to "lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul," and Dimmesdale replies, "No! - not to thee! - not to an earthly physician!"  Shortly after this, Chillingworth finds Dimmesdale asleep and peers inside his vestment.  "With what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror!  With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor!"  Clearly Chillingworth had not been sure until this point - and this is confirmed at the beginning of the eleventh chapter:

 

Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to a more intimate revenge than any enemy had ever wreaked upon an enemy.  To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!  All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving!  All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance!

 

We are now at the climax of what Henry James summarizes in saying that Chillingworth "devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulates them by malignant arts."  It is certainly devilish - a prolonged, restrained, deliberate and carefully calculated application of torture.  But we get only the slightest glimpse of the thing itself, in a short passage almost immediately following the one quoted just above:

 

He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minister's interior world.  He could play upon him as he chose.  Would he arouse him with a throb of agony?  The victim was forever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine; - and the physician knew it well!  Would he startle him with sudden fear?  As at the waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom, - uprose a thousand phantoms, - in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!

Strange, how helpless Dimmesdale has suddenly become, given that he is himself unaware of any change in his relationship with Chillingworth.  Hitherto, when Chillingworth has probed uncomfortably, Dimmesdale has been able to put him off - to divert him, or simply to end the conversation.  There was a close call - in his "No!  Not to thee!" episode - but he managed it.  Chillingworth's new power is assumed, not established.  Instead of illustration, all we get is a very brief and vague description, in eighteenth-century philosophical jargon, in terms of "the spring that controlled the engine."  And after this we see nothing at all, because we see almost nothing more of Chillingworth.  He appears briefly at the end of the vigil in the twelfth chapter, has a short conversation with Hester in the fourteenth, and jams the escape plans at the end.  Whatever he does to Dimmesdale after his discovery of Dimmesdale's guilt happens offstage.  We aren't shown it; instead we have been asked to imagine it; the action is all implied.

 

Now that doesn't establish that the action doesn't occur "in" the book - that's a delicate point, and I'll come back to it - only that we never see Chillingworth torturing Dimmesdale.  The treatment of Dimmesdale follows similar lines.  Even before the discovery, his malady is described only in vague terms.  His health has begun to fail; his cheek is pale; he loses weight; he frequently puts his hand over his heart and seems to feel pain there; his voice grows more tremulous; there is gloom and terror in his eyes.  There is no doubt Dimmesdale is suffering, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he is justified in keeping his secret, and chafing under Chillingworth's care.  He says to Chillingworth, with regard to guilty men, "guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service.  So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow; while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves."  Accurate, perhaps, but not of much consolation to him.

 

What exactly changes after Chillingworth's discovery?  Dimmesdale "had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching over him."  He connects it with Chillingworth, but blames himself for such an uncharitable sentiment.  "For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.  He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his best to root them out.  Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man."  The irony is clever, but is it plausible?  The torture is dreadful; Chillingworth has "constant opportunities," and keeps poking at the wound; but Dimmesdale spends as much time as ever with his tormenter, trying to persuade himself that something else is the matter.  Something else is the matter, of course - his unconfessed relations with Hester - and we never see in any detail why it isn't this same old cause producing the same old effect.  It's hard to see exactly what Chillingworth adds to it, although we're assured that he does.  We're also told that Dimmesdale's sermons became peculiarly effective, that to his parishioners it seemed that "his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain unto itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence."  He impassions virgins, and makes old people want to be buried near him - but we never hear a word of what he actually says.

 

In short, Hawthorne tells us that Dimmesdale's suffering gets worse because of Chillingworth's activity, but nothing demonstrates this, and in fact Dimmesdale's ongoing association with Chillingworth rather tells against it.  Dimmesdale has a burden of guilt that is ample to account for his continuing deterioration; Chillingworth isn't needed, and there's no reason to attribute much efficacy to what he attempts.  We can almost see the courses the two men take as being in a sort of preordained harmony, in which sufficient causes exist in each alone to explain his behaviour, although someone with a less robust perspective might attribute one's behaviour to the other's influence.

 

Hester, meanwhile, makes some progress.  She becomes a willing servant to a community that doesn't regard her as belonging to it, and that takes frequent opportunities to remind her of her outcast status.  She is patient and humble; she asserts herself only when the well-being of her daughter is at stake.  She tries to console Dimmesdale, suggesting that his sin is behind him and that his suffering should bring him peace.  Done a bit differently, she might have appeared a moral genius, finding redemption in suffering, always looking ahead, converting the loathing others feel for her into a love she feels for them, and so forth.  But Hester has various failings.  Dressing Pearl extravagantly, for instance, is at odds with what a more perfect Hester would teach her daughter.  So is telling Pearl that she once met "the Black Man," and that the scarlet letter is his mark.  The conceit that she can detect sin in others, if understandable in someone who is so alone, and if indicative of some sympathetic impulses, is nonetheless perverse; she is a bit too mature to feature as an ingenuous Young Goodman Brown.  When she offers Dimmesdale the solution of running away, she overlooks the reality that Dimmesdale is already in effect running away, and it isn't working.  And when, almost at the end, we hear that Hester had once thought she might be the prophetess of better relations between men and women, we realize that we're looking back on quite an ordinary woman, despite some attempts by Hawthorne to make her seem more.  She does, on the whole, make the best of a bad situation - most importantly, by not festering and decaying as Dimmesdale and Chillingworth do.  And we do see her moving as we do not see the two men moving.

 

 

II

 

As I said earlier, the fact that we don't see Dimmesdale and Chillingworth moving doesn't mean that their movements aren't "in" the story.  James's view is substantially accurate - this is a novel of picturesque arrangements, stable variations, small progress, ornate but static pieces.  And the pieces that are arranged can certainly be substantives that abbreviate motion - verbs frozen into nouns, as it were, such as "Dimmesdale's moral decay" or "Chillingworth's development as a devil" - so that we can think not only of continuing tensions but of escalating tensions.  For that, it is sufficient that we imagine motion, that we attribute it, that we believe it occurs when we are told that it does.  It doesn't matter if the motion is illusory, provided the illusion is accepted.  But that does constrain the kind of pleasure we can take in the novel.  A novel merely asserting an action, saying that it occurs instead of showing it occurring, is like a drama relating something that has happened offstage instead of acting it onstage.  That might sometimes be necessary, but doing it without being forced is giving up a tool of the genre.   It amounts to increasing what Aristotle calls thought - "the capacity to say what is pertinent and apt" - at the expense of the plot, by referring instead of demonstrating:

 

"Thought" covers all effects which need to be created by speech: their elements are proof, refutation, the conveying of emotions (pity, fear, anger, etc.), as well as enhancement and belittlement.  It is clear that the same principles should also be used in the handling of events, when one needs to create impressions of what is pitiable, terrible, important, or probable - with this difference, that the latter effects must be evident without direct statement, while the former must be conveyed by the speaker in and through speech.  For what would be the point of the speaker, if the required effects were evident even without speech?

 

The pleasure then tends to be in the contemplation of proportions, of relations, of juxtapositions.  The narrative is pushed in the direction of being a proof, and the pleasure taken becomes more like the pleasure of geometry or other arts of proof.  "Well, so be it," someone might say.  "There are different kinds of novel, and different kinds of pleasure appropriate to each.  It is a question of taking a novel on its own terms, or at most a question of taste.  A novel that depends on situation, on the positioning and handling of relatively static elements, can be well executed and be a fine novel, though it might not be your own favourite kind of novel."  But that sort of defence seems unsatisfactory in at least three ways.

 

First, novels that are short on the depiction of action encourage lapses of authorial judgment.  In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne is tempted far too often into clunky pieces of symbolism - sunshine retreats before Hester's hand, a scarlet letter appears emblazoned across the heavens, and so forth.  He drops frequently into commentary that veers awkwardly - think of some of his comments about the nature of "woman," for instance.  Every appearance of Pearl is strange, and the space given to her is uncomfortable, given her function.  When the constituents of a story are static chunks, special bridgework has to be invented.  A story anchored in action, on the other hand, is always already moving toward its next stage - the bridgework, one might say, is discovered rather than invented, and the author is kept busy.  To give it a New England accent, idle hands are the devil's workshop, and Hawthorne gets into trouble with his ad hoc stitchery.

 

Second (and this can be no more than a sketch here), there is a fortuitously simple way to imagine how the novel could have been better, by comparing it with another novel that treats very similar material much more actively, Silas Marner.  At first blush, in fact, George Eliot's book seems to refer quite directly to Hawthorne's, even down to some expressions that seem deliberate echoes.  In any case, it focusses on three individuals and treats them in two groups, with Silas on the one hand and the two Cass brothers on the other hand.  Silas, like Hester, is an outsider who has suffered a calamity, but through his adopted daughter (a bit of a sprite but convincing, unlike Pearl) he finds moral growth and a sense of community.  Godfrey Cass, meanwhile, has secretly fathered a child and has been concealing it, especially from his wealthy father, which allows his malevolent brother Dunstan to blackmail him, and the blackmail continues for some time.  The thematic resemblances, the parallel populations, and the internal relations of those populations, are striking.  But in Silas Marner, all of the action is shown to us in a single, coherent plot.  We see what Silas, Godfrey and Dunstan really do, and we hear what they really say, and it has a much fuller effect.  There is nothing unfair about the comparison.  The material isn't somehow lighter than Hawthorne's.  The treatment isn't rounder because of its length - Silas Marner is so short, in fact, that some critics liken it to a fable.  The execution is simply more satisfying because there is real movement without any clumsy bridgework.  The Scarlet Letter is ponderous and lacks life beside it.

 

Third, the technique in The Scarlet Letter is better suited to shorter work, and creates problems in a novel.  Hawthorne has tried to adapt a strategy that he uses with splendid results in quite a few of the short stories.  He constructs an image, a situation, a dilemma, a tendency, or an idea, and delineates it precisely and consistently so as to give it a bordered character, to make it a substantial entity in the reader's mind.  Then he bruises it, hits it with an idea from outside, an idea that shows what was weak, what was missing, what was mistakenly assumed, what a better alternative would have been.  We see how the second idea answers to the first, conditions it, lights it differently.  Sometimes the effect is amusing, humbling, or merely surprising, as for instance in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" or "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment."  Sometimes the blow strikes deeper, as in "Young Goodman Brown" or "Roger Malvin's Burial."  Sometimes the initial idea is shown to be resistant to the attempted bruising.  And sometimes the effect simply doesn't come off.  But when it does, the result is typically a decisive insight, one that is literally arresting, that acts to freeze the story.  Suddenly, there is nothing else to do with the intense situation; it dissolves, the image fades; there is nothing more for Hawthorne to operate on; and the story naturally ends.  Deployed as the structure of a novel, the device tends to create abrupt endings.  The material in a novel has accumulated significant inertia and needs to be wound down gradually.  It is hard to see how The Scarlet Letter could be concluded without Dimmesdale's secret coming to light.  But once it does, all of the tension is gone immediately.  The idea runs out of energy, and there's nothing left for Hawthorne to do but to dispose quickly of his characters.  He kills Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, offers a brief afterthought of Hester, and then cuts to a too-cute grave scene.  The ending of The House of the Seven Gables is similarly rushed, and I think it is for the same reason - despite a conscious attempt at a more dynamic novel, Hawthorne instead developed further variations on his old technique.

 

Almost all novels make some use of illusion.  As Plato noticed, an author cannot be expert in all the arts in which his characters claim expertise, but (contrary to Plato) that doesn't necessarily mean the work is flawed - it often suffices that the characters plausibly appear to be practising their appropriate arts.  Depending on the focus of the plot, this sort of illusion can attach even to a central character, provided the art in question is peripheral to the plot.  The nineteenth century is full of novels involving the political and love interests of clergymen and doctors who, in addition to pursuing power and love, practise their arts without their authors having been theologians or physicians.  We don't need to know the details of their ministering and doctoring to accept that those professional practices carry them about on their rounds, support their communication with colleagues in their profession, and so on.  But in their capacities as politicians and love-makers, they should be seen to act.  In a novel, the closer an activity is to the core of the plot, the more the plot is weakened by not showing the activity itself. 

 

 

I

 

Washington Irving's A History of New York came out in 1809.  It was a comic account of the times of three early Dutch governors, purportedly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.  The story was that Knickerbocker had gone missing without paying his bill - Irving even placed real newspaper requests for information about his whereabouts - and the landlord was publishing the manuscript in order to make good his losses.  Irving wrote little in the next ten years, then in 1819 brought out a miscellany, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.   He was now in England, and much of the collection was given over to local occasion-pieces and vignettes - the narrator's journey across the Atlantic, country churches, rural funerals, Christmas customs, Westminster Abbey, Little Britain, the behaviour of writers in the British Museum.  There are a couple of articles of genuine history, and then there are three narratives that today we recognize as short stories - "The Spectre Bridegroom," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "Rip Van Winkle."  The latter two stories are presented as further New York findings from among the now late Diedrich Knickerbocker's papers.

 

They both take place along the Hudson River - Sleepy Hollow near Tarrytown, and Rip Van Winkle somewhat further north - and today they tend to be remembered together as lightly and pleasantly supernatural, quaint old faux-Dutch legends mild enough to tell children or to be recalled fondly from our own childhood hearing of them.  Irving is an extraordinarily friendly and gentle narrator, a sort of casual host who wants us to feel at ease, and who seems to ask in return only that we go along with his puttering, meandering ways.  But Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle are very different stories - both from the earlier New York narratives and from each other - with very different narrative strategies and residual values.  The New York stories had been relaxed and digressive, exploiting an opportunity as it arose and jogging along to the next, but the new stories have a much more tightly planned architecture.

 

From its beginning, Sleepy Hollow draws a target on its intended comic climax and moves deliberately toward it with an almost syllogistic narrative.  All of the allusions, all of the characterizations, all of the ironies work to the same end.  There are no loose threads, no purpose beyond setting up Ichabod Crane to meet the Headless Horseman; and when the story ends, there are no questions left unanswered.  The lingering impression is only a pleasant sense of Sleepy Hollow and its legends, and a rollicking picture of a terrified schoolmaster.

 

Rip Van Winkle is a much richer story, and its effects are harder to explain.  Most of it proceeds neutrally and rapidly with no foreshadowing but no digressive interludes.  We don't know what is going to happen to Rip when he starts up the mountain.  For all we know of the tale to this point - and of Irving's tales more generally - we might be wondering whether Rip will perhaps discover a secret weapon with which to tame Dame Van Winkle, or some such thing.  The early narration isn't layered over with local legends, hints of supernatural doings; Rip and his dog are simply going hunting.  Then something magical happens, in unexpectedly dense prose, which sews together several elements but whose meaning is never entirely resolved.  It's rather like some of the supernatural interludes in Shakespearean comedy, perhaps even in Macbeth.  When the story ends, there is something left over - we aren't finished with it as we are finished with Sleepy Hollow.  There's more here than another Sleepy Hollow, or a satire on the new America or the new American, or the sentimental, exaggerated recall of an old Dutch village, or the clever ways of a lazy or cowardly man.  We find ourselves thinking that despite its impossibility the central story is somehow true, true in some elusive sense.

 

 

II

 

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" starts by portraying the setting as a place where spirits are seen, and one in particular.  The people "are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.  The whole neighbourhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions."  "The dominant spirit ... is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head.  It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball ... and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind."

 

Then in short order we meet Ichabod Crane, deliberately drawn as a credulous Don Quixote figure but with petty qualities substituted for Don Quixote's noble ones.  He is, first, physically the part:

 

He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.  His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew.  To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

 

For the night that will afterward be so famous, he is even given a Rozinante, but a malign one:

 

That he might make his appearance before his mistress in the true style of a cavalier, he borrowed a horse from the farmer with whom he was domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman, of the name of Hans Van Ripper, and thus gallantly mounted, issued forth like a knight errant in quest of adventures.  But it is meet I should, in the true spirit of romantic story, give some account of the looks and equipments of my hero and his steed.  The animal he bestrode was a broken down plough horse, that had outlived almost every thing but his viciousness.  He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost its pupil, and was glaring and spectral, but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it...

 

Instead of books of chivalry, he has absorbed accounts of witchcraft; and instead of inspiring him, they frighten him:

 

He had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed ... He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity.  His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary, and both had been increased by his residence in this spell bound region.  No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow.  It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed of an afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there on over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes.  Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his imagination.

 

Instead of jousting with giants, or liberating chain gang prisoners, his principal activity is beating his pupils.  And instead of being content with the meagre table of a knight errant, he is an absolute glutton for both quantity and quality of food.  "He was a huge feeder, and though lank, had the dilating powers of an Anaconda."  He courts Katrina Van Tassel primarily because she will fall heir to a substantial fortune, which he imagines largely in terms of an unlimited feast:

 

He pictured to himself every roasting pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce; in the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey, but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savoury sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter, which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

 

He wants Katrina, not as a Dulcinea to inspire him and to receive his knightly tribute, but as a bringer of wealth and luxury.  But there is an obstacle:

 

From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight, the peace of his mind was at an end, and his only study was how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel.  In this enterprize, however, he had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of a knight errant of yore, who seldom had any thing but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons, and such like easily conquered adversaries ... He had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers...

 

Among these, the most formidable, was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rung with his feats of strength and hardihood.  He was broad shouldered and double jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance.  From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb, he had received the nick name of Brom Bones, by which he was universally known.  He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar.

 

Brom Bones, moreover, has even been heard to consider himself and his horse Daredevil more than a match for the Headless Horseman and his steed.  He met the Hessian one night, he said, and challenged him to a race, and he had the race all but won when the headless horseman bolted off in a flash of fire.

Ichabod and Brom Bones become rivals, but not along terms that are satisfactory to Brom:

 

Brom, who had a degree of rough chivalry in his nature, would fain have carried matters to open warfare, and have settled their pretensions to the lady, according to the mode of those most concise and simple reasoners, the knights errant of yore - by single combat; but Ichabod was too conscious of the superior might of his adversary to enter the lists against him; he had overheard a boast of Bones, that he would "double the schoolmaster up, and lay him on a shelf of his own schoolhouse;" and he was too wary to give him an opportunity.  There was something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacific system; it left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery in his disposition, and to play off boorish practical jokes upon his rival.

 

The final ingredient is the party at the Van Tassel house, where smooth-dancing Ichabod monopolizes Katrina while Brom Bones seethes in a corner.  When Ichabod now starts on his long, lonely way home through the dark, windy woods, we know that he is going to joust with the Headless Horseman, that the Headless Horseman will be Brom Bones, and that Ichabod will get what he pretty much deserves.  And sure enough, Ichabod finds himself pursued at the gallop by a horseman holding his head on the pommel of his saddle, who at last hurls the head at Ichabod and knocks him off his horse.  The next morning all that is found of Ichabod is his hat, and nearby, a smashed pumpkin.  Brom Bones is afterward "observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin."  And several years after the incident an old farmer reports having seen Ichabod in a distant part of the country.

 

When we're told that the belief persists among many in the neighbourhood that Ichabod was carried off that night by the Headless Horseman, and that as the schoolhouse decays, it is said to be haunted by Ichabod's ghost, we smile, and that is all.  It is "a favourite story often told about the neighbourhood round the winter evening fire," and the sort of thing that would today make for a tourist curiosity, one that might require for its sustenance at least the appearance of some local credulity.  There is no great lingering mystery; it's not important to us whether perhaps Brom Bones had played the Hessian earlier, or what the real origins of the story were.

 

 

III

 

"Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains."  Thus begins the first paragraph of "Rip Van Winkle," which affords the only early hint that the mountains will play a role in the story.  There's no trace of anything supernatural.  The only possible reference, "magical," is used naturally and even with a scientific reference: "Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives far and near as perfect barometers."  The paragraph simply gives us a lofty view of the mountains as enclosing landscape, which is then narrowed in the second paragraph: "At the foot of these fairy mountains the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape."  Irving moves our attention down from the mountains to the village, to the houses "built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland," and then in the third paragraph to the house of Rip Van Winkle and to the man himself.  It is painterly - distances have a blue hue, then the eye is drawn by the curling smoke down into the more vivid colours and details of the foreground, and finally to its human subject.  It takes it even further than a painting could, in fact, since a viewer might see that the bricks were yellow, but hardly that they were the smaller-size bricks characteristic of older Dutch architecture; the technique is almost cinematic.

 

The paragraphs that follow take up, in short order, Rip's character, circumstances, habitual pastimes, and persecution by Dame Van Winkle.  The closest thing to a digression is the short description of Nicholaus Vedder:

 

A patriarch of the village, and landlord of the inn, at the door of which he took his seat from morning till night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the shade of a large tree; so that the neighbours could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun dial.  It is true he was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly.  His adherents, however (for every great man has his adherents), perfectly understood him and knew how to gather his opinions.  When any thing that was read or related displeased him, he was observed to smoke his pipe vehemently and to send forth short, frequent and angry puffs; but when pleased he would inhale the smoke slowly and tranquilly and emit it in light and placid clouds, and sometimes taking the pipe from his mouth and letting the fragrant vapour curl about his nose, would gravely nod his head in token of perfect approbation.

 

In the New York histories Irving constantly paused for some entertaining caricature, and what he says here about Nicholaus Vedder might seem an abbreviated, paler version of his earlier treatment of Wouter Van Twiller ("Walter the Doubter").  But this isn't just a meandering characterization.  The old innkeeper is compared first to a sundial by whose movements the neighbours have learned to tell the time, then to an instrument which the neighbours have learned to read by the puffs from his pipe.  This recalls the first paragraph of the story, where the mountains were said sometimes to "gather a hood of grey vapours about their summits," by which the mountain barometer was read.  Old Nicholaus Vedder is a gauge of local doings, just as the mountains measure larger phenomena.  When Rip later returns to the village after his sleep, Vedder is specifically mentioned as having died eighteen years previous, as if to say the village's clock had stopped, and the village had been evolving unmeasured.  At this stage in the story the connection is obscure, but connections of this sort accumulate.

 

We then hear that Rip's typical refuge from Dame Van Winkle is a hunting trip, and almost immediately, "In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains."  After a few sentences descriptive of the setting, we are directly into the core of the famous interlude.

 

There are elements at the beginning of it that suggest someone falling into a dreamy sleep.  Rip is tired and the couch is soft - "Panting and fatigued he threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage."  Things move in slow motion from his perspective on the Hudson, miles away down the valley.  On the other side the mountain glen grows shapeless as the sun sets.  "He saw that it would be dark, long before he could reach the village, and he heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering the terrors of Dame Van Winkle."  Yes, sleep would be preferable.  Then he hears his name called, "Rip Van Winkle!  Rip Van Winkle!"  He sees a crow, and again the cry, "Rip Van Winkle!  Rip Van Winkle!"  The rhythm and repetition suggest that although the sound might originate from without, perhaps from the crow, it is occurring to him in translation as he eases from waking to sleeping.  And henceforth neither this stranger nor any of the others says a word; the calling of his name is confined to the period of transition, which does resemble the onset of sleep.

 

Nothing disturbs this impression in the reader for quite some time afterward.  When Rip awakes and finds no sign of what he seems to recall, we might at first think that he dreamed it all; and we can stick to that story even when we learn that twenty years have passed.  It doesn't explain the twenty years, of course, but that can't be helped - no one really sleeps on a mountain for twenty years.  But until much later in the story, no alternative is offered; in the meantime, we are at the narrator's mercy.

 

Rip sees "a strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks and bending under the weight of something he carried on his back ... Supposing it to be some one of the neighbourhood in need of his assistance he hastened down to yield it."  Then:

 

On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the singularity of the stranger's appearance.  He was a short, square built old fellow, with thick bushy hair and a grizzled beard.  His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion, a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist, several pair of breeches, the outer one of ample volume decorated with rows of buttons down the sides and bunches at the knees.  He bore on his shoulder a stout keg that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip to approach and assist him with the load.  Though rather shy and distrustful of this new acquaintance Rip complied with his usual alacrity, and mutually relieving each other they clambered up a narrow gully apparently the dry bed of a mountain torrent.  As they ascended Rip every now and then heard long rolling peals like distant thunder, that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine or rather cleft between lofty rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted.  He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder showers which often take place in mountain heights, he proceeded.  Passing through the ravine they came to a hollow like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud.  During the whole time Rip and his companion had laboured on in silence, for though the former marvelled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe and checked familiarity.

 

The stranger looks like something from out of the past.  His communication with Rip is limited, rudimentary - he "made signs," and will do exactly the same shortly by way of asking Rip to distribute the flagons he fills from his keg.  The sounds Rip hears are like distant thunder, the muttering of a transient thunder shower, but in fact they issue from nearby, from a hidden, closely walled little amphitheatre to which the stranger will guide him.  It seems almost a farcical reminiscence of Dante's first encounter in the woods with Virgil.  Rip, like Dante, meets a stranger who guides him to a strange and otherwise inaccessible place.  Virgil is more talkative - he is a poet, after all - but he doesn't tell Dante much more at first than the strange little gnome tells Rip - it is "best for you to follow me, and I shall guide you."  Then in both cases, "passing through the ravine they came to a hollow."   Then Dante enters Hell, while Rip goes to a nine-pins party with an open bar; it is the sort of contrast any humourist would enjoy.  Rip and his guide continue:

 

On entering the amphitheatre new objects of wonder presented themselves.  On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd looking personages playing at ninepins.  They were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion - some wore short doublets, others jerkins with long knives in their belts and most of them had enormous breeches of similar style with that of the guide's.  Their visages too were peculiar.  One had a large head, broad face and small piggish eyes.  The face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugarloaf hat, set off with a little red cock's tail.  They all had beards of various shapes and colours.  There was one who seemed to be the Commander.  He was a stout old gentleman, with a weatherbeaten countenance.  He wore a laced doublet, broad belt and hanger, high crowned hat and feather, red stockings and high heel'd shoes with roses in them.  The whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlour of Dominie Van Schaick the village parson, and which had been brought over from Holland at the time of the settlement.

 

The figures have an almost cartoonish appearance, and it would be interesting to know whether Irving had a particular painter or painting in mind.  The style doesn't seem to have been particularly common in Flemish painting, even if we look from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries and consider more northerly, Dutch works as well - but millions of canvasses were painted, and we can't be sure.  Exaggeration and cartoon were typical in Hieronymus Bosch and especially Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and were later characteristic of Dutch painters such as Hendrick Avercamp and Jan Steen; and they were no doubt imitated by lesser painters whose works have not survived.  One of the most noticeable features of the subjects of the surviving paintings, incidentally, is that almost no one in any of them has a beard - beards are concentrated in the later and more realistic portraits of such painters as Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens and Franz Hals.  Again, there were millions of paintings, and some of them might well have featured cartoonish little men who did have beards "of various shapes and colours."  And taken in the round, it doesn't matter much - the people described are certainly like something from old paintings in the manner of Brueghel's peasant weddings and dances.  Then we pass along to what Rip at last sees and does:

 

What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed.  Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene, but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder.

 

As Rip and his companion approached them they suddenly desisted from their play and stared at him with such fixed statue like gaze, and such strange uncouth, lack lustre countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote together.  His companion now emptied the contents of the keg into large flagons and made signs to him to wait upon the company.  He obeyed with fear and trembling; they quaffed the liquor in profound silence and then returned to their game.

 

By degrees Rip's awe and apprehension subsided.  He even ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage, which he found had much of the flavour of excellent hollands.  He was naturally a thirsty soul and was soon tempted to repeat the draught.  One taste provoked another, and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head - his head gradually declined and he fell into a deep sleep.

 

A game of nine-pins would typically involve conversation and merriment, but these players seem completely serious and never talk.  They're surprised to see him, and they stare ominously, but their attention quickly moves on when Rip's guide as much as tells them that he's here to serve the drinks.  They drink, but there's no indication that it has any effect on them.  By and by Rip gets to feeling bolder, and he has a few drinks of what turns out to be a sort of jenever that he finds very tasty, and in a short time he is asleep.

 

The world of the bowlers is very different from Rip's, and both sides seem surprised that there should be any intersection at all.  Rip seems as strange to them as they do to him.  There are some similarities but they are all isolated from their usual accompaniments - games without enjoyment, interaction without conversation, drinks without intoxication.  There is a "commander" whose sole discernible function is to "seem to be" the commander; he is introduced but plays no role.  It is dream-like.  It's as if a transcription has been made but something has been lost in the copies; quasi-familiar things have been reproduced but without any of the underlying qualities that make them what they are in their home world.  The characters are as silent as characters in a painting except for the rumbling of the balls they roll.

 

When Rip wakes up, the bowlers and their world are gone; the ravine no longer opens through the cliffs; there is now water running down what had been a dry gully.  The small furniture of his own world has likewise changed - the flintlock has rusted, his dog is gone.  "He was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows" - rather like the closing of a parenthesis that had opened as he was falling asleep.  He starts down the mountain toward the village, and the strangeness of the night before is replicated.  He doesn't know the people, and they don't know him; they're dressed very differently; he stares at them and they stare at him; and when they stroke their chins, he strokes his, and finds that he has a beard.  He is again out of place, but in what had been his own world.  The tone of the narration is casual and straightforward, but it rapidly reveals, as if reversed in a mirror, striking symmetries between the morning and his night before.

 

Differences mount from what he thinks was only the previous day.  The village children used to love him; now they mock him.  The dogs don't know him now, and they all bark at him.

 

The very village was altered - it was larger and more populous.  There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared.  Strange names were over the doors - strange faces at the windows - every thing was strange.  His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched.  Surely this was his native village which he had left but the day before.  There stood the Kaatskill mountains - there ran the silver Hudson at a distance - there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been - Rip was solely perplexed - "That flagon last night," thought he, "has addled my poor head sadly!"

 

And so it goes.  He finds his house empty, the village inn replaced by another, George Washington in place of George III, and his old cronies gone.  He doesn't understand the political talk.  He discovers the current young Rip Van Winkle, meets his own grown daughter, and learns that his wife has died.  At last someone is able to identify him, and "Rip's story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night."  Some believe it, others do not.  He goes to live with his daughter, and falls into relaxed, retired ways, spending much of his time at the inn.

 

Then, just before the story ends, we learn that Rip told his tale often and that "he was observed at first to vary on some points, every time he told it, which was doubtless owing to his having so recently awaked.  It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related."  What we have taken for third-person omniscient narration turns out not to have been that, and everything we have heard about Rip's trip alone to the mountain must now, in retrospect, be recharacterized as a version that has emerged after Rip's redaction.  We don't know exactly what he actually said when he first reappeared in the village after twenty years; that isn't covered by the account we've just been reading; the story thus now argues about its own details, rather in the manner of Don Quixote.  The suggestion emerges that Rip has invented the main elements of his story, and afterward refined them for his own purposes.  This interpretation is then itself conditioned in an appended note purportedly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker:

 

Indeed I have heard many stranger stories than this, in the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated to admit of a doubt.  I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself, who when I last saw him was a very venerable old man and so perfectly rational and consistent on every other point, that I think no conscientious person could refuse to take this into the bargain - nay I have seen a certificate on the subject taken before a country justice and signed with a cross in the justice's own hand writing.  The story therefore is beyond the possibility of a doubt.

 

Even a country justice, of course, would have to be able to read and write, and would hardly attest to a document by "making his mark."  And Rip's attested rationality would count just as much in support of the conclusion, as against it, that Rip has invented and worked up the story.

 

A narrative which was, until almost its end, apparently straightforward, has become in hindsight much more complicated.  It first enticed us into a sort of tentative belief.  When Rip wakes up and goes down the mountain, we are as puzzled as he is portrayed to be.  Then at the end, the narrator's openly ironic assessment - his citing of Rip's changing the story and of the outrageous "testimony" of the country justice - seems clearly intended to frame the story as merely a conscious invention on Rip's part, or at best an elaborate delusion whose details he has consciously or unconsciously massaged.  We no longer pretend the literal truth of his adventure with the little old Dutch bowlers.  Perhaps he ran away from his wife.  Perhaps he was an uncommitted colonial who went somewhere else to sit out the revolutionary war.  Perhaps he doesn't really know what happened.  Still, the impression of something marvellous lingers, something more than the pleasant scenic recall of Sleepy Hollow.

 

It isn't just that we're especially charmed by the mere idea that someone might sleep for such a long time.  That device had been used before - in Greek, German, Irish and middle eastern folktales, for instance - but without anything remotely as powerful as the effect Irving achieves.  In Diogenes Laertius's version, for instance, a shepherd, Epimenides, "went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven years.  After this he got up and went in search of the sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time."  He "found everything changed," was "in utter perplexity" until he "learnt the truth," and afterward "was believed to be a special favourite of heaven."  In another version the sleeper is asleep only for a year.  In the "seven sleepers" stories, a group of people escapes religious persecution by falling asleep for more than three hundred years - several lifetimes.  And so on.

 

Could it be that we can't quite put aside the trust we had for so long in our narrator?  It is true that we get a good distance into the core of the story - the strange little men and the way they interact with Rip, their peculiar demeanour at their games, Rip's tastings from the flagon - before anything impossible occurs.  We might even, at the end of the story, continue to fancy that Rip did meet some strange people on the mountain, that that much is true.  But that isn't the charm, and we know that the continuation to a twenty years' sleep is impossible.  Somehow, though, the twenty years' sleep remains the central part of what we take away from the story.  How is that possible?

 

Irving attaches questions of history, and of time and personal identity, directly to the fulcrum of the story in several ways.  When Rip comes down the mountain, from his perspective he is seeing the future, looking into a time not his own.  Not surprisingly, he doesn't understand it, and it doesn't understand him; he can't communicate with it; his sense of identity is undermined.

 

I'm not myself. - I'm somebody else - that's me yonder - no - that's somebody else got into my shoes - I was myself last night; but I fell asleep on the mountain - and they've changed my gun - and everything's changed - and I'm changed - and I can't tell what's my name, or who I am.

 

How can he be Rip Van Winkle, if Nicholaus Vedder, and Brom Dutcher, and Van Bummel and the rest have vanished?  And - what is crucial - it is the same kind of experience that he had had the night before, but with the near future instead of the more remote past.  The night before, he had been placed as a direct actor in some past action, serving drinks to strange little men from long ago, the sort of men seen in old paintings.  He couldn't talk to them, and they couldn't talk to him.  The only sounds he could hear from their world were "long rolling peals like distant thunder," "the muttering of one of those transient thunder showers which often take place in mountain heights," the way perhaps the past might be said to be still rumbling or muttering or reverberating to us today.  Everything seems distant, yet he is unaccountably in direct contact with it.  The very notion of time is peculiar, magical.

 

Rip's return to the village is also not unlike mundane confrontations with our own temporal location and its limitations.  As children, our view of old people is as beings who have emerged from some distant and unknowable time, a time teeming with alien and sometimes alarming events.  We can barely believe in it.  The idea that anything at all happened eighty years ago is incomprehensible; the further idea that we are talking to an eyewitness of it is overwhelming.  As we get older, the edges of the perception are softened; we are old hands not easily abashed; but something of the original shock remains.  Somehow, when we ourselves become the old people, we still think of the old people from our youth as the real old people - Nicholaus Vedder is old, but Rip Van Winkle can't be.  But then, visiting a place, or an occupation or profession or role, that we left behind twenty or thirty years ago, we know that it really has happened.  We see how much both we and our former setting have changed.  Its concerns are no longer ours; even simple communication can be awkward; the points of intersection are crude and of limited use.  Rip Van Winkle's experience is common, not rare.  Interacting with our adult children we find small, sudden moments like that.  We realize, if only in formal terms, what must have happened with our own parents, and what will happen with our children when their children have grown up.  If we stretch just a little, we can imagine fitting in, understanding and being understood.  The distance is only partly illusory.  It really can be rather like looking at a painting.  The old painting we see, or the old writing we read, exists today; we are looking at something in the present; and yet in some sense we are looking into the past.  We can get to know it so well that we forget the distance.  When we read or listen to a good historian, the liveliness of his knowledge can make it seem almost that he must have been there.  He speaks of the people as familiars, of the events as if we have all been following their development this week in the newspaper.  And yet, how often we are surprised by the simplest facts that we have overlooked or ignored in the thrill of a sense of connection.

 

The continuing impact of Rip Van Winkle derives from its confronting the reader with some simple but persistent mysteries, mysteries of time and history and personal identity.  The elements that reinforce them accumulate quietly in undercurrents - mountains and people as clocks and barometers; seeing the past in the strange men and the future in the new village; the genuine lapse of perceived time that occurs every time we sleep; the question of who is really old; the question of what we see in a painting.  And when we think again of the very beginning of the story, of the people and the village and the mountains, themselves "a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family," the places could just as easily be times, as the village becomes, at the end, a time to Rip Van Winkle.  It's a story that asks us how we perceive time - and asks us whether, after all, it is really so impossible that twenty years of it could elapse without our noticing.

 

 

IV

 

The narrative procedure in Sleepy Hollow can properly be called a technique, a learnable piece of art.  It creates an expectation, builds suspense, and at last delivers what it has made the reader crave.  It exhibits repeatable methods.  We could elaborate an Aristotelian analysis of it - what suspense is, how tragic and comic suspense differ and what objects are appropriate to each, what devices are common and why some are more satisfying than others, and so on.  We could extract a rudimentary recipe for creating other works like it.  We could cite similar structures, not only in Irving but in Dickens, Trollope, Henry James, and we could show why some are better than others.  I rather expect someone has already worked up a specialized Poetics along these lines, but I don't know.

 

The same isn't true of Rip Van Winkle.  There aren't any useful generalizations that capture a technique, that extract a recipe.  If my account of it is roughly right, we might say that it achieves its effect by attaching a series of related impressions to the thread of the story.  But we can't go much further than that without being impossibly vague, or making evaluative terms part of the recipe itself.  "Choose a deep but simple philosophical mystery, such as time or consciousness or the one and the many.  Choose a simple but gripping plot line, and conduct the thread of that plot through elements that effectively invoke the philosophical mystery and cause it to become closely associated with the plot."  We simply don't know at all whether similarly powerful stories would really follow those lines in any meaningful sense, or conversely, whether a story thus constructed could possibly achieve a similar power using plot and background content different from those in Rip Van Winkle.

 

No, Rip Van Winkle is a literary singularity, and it has something of the feel of a happy accident.  Washington Irving was certainly an accomplished storyteller, but nothing else in his work prepares us for Rip Van Winkle; the right storyteller found the right story.  There are other examples, some on a much larger scale, and not always as difficult to explain as Rip Van Winkle.  Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, for instance - nobody but Mark Twain could have written the story, but nothing else in his corpus approaches it.  Cervantes and Don Quixote - "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write."  Perfect as Sleepy Hollow is, Irving and others have written stories much like it and just as good.  And, as skilled and tasteful a narrator as he was, Irving was generally charming rather than subtle, glancing rather than probing, encyclopedic rather than scientific.  He didn't have the depth of material to write stories that could be consistently compared with those of the best short story writers.  But in Rip Van Winkle he brought to the surface a piece of magic that appeals to nearly all short story readers.  It is a curious and compelling monument.

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We called the agents in our example of comparative advantage the Smith family and the Jones family. But those agents are themselves complex in several ways.

We thought of them, for instance, as farming families, each with cattle that could supply leather and sheep that could supply wool. We noticed that some of the leather was used for shoes, and some of it for other leather goods. We suggested that some of the families' cattle were in the form of milk-giving cows. We noticed the possibility that one family might be experimenting with cotton, and we explored what effect that might have on inter-family sock trading. We imagined that one family used a horse-drawn wagon for transport, and that the other family might use a river to float goods to their destination. To say that the families made shoes and socks was a natural enough shorthand, given that we were using shoes and socks to illustrate comparative advantage. But it was, after all, an abbreviation of a variety of skills that the families exercised, of various activities that were part of the families' economies. That was clear from some of the reallocations of labour we imagined, and we could have continued the list of possible reallocations. One family, for instance, might transport not only its own goods but some or all of the goods produced by the other family. One family might produce more or less fodder for the two families' livestock. As Xenophon and Adam Smith observed, a given economic activity can often be analyzed into component activities.

A given agency can also be analyzed into component agencies, and the competencies of the composite agency are typically not evenly divided among the components. The Jones family's talent for shoe-making, for instance, might derive entirely from Jim Jones's craftsmanship, and that would suggest various possibilities and limitations. The potential labour reallocation between the Smiths and the Joneses will require a labour reallocation within the Jones family. Is Jim willing, or even able, to take on the additional shoe-making? Who will now do the work that Jim gives up in order to concentrate on shoes, and how well will that work be done? Who, in turn, will take on the work given up by the member who takes on some of Jim's former duties, and how well will that work be done? How readily could Jim teach shoe-making skills to other family members? Is there room for a second cobbler's bench, without displacing some other useful piece of equipment? If the reallocations result in a staffing strain on the Jones's dairy operations, how vulnerable is the family in the event of a death among the dairy staff?

The same worries can be caused by external forces even when the labour allocation within an agency has remained steady for some time. Perhaps, after a time, the shoe-making business becomes less profitable; then the Joneses would have to allocate labour away from shoe-making. But perhaps by then, their sock-making operation has atrophied as a result of long-time concentration on shoe-making, so that the sock-making operation can't be sufficiently revived. On the other hand, perhaps the dairying operation's efficiency has increased, incidental to the allocation that supported shoe-making and that moved some family members out of dairying and others into it.

This sort of analysis can be applied to agencies of different sizes, types and situations, and the results suggest further complexities of different sorts. Suppose, for instance, that instead of two families we have a village of fifty families. There will be a great many putative cases of absolute and comparative advantage, and a great variety of possible labour allocations. When the Joneses now think not just of the Smiths but of all the other families as well, they will see new difficulties but also new safeguards.

Other families might be competitive in any of the Jones's constituent economic activities - dairying, woolen goods, shoe-making, and so on. The comparative shoe-making advantage the Joneses had with regard only to the Smiths might not obtain against other families or combinations of families. On the other hand, if the configuration does favour their shoe-making specialization, the larger market will provide a cushion that the smaller market could not. The Smiths' need for shoes might dwindle, but that wouldn't much change the aggregate village demand for shoes. At the same time, though, the existence of other shoe-making families imposes the prospect of competitive innovation - another family might introduce a different material for soles, or discover better ways to minimize waste in cutting shoe components from leather hides. The economic ecology of the village is different from the economic ecology of two families in a wilderness, and that influences the economic ecologies internal to the constituent families. With a good initial market for shoes and a reasonable opening advantage in shoe-making, the additional advantage obtained by specialization itself might make in-family allocation of labour to shoe-making more attractive than it was in the two-family situation; under different conditions, specializing in shoes might be less attractive.

Now our talk about families, villages, and their traditional trades has suggested something like a nineteenth-century rural setting for our imagined economies. It was only a few paragraphs ago that the cotton gin was on the verge of being invented. That setting tacitly carries with it some assumptions that should now be made explicit. We have probably imagined a moderate pace of technological change, and a relatively stable range of products in demand. There might be a sawmill in the village, and perhaps a grist mill, though probably not yet a textiles mill. In the main, products are made as they have been for some time, and the same products are wanted now as were wanted before. That, of course, isn't altogether untrue of any economy. I have been accumulating shares of Canadian banks and utilities most of my life, thinking as I do that the demands for electricity and for borrowing money will continue indefinitely into the future. I have avoided investing in very new things such as start-up "dot-coms" and legal cannabis producers, and that isn't so very different from a nineteenth-century investor not wanting to gamble on novelties - Mark Twain, for instance, ought not to have bet so heavily on the Paige typesetter. Still, in an economy of traditional trades and products, participants can rely on shoes and socks, milk and cheese, flour and harness, and indeed nearly all of the ordinary furniture of their lives, not to go out of demand at all or at least not quickly. Their village economy is very durable.

It is also an economy about which, on account of its size, the participants are quite well informed. The Joneses know what the Smiths do and what they might be capable of doing, and the same with the Johnsons, the Robinsons, the Harrisons, and so on. With minor variations, the same small group shares the same fall fair prizes in the same way, year after year, for tastiest pie, fanciest sewing, and best heifer. Children do what their parents did, and follow them eventually into the same cemetery. There are always some surprises - the agent of a distant equipment maker arrives in the village, for instance, and offers farm implements more cheaply than the village can produce them. Enough surprises in a short time can ruin a village, but that happens infrequently; small surprises can usually be accommodated by modest reallocations of labour. Everyone knows what the general economic conditions in the village are, and everyone believes they are quite stable.

Families in the village will, for the most part, aim to achieve survival and prosperity using strategies similar to what other families use. Suppose, for instance, that the Johnsons and the Robinsons come to a trade arrangement in which the Robinsons produce the cheese for both families while the Johnsons produce the iron implements, and that this makes both families better off. This will tend to influence the Smiths and the Joneses in two ways. They will be more inclined to specialize and trade in shoes and socks. At the same time, the efficiency of their manufacture of cheese and iron implements will decline relative to the village average, so that they will be inclined to work out their own agreements with the Johnsons and the Robinsons - who will themselves be motivated to trade for shoes and socks. Most families will, as it were, keep to the middle. At the current level of our example's development, they will undertake limited specialization, which is more profitable than no specialization at all and less risky than more extreme specialization. The levels of specialization will increase gradually, as in Adam Smith's example of the hunter who makes more and more of his fellows' bows and arrows until he is making them all. Absent outside influences, and other things being equal, levels of specialization will follow population growth, moving gradually toward the highly specialized economic ecology that Xenophon thought characteristic of cities.

The same considerations that apply among families in a village apply also among villages when there are several in the same economic geography. Specialization and trade begin slowly, and as they increase, whole villages come to specialize. A village will place a higher value on the specialty goods that it trades most profitably, and this will cause a reallocation of labour among the constituent parts of the village - families, we'll say for now. The same sorts of problem the Joneses faced in reallocating labour among family members will now be faced by the village. And so on, as villages federate into still larger units - townships, counties, provinces, countries. At each stage there will be larger markets, providing larger cushions but also larger threats. And at each stage there will be questions of how specialized to become. The size of casualties will become larger - as individual families in a village fail to find successful strategies, so individual villages likewise falter.

The types of choice faced by the proximate constituents - the members in a family, the families in a village, the villages in a county - thus tend to replicate at the next higher level. But as the total economy grows larger, the choices faced by more remote constituents of that economy do not remain as they were. What counted as "keeping to the middle" for a family in an economy that ended at the village level will change as the village begins to function in a larger economy. Conceptually the family's strategy for survival and prosperity remains the same - keep to the middle. But keeping to the middle in a village that itself must now specialize among other villages will mean that the family must now tailor its own strategy to the overall strategy of the village. And the same with individual family members. The choices open to more remote constituents of an economy - the atoms rather than the molecules, we might say - are more constrained that the choices open to more proximate constituents.

What happens to constituents who aren't suited by these narrower specialization constraints? One remedy is relocation. A family that really doesn't like the activity in its village can move to another village. Family members who don't like their family's activities can - when they become adults - relocate to another family by leaving home. But larger units have fewer relocation opportunities. A village, province or country might, over a longer period, begin to change its trading partners, thereby "relocating" itself into a somewhat different economy. But no literal relocation is possible, because larger entities have inherently geographical characteristics. The only way really to move a village is for its constituents - in our example, the families - themselves to move.

A second buffer against unwanted specialization is the facilitating services that invariably spring up as specialization increases. Jim Jones might not be happy doing nothing but making socks, for the same reason that he would be unhappy doing nothing but making shoes. But the shoes and socks, the cheese and the iron implements, will need to be delivered - and counted, inspected, packaged, stored, marketed, and so on. And it is often the case that, although someone who makes shoes does nothing but make shoes, someone who delivers shoes also delivers socks, and perhaps arranges for their storage. There is variety to be found in the spaces between specialized production. And as the services themselves become specialized, there will be variety in the spaces between specialized services. Moreover, the sheer increase in the number of specializations makes it more probable that a given agent will find a congenial specialization without resorting to the spaces between specializations.

Two broad claims have now emerged in our analysis. (1) Economic advantage, whether absolute or comparative, suggests specialize-and-trade strategies; but it is extremely difficult to determine whether an apparent advantage retains that character when all things are considered. Immediate opportunity costs almost certainly do not reflect comprehensive opportunity costs. (2) Despite that difficulty, economies do tend to rely more and more on specialization and trade as they get larger, as Xenophon and Adam Smith thought they did. Together, the two claims suggest that larger economies must involve a great many mistakes about what is really beneficial. Now the availability of specialization alternatives is a natural economic mechanism that cushions the effects of those mistakes on the various economic agents. And additional mechanisms such as social insurance and welfare can be put in place deliberately to provide further cushioning. But whether the natural and the artificial cushions are globally efficacious, or whether they can remain so, must seem tentative and conditional. The remainder of this essay is devoted to exploring that question.

The time occupied by a baseball game consists mainly of intervals between the short periods when the ball is in play. You might think the description of the play would pack in a lot of excitement, but it's just the reverse - conventional, routine, stylized. "Swing and a miss, strike one." "There's a short hopper to the third baseman." "That'll drop in for a base hit." All of the interest in baseball commentary occurs in observations of the larger context. "He's eight for twenty with runners in scoring position on the western leg of this road trip." "Clem's hit for extra bases in six double-headers this year, always in the second game." "His dad played shortstop for a year with Pawtucket in Triple A, stole twenty-two bases and hit for the cycle twice - both times on the road." These waves of statistics would scarcely be credited at all outside baseball, but inside baseball they break calmly onto the shores of the telecast. "That's quite an accomplishment, Jim," his partner will say. "Eight Triple A players have hit for the cycle twice in a season, but the only other man to do it twice on the road was Baldy Ames for the Diggers in 1903. And Baldy didn't steal anything like twenty-two bases." "That's for sure, Ron," laughs Jim, and the wave subsides back into the baseball ocean as another arrives to replace it.

Baseball is hot summer afternoons talking over the past while the present slowly unfolds one pitch at a time and passes into the Great Record - "That's three in the books now," says Ron. He and Jim watch from the shade where it's relaxed and cool and statistical, and they provide a quiet, continuous and smooth accompaniment - "That catches the inside corner for oh-and-two. Andy's one for three this afternoon, and he's hit safely in all but one of the last ten games." "And the A's are seven-for-ten in that stretch, Jim." Baseball commentary is like afternoon jazz - unhurried, nonchalant, and confident. There's a measured pace, an easy deliberateness, a gracious sharing of the narrative. Baseball commentary has elegant, time-taking southern manners.

The game itself seems designed to promote a calm acceptance of all outcomes and to discourage lopsided enthusiasm for favorites. The best team wins six games out of ten; the worst team wins four. In a three-game series, the odds are good that the better team won't win all three, and the odds aren't bad that the better team will lose two. Don't worry if your team doesn't win today, even if they blow a six-run lead in the ninth inning; history shows that it happens all the time. "So the Reds stage a two-out rally to prevent the sweep and they'll head into a home stand against the Braves, while the Dodgers move east for a three-game series with the Mets." Everything is fine with the teams, and the same is true with the individual players. A player with a really good batting average will fail to reach base seven times in ten, so don't worry if a player you particularly like went hitless today, or even yesterday and today. "After a fast start in April, Johnny's tailed off to .260 in the first two weeks of May." "And in May last year, Ron, he went on an eighteen-game tear with a .390 average and eleven home runs." It's all completely normal, even reassuring. You might really like Andy or Johnny or Clem, but there's something to be said for the Brewers' new centerfielder or the catcher the Twins just brought up from Triple A.

You like some teams better than others - maybe you have a single favorite - but your favorite might be a long way out of the running before the season's very old, so you take an interest in other teams as well. Most other fans have it the same way; it isn't their team's year either. But the Phillies have been playing some pretty exciting baseball, and wouldn't it be great to see them in a World Series. And the Royals just might catch the Tigers. Baseball asks for and repays a certain generosity in its fans. It's a bit like a pot-luck supper. I might be a White Sox fan, but I can remember fondly what the Giants did, or how good the middle of the Pirates' order was, and I am already on familiar terms with every team - the Cards, the Jays, the Tribe. Baseball is roomy, friendly and informal. You can sit in one chair for a while, but you don't have to stay in it. Come and sit over here and help me cheer on my Orioles. "That'll retire the side, but Badger's two-run blast ties it up and we'll go to the bottom of the fourth and the top of the Yankees' order."

Every sport enjoys its own history, but history is especially important to baseball and the sense of belonging that it facilitates. The roster of teams in both leagues has been stable for periods undreamed-of in other sports. From 1900 to 1952 there were eight teams in the National League. Four of them even stayed in the same cities and kept the same names (and if you've read this far, you might know who they are). In the American League the same eight teams played in the same eight cities from 1902 until 1954; the only changes were to their names. It's true that between the two leagues they've expanded to thirty teams now, but even so, only four AL teams and six NL teams have been enfranchised in the last fifty years. As Ron might point out, of the twenty teams that are older than fifty years, fifteen are older than a hundred. So when your favorite falls out of the running, the alternates you have available offer lots of tradition you can be part of. It's odds-on that the teams still in the race at the end of the season will include some venerable organizations, and you're welcome to ride along. Pick up on the Cardinals, you get Stan Musial and Dizzy Dean, Bob Gibson and Rogers Hornsby. Watch the Tigers and think about Al Kaline and Ty Cobb, Denny McLain and Hank Greenberg. As I write this, the Red Sox and the Dodgers are about to meet in the World Series; the last time it happened, Babe Ruth pitched for the Sox.

Baseball isn't measured in units that apply anywhere else; it's like English currency used to be. Two farthings make a halfpenny, twelve pence in a bob. We're not half-way through the season - we're at the all-star break. Three strikes and you're out, four balls to the walk, and sixty feet six inches from the mound to the plate. Four bases to the run, ninety feet in each, and three outs to the inning. Hold the runner on one and two, but hit and run if it's two and one. It's a one-six-three double play. One's out, the play's at third; two are gone, the play's at first. And that brings up a point some people find puzzling, the constant obvious commentary by the players on the field - it's even more routine than the play-by-play. "Two down," says the shortstop across to the second baseman. "Two out," the second baseman shouts to the right fielder with two fingers in the air. "Two away, play's at any bag," he responds to notify the center fielder. It goes around the field like an oath that every player is obliged to take.

The reason they're doing it is that baseball depends so crucially on the configuration of the game when the ball next goes into play. Think of hockey for a minute. When the play is stopped and then started again, not much has changed. The face-off might be in the other end; one team might now be playing short-handed. But what to do when the puck drops remains very much the same. Football is one step closer to baseball. When the play starts again, it's now second and two, or third and long, and the play is conditioned by the parameters; but again, the situation is obvious to everyone. With baseball, the number of possible configurations is huge, and not recognizing a configuration can be costly. Even the most seasoned fan regularly sees plays that he can't remember seeing before. It's not always obvious, even to the players, what the best response is to a given event, so they plan ahead, and they do it aloud.

The large number of possible configurations in baseball also ensures a massive fund of stories, a mythology where every piece of lore is unique. Again, the contrast with the ordinary is striking. Read the history of a team, or a season, or a player, and most of it is blasé. Someone is always grounding into an inning-ending double play, or scoring the runner with a long drive into the corner; every game can seem almost the same. But how often do you see an infield pop-up that might land foul, where the first baseman stumbles into the first-base runner, who takes second when the ball lands fair and bounces foul, forcing the runner at second to head for third, where he is thrown out? The umpires themselves talked and talked, and then the managers were brought in. It looked for all the world as if the umpires were trying to broker a deal, and the shrugs from the managers seemed to say, "I can live with that - you okay with it?" And people are still talking about a game between the Giants and the Cubs more than a century ago. With the score tied and runners on first and third in the bottom of the ninth, the Giants batter hit a single that was enough to score the runner from third to win the game. The runner on first celebrated but neglected to run to second. After quite a struggle, including having to retrieve the ball from the stands where the Giants had deliberately thrown it when they realized what was going on, the Cubs got the ball to second base and the runner was called out. Since it was a force out, the run didn't count.

Baseball is at once overwhelmingly regular, and yet astonishingly various, and the language of baseball reflects that. You can follow a game on the radio without paying very careful attention, and then be amazed at every story the commentators slip in. You can get the drift of the season just by looking at the standings and statistics in the paper, and yet when you watch a game you'll see something you've never seen before. Every time Clem beats out a bunt for a base hit, he's doing anew what Ricky Henderson and Lou Brock and Maury Wills did before him. They all belong together, and if you forget, Ron or Jim will be there with an entertaining reminder. "The ball dribbled loose, and John McGraw picked it up and heaved it into right field, and the runner got all the way to third." "And after the umpire and McGraw went nose to nose and McGraw kicked dirt on the umpire, the umpire kicked dirt on McGraw before he ejected him."

Forrest Gump had all of the virtues and none of the vices. The film about him is almost a continuous display of the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, prudence and justice, and of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. And there's scarcely a trace of any of the seven deadly sins - pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, or lust.

Forrest was always brave - rescuing platoon members under fire in Vietnam was only the most obvious example. He wasn't inclined to any form of intemperance. He provided for himself prudently, but always ensured that others got their share. In fact, he split his shrimping income with the family of the man who was to have been his partner but who died before they could start the business together. He didn't know anything about theology, but his faith in Jenny was steady and unconditional. He was always hopeful - "life is like a box of chocolates." And he was forever charitable - everyone he touched benefitted from him.

He had no tendency to puff himself up, and he was free from envy of any sort. He was slow to anger, and he was always energetic - running, shrimping, and running again. He made money in spite of himself, and never wanted more. He never overate, and he was surprised even to discover sexual pleasure. He was peculiarly free from all of the vices.

The film is correct in showing him as a self-made, though lucky, man. But it omits to show that there was money in another part of the family. His father was very rich, but he didn't settle any of his fortune on Forrest or on Forrest's mother. It went instead to Forrest's brother, Ronald. Ronald Gump was very like his father, and very unlike his brother.

Ronald wasn't brave, only blustery. He afterward said that he was opposed to the war in Vietnam, but he didn't say anything at the time, and he simply avoided military service with different excuses. He was inclined to overindulge in all sorts of pleasures, and he wasn't very prudent with money - he went bankrupt again and again, and made others go bankrupt, too. Justice, he said, was for dummies; he even avoided paying tax. He had no faith in anyone or anything, and no one wanted to be friends with him, but there were always people who liked to be around him because he had money. He lived on fear instead of hope, fear that something would go wrong if he didn't strike others before they struck him. He wasn't charitable - he told himself that charity was harmful, that it weakened self-reliance. His father liked what he saw, and smiled to see how Ronald shunned the virtues.

But if Ronald was disengaged and cowardly in some ways, he waded fearlessly into the seven deadly sins. No one was ever prouder of himself, or with less reason. He envied others, and satisfied his envy by insulting them and taking whatever he could from them. He was quick to anger and, once he was angry at someone, he never relented. He didn't work hard or exercise much. He got away with that as a young man, but it later caught up with him, and by middle age he was fat from lack of exercise and ignorant from lack of study and serious endeavour. He was greedy for money, and used it as if it could pay for his sins. He was gluttonous to the point where he bought special clothes to hide his weight. He never worried about lust; whenever he had a sexual whim, no matter how degrading to himself or others, he bought what he wanted.

He had all the vices and none of the virtues, and his father was so impressed that he made him a deal. Continue in your ways, he said, and I'll give you all my fortune. And he did - and that's how Forrest and his mother came to be so poor. Ronald despised them for it, and he soon left home. We don't see that in the film, because it wasn't something that Forrest and his mother liked to talk about much. They were sorry for Ronald, but there wasn't anything they could do. They didn't feel ashamed of him - they somehow felt that maybe it wasn't all his fault after all - but they felt sad. For a time, they heard news of him, and they hoped he would get better, but he didn't, and the news stopped coming. In fact, he got so bad that he had to change his name and pretend to be someone else.

He finally got so rich that he didn't have to worry about being caught at anything, because he could always pay to get himself excused. Not only that, he bought himself a lot of honours, and people seemed to admire him more and more. He came to believe that his success had nothing to do with the deal he had made with his father. He had made himself all that he was, he said, and he deserved everything he was getting. And his father, being the kind of father he was, smiled to see it.

Eventually Ronald died, as everyone does, and there are two different traditions about what happened next. One version holds that he was simply extinguished, that Ronald Gump ceased to exist in any form, and that he was soon forgotten. But there is also a somewhat cruel and astonishingly elaborate tradition that he is now suffering for his sins in an afterlife, and that he is a great figure of fun there. The story goes that when he was brought forward for sentencing, he said there had been a mistake, and he insisted on his right to a hearing - and not just any hearing. He wasn't accustomed, he said, to talking to underlings or assistants; he demanded to see God. God would be very sorry if He didn't see Ronald, on account of the offer Ronald was prepared to make Him.

So the devils dressed one of their number up in great flowing robes, sat him on a judge's chair in a courtroom, and brought in Ronald. The judge pretended to be surprised that Ronald was naked, and began to abuse him for showing such disrespect to the court. If he didn't get dressed immediately, the judge said, his appeal would be dismissed. Another devil, dressed as a lawyer, immediately approached and offered to sell him some clothing. But when he found that Ronald had no money with him, he refused to extend credit. "No money, no clothes," said the lawyer. "And no clothes, no case," said the judge. "Take him away." And fifty miniature, grinning devils began to pull at him and to pelt him with little sparks of fire, and he scampered about so ridiculously that everyone in the courtroom laughed and laughed, and their laughter was the last sound he heard before his sentence began in earnest.

I believe the first tradition is more likely the correct one - I can't see what good it would do anyone, least of all God, to go on tormenting Ronald. Still, the second tradition might be useful in persuading people to be good rather than bad. We certainly want our children to be like Forrest rather than like Ronald. We dissuade them from associating with people who even slightly resemble Ronald. We want them to grow up to be brave, moderate, self-reliant and fair, and to avoid miring themselves in vice of any sort. I don't know that I could myself tell a child that Ronald is suffering eternal damnation, but I suppose I can understand why other people might tell such a story.

The notion that people governed by an oppressive government have a right to overthrow it has been widely endorsed. There are debates about what the parameters are - the nature and the extent of the oppression and the availability of other means. And in the west, there haven't been a great many recent internal struggles against governments. There was the Cuban revolution in the fifties, and before that the Mexican civil war in the teens. But the coming of Nazi power in Germany in the thirties wasn't a complete shrugging off of the then-current government, and the Spanish civil war of the same decade resulted in the establishment, not the defeat, of an oppressive government. In fact, nowadays active internal resistance to the incoming governments of Hitler and Franco is applauded in retrospect.

The principle is famously advocated in Thomas Jefferson's words in the American declaration of independence, written in 1776. "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [securing of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

That echoes John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, which was written in the late 1660s but not published until 1689. "There remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them; for all power given with trust for the attaining of an end being limited to that end, whenever that end is manifestly neglected or opposed, the trust must necessarily be forfeited, and the power devolve into the hands of those that gave it, who may place it anew where they shall think best for their safety and security. And thus the community perpetually retains a supreme power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of any body, even of their legislators."

I see at least two points of agreement in Locke and Jefferson. First, the possible legitimate grounds for resisting a government seem quite wide. Jefferson speaks in terms of a government's failure sufficiently to secure people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Locke, similarly, refers to "an end" being "neglected or opposed." Second, both writers think in terms of people retaining a right over their government, so that the social contract establishing a government isn't so much a relinquishing of rights as a prudent exercise of them.

In both cases their analysis runs broadly against what we find in the early giant of social contract theory, Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan, published in 1651, Hobbes characterizes the social contract as requiring "that a man be willing, when others are so too ... to lay down this right to all things." It's not really quite this simple, but Hobbes tends to see nothing provisional about the giving up of rights that attends the social contract. Second, and related, what the contractors do retain appears to be very limited - "a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life ... [and] the same may be said of wounds, and chains, and imprisonment." Subjects thus retain only a very modest residual right against their government. "The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long [as], and no longer [than,] the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished."

Hobbes's views comported with his royalist position in the English civil war, and he fled England for the continent with the ascent of Cromwell and his parliamentarian forces in the middle 1640s.

Parliamentarians, of course, took very different views about people's residual rights against a sovereign. John Milton characterized the relation between people and government with a curiously suggestive analogy. In his pamphlet The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, published in 1649 just after the execution of the king, Milton says that the power of kings and magistrates "is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of them all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally." In what I quoted earlier from Locke, the term "trust" is clearly used in the sense of confidence - trust is "reposed," and it may be "forfeited." In Milton it is not clear that the term is used in that nontechnical way. In fact, if we read it as an allusion to a legal trust relationship, we find a very interesting analogy.

The mechanism of a trust originated in England during the crusades. A departing crusader might convey title to his property to someone else to look after in his absence - to use the property for the benefit of the crusader's dependants, and to convey it either back to the crusader upon his return, or to the crusader's heirs in the event the crusader did not return. A returned crusader often found, however, that the trustee would refuse to return the property. Courts usually held that the property belonged to the titleholder, that is, the trustee. Crusaders took to petitioning the king, who usually left it to his Lord Chancellor to decide. The Lord Chancellor typically held that it was "inequitable" for the property not to be returned. And over time the principle became institutionalized. At common law, the trustee was the owner of the trust property. He had title and could therefore do as he liked - mortgage the property, sell it, reinvest or distribute profits, and so on. In order to call him to account, to obtain an equitable result, beneficiaries were obliged to resort to the Court of Chancery.

The analogy with sovereignty is charming. A sovereign is ordinarily entitled - he is the trustee, with title at common law, we might say - to be obeyed. Sovereignty wouldn't be sovereignty without something like that. A disgruntled citizen can't expect a court to countenance exceptions to his obligation to obey the law. Where inequities are foreseeable, of course, they can be fortified against in the law itself - killing someone may be permitted, for instance, if it is a case of self-defence. And where inequities aren't foreseen, common-law judges are sometimes obliged to allow that the law operates inequitably but must be followed nonetheless. Generally speaking, then, the law must be obeyed. If it becomes too oppressive for people to bear, they go about achieving equity by rebelling against it. But that resort is to something outside "the common law." The residual right of the people may be a legitimate remedy, but it is of a different order. The sovereign is the ordinary authority, the residual right of the people the extraordinary remedy. That the English institution of a trust should be so suggestive for English political theory really is splendid.

Textually, I have to admit, the case for seeing this analogy in Milton is tenuous. Except tangentially, he wasn't a political philosopher. Some scholars have tried to show that he was legally quite sophisticated, but the evidence is mainly circumstantial. He often used legal terminology, even in his poetry. He served in Cromwell's government. He was familiar with Justinian, and he met Grotius and admired him. More generally, some acquaintance with law was usual for educated men in those days. All in all, it seems probable that Milton had the wherewithal to formulate the analogy, but it isn't certain. What is more to the point is that Hobbes would have had it ready to hand. He had studied and thought about law carefully - witness A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. He made extensive and critical use of Sir Edward Coke's Institutes of the Lawes of England, the collection of treatises widely used by law students until they were supplanted by Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in the eighteenth century. [It is an interesting sidelight that Thomas Jefferson found Blackstone too much a tory, and wished that American students would return to Coke.] He was keen on problems connected with political authority, and especially with the precise location of that authority. Anyone with such a significant interest in law and its neighbours must have been acquainted, at least in outline, with the legal peculiarity of trusts. Why didn't Hobbes make something of it?

I think Hobbes might dispute the analogy in a couple of different ways. Appeal from sovereignty to the people is a drastic, once-for-all course, whereas appeal from common law to equity is not. Hobbes certainly didn't think - and neither does anyone else - that people in civil societies could be justified in regularly resorting to residual rights outside the jurisdiction of the sovereign. Even Jefferson and Locke were cautious about it. "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes," says the Declaration. "Accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." This again recapitulates Locke: "Such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur." Trust beneficiaries, by contrast, really faced no risks in turning to Chancery, and they often did so. And as we noted earlier, Hobbes's account of residual rights is extremely thin by comparison; justifiable resort to such rights will be rare.

Moreover, although Chancery stood outside the common law, it didn't stand outside civil institutions in general. Petitioning the king, although not usual, was an accepted civil mechanism. From that perspective, the common law itself was understood to be subject to limits - that was the way the country was constituted. The sovereign, for Hobbes, held a very different position. The sovereign stood at the very beginning of law, and couldn't be part of a system in which there were understood limits to sovereign power. "That he which is made sovereign maketh no covenant with his subjects beforehand is manifest," says Hobbes, and therefore the sovereign cannot not be understood to be amenable to being appealed against. "The opinion that any monarch receiveth his power by covenant, that is to say, on condition, proceedeth from want of understanding this easy truth, that covenants, being but words and breath, have no force to oblige ... but what it has from the public sword." Before there is a sovereign, thinks Hobbes, there can be no reliable civil organization whatever; establishing a sovereign is the very first step.

None of that shows that the analogy couldn't be maintained, but it isn't surprising that Hobbes himself didn't use it. Hobbes really wanted to do something stronger than what Locke and Jefferson were after, or than what Milton, incidentally, thought was necessary. All three of the latter recognized robust rights and duties extant in the state of nature, and they thought of civil arrangements as exercises of natural rights and duties. Hobbes, on the other hand, believed that rights and duties were all derived directly from the social contract, and he therefore could not see the drawing up of that contract itself as the exercise of anything but prudence - and as an exercise, moreover, that committed to a permanent subordination of prudence to civil obligations. The sole exception is that one may fall back on prudence when the social contract fails to provide very basic protections.

I think the neo-Hobbesian philosophers of the late twentieth century were true to the historical Hobbes in this respect; they wanted to derive ethical principles from prudence, morals from rationality. It does look like that's what Hobbes was trying to do. We might say that Hobbes and his followers were trying to derive "ought" from "is." But that derivation cannot but pull some prudence - the rights that contractors cannot relinquish - into civil society. Put differently, it is always possible to object to Hobbes-type derivations that the contract involves the exercise of prudence, not its abandonment. It continues to be available as a fall-back; it never becomes a different kind of authority from what was already there; and thus, the analogy with a trust is imperfect.

Milton, Locke and Jefferson, on the other hand, did not try to derive "ought" from "is," and that has its own consequences for the analogy. They thought rights and duties existed in advance of any contract, and were preserved into it. But if that's so, then it's hard to see how any appeal back to original rights could be an appeal to a different sort of authority, and the trust analogy is imperfect here as well. If there is already an "ought" in the state of nature, then of course it need not be derived; but the price is a homogeneity of obligation in or out of civil society.

Still, the analogy to a trust does represent an ideal that is common to both sides. The normal functioning of the sovereign in civil society does have strong claims on citizens - the common law does and should normally prevail. But when it fails to produce equity - more inclusively defined for Milton, Locke and Jefferson, and less inclusively for Hobbes - a resort to extraordinary means is permitted. And sovereigns, just like other trustees, do well not to behave so as to invite such a resort.

Christmas always brings a new film version, and a collection of old film versions, of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It is worth reading the original 1843 story. It is about a hundred pages long and easy to follow, since most of the dialogue is familiar from the films. Some of the prose is a bit complex compared to the simplified grammar of our own times, but it isn't overpowering. If you like the films, you should enjoy the book.

The problem with A Christmas Carol is that we're so familiar with it that we don't readily see its limitations. The three-spirits, past-present-future motif has a certain fairy-tale charm, but it means that Scrooge's character is transformed by magic rather than by natural means. It has to be, given how exaggerated his selfishness is. It's hard to see how anything short of magic could work with him, and it's hard to see how magic so powerful could fail with anyone. It works on us, too - but because it is just magic, the effect doesn't last. The emotions we feel are based on heavy sentimentality, not on naturally developed convictions. The gratification in A Christmas Carol is too easy - it's really a children's story.

There are adult stories about the reformation of selfish people, and three of the better ones are quite short. One of the newest is R. K. Narayan's novel The Guide (1958, about 200 pages). One of the shortest is Tolstoy's short story "Master and Man" (1895, about 55 pages). George Eliot's novel Silas Marner (1861, about 200 pages) is a more difficult book but also more rewarding. In all three, the moral reform is natural and compelling.

R. K. Narayan's The Guide takes place in the south of India, in the fictional town of Malgudi where most of Narayan's work is set. The central character, Raju, a small merchant's son, finds it easy to make himself liked. When the railway comes his father is given shop space in the station and Raju spends more and more time there. He finds himself advising passing travellers, faking it at first until he gets a repertoire of local places of interest, but soon pleasing his travellers so well that he comes to be known as the guide to ask for - Railway Raju, they call him. He is sharp at sizing people up and estimating how much can be got from them, and soon he's a sort of general contractor, arranging drivers, accommodation, and pundits of various sorts for his tourists.

One of his tourists is a talented dancer for whom he becomes the promoter. The enterprise pays more and more, and Raju concentrates on it to the exclusion of almost everything else. He becomes self-important and careless, and breaks a law which gets him a two-year prison sentence. When he is released he has nothing, and he takes shelter in an abandoned temple. Local villagers think he is some sort of holy man, and he doesn't mind encouraging them with cryptic religious and philosophical talk. They bring him food and other necessities, and the role becomes his livelihood. Everything is easy until a drought comes and, through a misunderstanding, the villagers believe the holy man has undertaken to fast in order to bring the rains.

He cheats at first, eating food at night from a secret cache. He thinks about sneaking away, and there is no doubt that he could again find ways to support himself. But now he sees that people are depending on him, not as a guide to tourist sites or entertainment, but as a model of responsibility. He feels for the first time the satisfaction of "earnest effort," of "full application." It is an adult moral insight, presented in a splendidly quixotic way. Raju is no longer playing just a role by which he gets a living, but instead a role by which he belongs to a community. He finds both mental and moral health.

Tolstoy's "Master and Man" has the characteristic simplicity of Tolstoy's later years as a writer. It is the story of a merchant and his peasant servant driving their horse-drawn sledge in a snowstorm. The merchant has all of Scrooge's lust for money, the story takes place just before Christmas, and the merchant is redeemed at last, but that is the end of the resemblance to Dickens's story. The focus is almost exclusively on the two men, the horse, and the intense snow; there are no Dickensian distractions. We don't anticipate a happy resolution. A sense of doom is established early and grows throughout, barely balanced by the peasant's optimism. And the characters - the horse as well as the merchant and the peasant - have a concreteness that is foreign to Dickens.

Nikita, the peasant, is mild and even humble during the main action, but he is no Bob Cratchit. He has been sober for two months after an episode of drinking in which he pawned his coat and boots. Once, we learn, when he was drunk at home, he took out his wife's best clothes, "snatched up an axe, and chopped all her under-garments and dresses to bits." But most of the time he is pleasant, and in a joking rather than in a sentimental way - teasing the horse gently, for instance, and playing little games while he harnesses him.

Mukhorty, the horse, plays right back - "how carefully Mukhorty threw out his hind leg just to touch his greasy sheepskin coat but not to strike him." And Mukhorty, along with Nikita, serves the merchant well; they're both hardworking, trustworthy and respectful. The merchant begins to emerge by contrast even before we've seen much of him.

The merchant, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, is no lonesome Scrooge. He is quite a young man but already a church elder in his village, and he hosts friends and relatives for St. Nicholas's Day. But as soon as he can get clear of them, he has Nikita harness Mukhorty for an immediate drive to see a nearby landowner about buying a valuable grove of trees. He is worried that other buyers might get there first, and they set out in a hurry. Brekhunov is well dressed for the cold, in fur-lined coats, leather boots and mitts; Nikita has only his old mittens, a worn coat over a torn sheepskin, and a pair of felt boots with holes in them. And even as they are starting, there is a dark cloud, a cold wind, and whirling snow obscuring everything.

Brekhunov chooses a direct route over a better-marked one, but by the first turn it has started to snow and the wind is in their faces, and they are soon off the road. They meander through fields and back onto a road and eventually into a village where they are invited to stay the night, but away they go, the wind howling so they can't even hear the final directions they are given. Soon they're off the track again, and their only solution is to let Mukhorty have his head, and by and by they find themselves back in the same village. They stop in a house to get warm - Brekhunov has vodka, Nikita sticks to tea - and again they are invited to stay the night. The storm has got worse, and it is dark now; it's even hard to see the sledge in the yard; but again, Brekhunov insists on going on.

They get lost and end up in a ravine. Brekhunov is afraid. "What shall we do, then? We can't stay here! We must go somewhere!" Nikita is matter-of-fact. "I can't make anything out. It's too dark. There's nothing but ravines." He unharnesses Mukhorty and prepares as best he can to spend the night. Brekhunov can't control his thoughts. He reviews how successful he has been. He worries. "If only that peasant doesn't freeze to death! His clothes are so wretched. I may be held responsible for him. What shiftless people they are..." He thinks it must be nearly morning, but his watch shows only midnight. He hears a wolf. He unties Mukhorty and tries to ride away, but he falls off. He follows the horse, who returns to the sledge, where Nikita is now moving very slowly. "Give what is owing to me to my lad, or to my wife, no matter," he says to Brekhunov. "I feel it's my death. Forgive me for Christ's sake..." And at last Brekhunov sees what he has missed.

With George Eliot's Silas Marner we're back in England, though not in Dickens's mid-century London. The action of the novel takes place in a rural setting early in the century, "in the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses." The narration proceeds more slowly and with a great deal more digression than in the other stories. The contrast with Tolstoy is especially interesting, since in both cases we're in the company of two of the very best of the great realist writers. Tolstoy is invisible; George Eliot actively hosts her novel and offers curious morsels on nearly every page. You can race through Tolstoy if you like; with George Eliot you have to be patient.

As a young man, Silas Marner is falsely accused by a friend, loses his fiancée as a result, and has to leave his community. He settles in a distant village, Raveloe, as its weaver, and keeps to himself. Over the course of fifteen years both his isolation and his wealth increase until he is a wealthy miser and the next thing to a hermit. Villagers find him odd; some of them even wonder whether he is in league with the devil. Then one night all of his money is stolen. While he is still in shock - bereaved, almost - a young woman dies in the snow near his cottage and her tiny daughter toddles inside without Silas noticing at first. He gives her something to eat, then follows her footprints back and finds the mother. Carrying the child, he walks to the squire's house, where there is a festive gathering, to get the doctor.

He is told that one of the women will look after the child. No, he says. "It's come to me - I've a right to keep it." After the mother is found to be dead, he is expected to turn the child over to the parish - surely an old bachelor can't keep her. "'Till anybody shows they've a right to take her away from me." "The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father; it's a lone thing - and I'm a lone thing. My money's gone, I don't know where - and this is come from I don't know where."

He repeats this curious accounting, and Dolly Winthrop - a village woman who mentors him in parenting - not only accepts Silas's understanding but elaborates it. "It's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest - one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all - the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n - they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you." It has a folk charm which is doubled for the reader, who knows the real causes of the going of the money and the coming of the child, which are indeed themselves connected.

As his love for the child - Eppie - grows, so do his relations with the surrounding community. Dolly advises him that Eppie ought to be christened. Silas's own religious background didn't include christening, "but I want to do everything as can be done for the child. And whatever's right for it i' this country, and you think 'ull do it good, I'll act according, if you'll tell me." "Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie: she must have everything that was a good in Raveloe; and he listened docilely, that he might come to understand better what this life was, from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof." And so, in place of the gold which isolated him, he dotes on Eppie and is connected to her and through her to the life around him.

In A Christmas Carol, the human connections that Scrooge achieves aren't connections with people who transform him. The Cratchits begin as nothing but examples used by the spirits; the spirits do all the transformative work. It isn't without considerable charm - we might be reminded of Shakespearean comedies where fairyland interludes provide magic, offstage solutions to recognizable human problems. But both cases involve a deus ex machina solution. Scrooge comes to love people because he is transformed by the spirits between dark and dawn. The new Scrooge comes as a pleasant surprise for Bob Cratchit, because neither Cratchit nor anyone else has had a hand in changing him. Raju and Brekhunov and Silas Marner are instead transformed because they come to love people. Christmas with Scrooge is emotionally easy, even cheap - but just for that reason, it's not as true a Christmas story.

We can relax to Dickens, and it's pleasant, but if we feel the expansive spirit of Christmas, we want more than that. England with its reformed Scrooge is a comforting collective memory, but indulging it doesn't move us forward. If you like The Guide, there are more than a dozen other little novels by Narayan that will expand your sense of India. If you like "Master and Man," there are half a dozen other stories by Tolstoy of roughly the same length and ease of reading, not to mention the works for which he is more famous. And if you like Silas Marner, you might think of looking at some of George Eliot's longer novels - perhaps at Middlemarch, which many people think is The Great English Novel. These books open new and natural worlds, adult worlds, that A Christmas Carol can't touch. Sticking only to Dickens is like sitting on Santa's knee once a year - a jolly experience for children, but that's all.

The goaltender in hockey is like the drummer in a small band. Forwards are the lead guitarists and vocalists out front, the ones everyone watches most of the time. They flash around with the puck; they carry the melody of the piece. Then there are the defencemen who control the larger arrangement. Some of them are rhythm guitarists who pump the puck up and back, back and forth, and occasionally carry it themselves for a few licks and overlap their play with the forwards'. Others are stay-at-home bass players who patrol the perimeter, stretching it out or moving it in. Whether it's lead or harmony or bass, the forwards and defencemen are all actors in the musical narrative and its subplots. The goalie is alone in the back, percussive rather than melodic or harmonic, unique in the band.

The others do have defensive responsibilities - they skate back, they pick up their man, they block shots, they clear the puck away from the front of the net - but the goalie's defensive role is the whole of his obligation. Yes, he corrals the puck behind the net and makes it convenient for his defencemen to take it away, and when he clears the puck he often has the side effect of starting an offensive rush. From time to time he makes a long pass or shoots at an empty net. But those are extras. The goalie's main offensive move is to leave the ice so that someone with real offensive capability can come out in place of him. He doesn't start the puck, he stops it. He's the main reason hockey games end up 3-2 instead of 116-114. Think about it. A basketball has a ten-inch spherical diameter, travels at a comparatively low speed to and from players who are walking or briefly running, and has to fit through a linear circle scarcely larger than itself. There are a hundred goals a game. A puck is three inches across and an inch thick, it gets shot around at more than a hundred miles an hour by players skating most of the time at thirty miles an hour, and the net is six feet across by four feet high. There's room for one thousand, one hundred and fifty-two pucks to fit through the opening of the net at the same time. Why isn't there more scoring in hockey? The goalie doesn't allow it.

This makes the goalie very important, and the game provides protections. If an opposing forward loiters around the net without the puck (known as "camping on the doorstep"), the goalie can whack his legs or give him a good dig in the back, even though strictly speaking those procedures aren't legal. If the goalie travels out of his crease, it's understood that he enjoys a sort of diplomatic immunity; the very name "crease" suggests a personal textile like clothing or bedding. If an opposing forward intrudes too closely, one of the goalie's teammates knocks him down. Provided the violence is appropriate to the offence, normal rules about its content are relaxed, so that some slashing, roughing, hooking, charging, tripping, cross-checking, elbowing and so on are considered within bounds. On the other hand it is also accepted that the attacking team ought to intrude and intimidate its opposition's goalie ("run the goalie" is one expression) - spray snow in his face, poke sticks under him, detain him when he's out of his net, and so forth. Thus some of the play around the net has a stylized and even ceremonial aspect. I position myself where the goalie doesn't want me. He takes his stick to my calves. When the puck arrives and he covers it up, I slash his catching glove. His defenceman cross-checks me, and my team-mate has no choice but to pull that defenceman down from behind. Soon everyone takes his part in the scene (known by this point as "a gathering of the clan"), and the referees and linesmen arrive. They, in turn, have clear obligations about whom to pull and what orders to issue. The players, again, are obliged to resist the authorities within certain well-established norms; and so the band plays on.

The goalie's importance is also emphasized by his appearance, privileges and property rights. He dresses differently from everyone else, and he is the first player onto the ice at the start of a game. He is the only participant who maintains a permanent establishment on the ice surface, and he is entitled not only to landscape it with shavings but even to stock it with provisions for himself. Should the net be moved ("come off its moorings"), play is stopped at once and domicile is restored. If a goalie is assigned a penalty, someone else must serve it; eviction of a goalie from his house is unknown to hockey. Nowadays the goalie sometimes fights, but this is a recent innovation and shouldn't be considered established or authentic. The old practice was better - when everyone else was fighting, the two goalies used to shoot the puck back and forth the length of the ice. In fact, before the days when teams dressed a second goalie for every game, when the visiting team's goalie was hurt the home team was obliged to supply a substitute, and these substitutes sometimes shut out their own teams; it was a question of integrity. I have heard tell that in the 1972 series between Canada and the Soviet Union, Jacques Plante visited with Vladislav Tretiak and counseled him about the Canadian shooters; that was part of his duty as a goalie.

Other players go to the bench to rest; a goalie instead waits until play moves to the other end of the ice. Then he thwacks his stick against his pads, sweeps his porch, stretches, takes off one of his gloves and has a drink, leans back on his elbows, and looks around to see what's happening in the stands. The others have gone up-ice and there's nothing he can do now to support them, so he relaxes until they come back. Occasionally he'll go for a little skate to inspect nearby sites of interest. In the old days he might strike up a conversation with someone at the boards, perhaps even have a smoke, keeping half an eye on the other end in case something broke out, maybe daring the opposition to take a long shot. But when the game is played for a lot of money, playful elements of that sort get squeezed out.

Then - no matter how much the goalie has actually done - when the game is won, the goalie is said to have won it. Everyone on the winning team immediately gathers around and congratulates him. But I think in this he is more like a sort of slightly moveable Maypole, a location for the celebration. Season and career "victories" are counted and compared only by commentators; fans accept only the convention of gathering around the goalie. We do think about shutouts - those demonstrate sustained concentration - but mostly we think of characteristic moves and postures, or of heroic saves ("robberies" is often the term). Above all we think of a goalie's demeanour, of the way he conducts himself, of his moral bearing on the ice. It was clearer in the days before the mask. Not that anyone would wish masks away in the current state of the game, but the dignity of goalies was more prominent and gave the game a dimension that it doesn't have today. You can still see it in pictures. One classic shows Jean Beliveau trying to poke the puck through Johnny Bower while Bower stands upright and implacable, holding his stick authoritatively in the way; you can almost hear him saying simply, "No." Or there's Henri Richard, flying past the net chasing the puck that Glenn Hall has just steered away; Richard looks keen and excited, while Hall looks relaxed, even pacific. We don't get to see the facial expressions any more, and we have to read the poise from grosser gestures, but fearlessness and resolve are still how we judge a goalie's moral stature. Ah, there should be an epic...

Sing, Muse, the standup strength of John Bower,

Who steered countless pucks into the corners

And left their shooters tired and unfulfilled,

Prey for defencemen clad in white and blue,

The Leaf hosts, who journeyed from Toronto

On the train. Sing, the well-scarred big brown pads,

The wrinkled chest protector that covered

Chest and belly together, the blocker

Paler than the catching glove, the stick taped

Black along the blade and around the heel.

The mask does usefully emphasize the goalie's remoteness, and when he takes it off at the end of a game it is with the air of a deep-sea diver taking off his diving helmet. He clomps around with the rest of his diving suit still on, only just returning from a hidden world where his operations have been as obscure as his identity. He and the others have played in the same game but seen completely different features of it. For his part, he has only distant notions of what really happened at the other end, of who really scored, of whether a given penalty was a good one or not. And while it's true that the others have sometimes been nearby in their own end, they haven't seen quite what their goalie saw. It is as if he has been working inside a special control room, staying more or less in place and pulling various levers to move highly specialized equipment in response to events that he sees only through his windows. Those responses can be classified in certain ways - the poke-check, the butterfly, hugging the post, going behind the net to stop the puck on the periphery, and so on. But they never fall into the repetitious patterns the other players use so often - cycling the puck in the corner and moving it back and forth from one defenceman to the other, for instance. The goaltender is like a main actor in a Greek drama, and is entitled to a mask that distinguishes him from the chorus. Still, all in all I think it was better before the masks.

In those days there were even fewer goalies than there are today. There was room for six regular goalies in the National Hockey League, which made goalies at the top of their profession about as common as leaders of major world powers. Seeing Terry Sawchuk talking to Jacques Plante was a bit like seeing Winston Churchill talking to Charles De Gaulle. It is pleasant to reflect on a time when there were fewer heroes and they really counted - those were indeed the men of old and the men of renown. They were exclusive and iconic. It is no surprise to learn that the goalies of today - more numerous than their predecessors, but still a small club - commemorate their ancestors. When a young goalie today is first hit on the mask with a puck, for instance, he is presented with a St. Jacques medal by the fraternity. Goalies who get a certain number of shutouts - the exact number is a close secret - are entitled to wear a St. Terry. Good goalies on weak teams can qualify for the St. Gump. Older goalies will wear a St. Johnny, though they normally follow a special tradition of concealing it. It isn't much known outside hockey circles, but a goaltender is the only player entitled to keep his age a secret; it is even provided for under Canada Pension Plan regulations.

The goalie did look better without the gaudy mask and the massive padding, but he's still a throwback. The other players have learned new tricks, rules have come and gone, but the goalie hasn't really changed. He stays in the back and when someone shoots at his net, he steps in the way like a dragon guarding a golden fleece.