Theron Ware, the Irish Picnic, and Comus

T HE CLIMACTIC and by far the longest episode Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Ware centers around the Irish Catholic picnic described Chapters 22 and 23. The picnic scene proper is, however, only the second of four parts that constitute the complete episode,1 which focuses first on somber Methodist camp meeting, next on the picnic, then on and Celia Madden as they talked a little copse of white birches (p. 251) out of earshot of the noisy Irish, and finally on as he later walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the forest (p. 268), bewitched by Celia's parting kiss, swift [and] almost perfunctory (p. 264) though it had been. The kiss not only capped the episode but, as Allen F. Stein has said, pushed Theron Part Four [the final section of the novel] to new attempt to resolve the conflict that had plagued him since he first met Celia.2 This is the episode which-more than any other part of the novel -has prompted numerous readers to find echoes of Hawthorne Ware. Ever since I896, when friendly English reviewer detected the newly published novel more than touch of the vanished hand that wrote The Scarlet Letter,3 Hawthorne's name has been invoked by commentators who have discussed Ware. For many years after Frederic's death I898, to be sure, precious few discussed it at all; once it returned from near-oblivion, however, the discovery of Hawthornian touches resumed. In recent

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