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But for a fantasy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, this play, of course, would never have been written. In “Mosses from an Old Manse,” the Moralized Legend “Feathertop” relates, in some twenty pages of its author’s inimitable style, how Mother Rigby, a reputed witch of old New England days, converted a corn-patch scarecrow into the semblance of a fine gentleman of the period; how she despatched this semblance to “play its part in the great world, where not one man in a hundred, she affirmed, was gifted with more real substance than itself”; how there the scarecrow, while paying court to pretty Polly Gookin, the rosy, simpering daughter of Justice Gookin, discovered its own image in a looking-glass, returned to Mother Rigby’s cottage, and dissolved into its original elements.

My indebtedness, therefore, to this source, in undertaking the present play, goes without saying. Yet it would not be true, either to Hawthorne’s work or my own, to classify “The Scarecrow” as a dramatization of “Feathertop.” Were it intended to be such, the many radical departures from the conception and the treatment of Hawthorne which are evident in the present work would have to be regarded as so many unwarrantable liberties taken with its original material; the function of the play itself would, in such case, become purely formal,—translative of a narrative to its appropriate dramatic form,—and as such, however interesting and commendable an effort, would have lost all raison d’être for the writer.

But such, I may say, has not been my intention. My aim has been quite otherwise. Starting with the same basic theme, I have sought to elaborate it, by my own treatment, to a different and more inclusive issue.

Without particularizing here the full substance of Hawthorne’s consummate sketch, which is available to every reader, the divergence I refer to may be summed up briefly.

The scarecrow Feathertop of Hawthorne is the imaginative epitome or symbol of human charlatanism, with special emphasis upon the coxcombry of fashionable society. In his essential superficiality he is characterized as a fop, “strangely self-satisfied,” with “nobby little nose thrust into the air.” “And many a fine gentleman,” says Mother Rigby, “has a pumpkin-head as well as my scarecrow.” His hollow semblance is the shallowness of a “well-digested conventionalism, which had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him into a work of art.” “But the clothes in this case were to be the making of the man,” and so Mother Rigby, after fitting him out in a suit of embroidered finery, endows him as a finishing touch “with a great deal of brass, which she applied to his forehead, thus making it yellower than before. ‘With that brass alone,’ quoth she, ‘thou canst pay thy way all over the earth.’”

Similarly, the other characters are sketched by Hawthorne in accord with this general conception. Pretty Polly Gookin, “tossing her head and managing her fan” before the mirror, views therein “an unsubstantial little maid that reflected every gesture and did all the foolish things that Polly did, but without making her ashamed of them. In short, it was the fault of pretty Polly’s ability, rather than her will, if she failed to be as complete an artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself.”

Thus the Moralized Legend reveals itself as a satire upon a restricted artificial phase of society. As such, it runs its brief course, with all the poetic charm and fanciful suggestiveness of our great New Englander’s prose style, to its appropriate dénouement,—the disintegration of its hero.

“‘My poor, dear, pretty Feathertop,’ quoth Mother Rigby, with a rueful glance at the relics of her ill-fated contrivance, ‘there are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world made up of just such a jumble of worn-out, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was, yet they live in fair repute and never see themselves for what they are. And why should my poor puppet be the only one to know himself and perish for it?’”

Coxcombry and charlatanism, then, are the butt of Hawthorne’s satire in his Legend. The nature of his theme, however, is susceptible of an application far less restricted, a development far more universal, than such satire. This wider issue once or twice in his sketch he seems to have touched upon, only immediately to ignore again. Thus, in the very last paragraph, Mother Rigby exclaims: “Poor Feathertop! I could easily give him another chance and send him forth again to-morrow. But no! His feelings are too tender—his sensibilities too deep.”

In these words, spoken in irony, Hawthorne ends his narrative with an undeveloped aspect of his theme, which constitutes the starting-point of the conception of my play: the aspect, namely, of the essential tragedy of the ludicrous; an aspect which, in its development, inevitably predicates for my play a divergent treatment and a different conclusion. The element of human sympathy is here substituted for that of irony, as criterion of the common absurdity of mankind.

The scarecrow Feathertop is ridiculous, as the emblem of a superficial fop; the scarecrow Ravensbane is pitiful, as the emblem of human bathos.

Compared with our own ideas of human perfection, what human rubbish we are! Of what incongruous elements are we constructed by time and inheritance wherewith to realize the reasonableness, the power, the altruism, of our dreams! What absurdity is our highest consummation! Yet the sense of our common deficiency is, after all, our salvation. There is one reality which is a basic hope for the realization of those dreams. This sense is human sympathy, which is, it would seem, a more searching critic of human frailty than satire. It is the growth of this sense which dowers with dignity and reality the hollowest and most ludicrous of mankind, and becomes in such a fundamental grace of character. In a recent critical interpretation of Cervantes’ great work, Professor G. E. Woodberry writes: “A madman has no character; but it is the character of Don Quixote that at last draws the knight out of all his degradations and makes him triumph in the heart of the reader.” And he continues: “Modern dismay begins in the thought that here is not the abnormality of an individual, but the madness of the soul in its own nature.”

If for “madness” in this quotation I may be permitted to substitute ludicrousness (or incongruity), a more felicitous expression of my meaning, as applied to Ravensbane in this play, would be difficult to devise.

From what has been said, it will, I trust, be the more clearly apparent why “The Scarecrow” cannot with any appropriateness be deemed a dramatization of “Feathertop,” and why its manifold divergencies from the latter in treatment and motive cannot with any just significance be considered as liberties taken with an original source. Dickon, for example, whose name in the Legend is but a momentary invocation in the mouth of Mother Rigby, becomes in my play not merely the characterized visible associate of Goody Rickby (“Blacksmith Bess”), but the necessary foil of sceptical irony to the human growth of the scarecrow. So, too, for reasons of the play’s different intent, Goody Rickby herself is differentiated from Mother Rigby; and Rachel Merton has no motive, of character or artistic design, in common with pretty, affected Polly Gookin.

My indebtedness to the New England master in literature is, needless to say, gratefully acknowledged; but it is fitting, I think, to distinguish clearly between the aim and the scope of “Feathertop” and that of the play in hand, as much in deference to the work of Hawthorne as in comprehension of the spirit of my own.

P. M-K.

Cornish, New Hampshire,

December, 1907.