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diff --git a/18566-8.txt b/18566-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a874d1a --- /dev/null +++ b/18566-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5738 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hawthorne, by Henry James, Junr. + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Hawthorne + (English Men of Letters Series) + +Author: Henry James, Junr. + +Release Date: June 12, 2006 [EBook #18566] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAWTHORNE *** + + + + +Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Sankar Viswanathan, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + + + English Men of Letters + + EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY + + + + + HAWTHORNE + + BY + + Henry James, JUNR. + + + + + + London + MACMILLAN AND CO + 1879 + + * * * * * + + + + +CONTENTS. + + +CHAPTER I. + +EARLY YEARS + +CHAPTER II. + +EARLY MANHOOD + +CHAPTER III. + +EARLY WRITINGS + +CHAPTER IV. + +BROOK FARM AND CONCORD + +CHAPTER V. + +THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS + +CHAPTER VI. + +ENGLAND AND ITALY + +CHAPTER VII. + +LAST YEARS + + * * * * * + + + + +HAWTHORNE. + + +CHAPTER I. + +EARLY YEARS. + + +It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch +the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for +a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if +they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the +purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil +and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it +was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the +dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can +have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books +illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an +unagitated fortune. Hawthorne's career had few vicissitudes or +variations; it was passed for the most part in a small and homogeneous +society, in a provincial, rural community; it had few perceptible +points of contact with what is called the world, with public events, +with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours. +Its literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in quantity, but +little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another, +five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of +story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the +writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's +private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and +most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the +literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of +letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American +genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but Hawthorne +was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to +whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a +claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from present +appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is +something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added +relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the +general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him, there is +also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation. He +was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing +from the lonely honour of a representative attitude--perceiving a +painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the +large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so +subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the +other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to +the author of _The Scarlet Letter_ and the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, +that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with +those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward +as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of +pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms +only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to +produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery +to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had +other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to +writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for +them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic +growth are the sum of what the world usually recognises, and in this +modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest +and sweetest fragrance. + +His very simplicity has been in his favour; it has helped him to +appear complete and homogeneous. To talk of his being national would +be to force the note and make a mistake of proportion; but he is, in +spite of the absence of the realistic quality, intensely and vividly +local. Out of the soil of New England he sprang--in a crevice of that +immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed. Half of the interest that +he possesses for an American reader with any turn for analysis must +reside in his latent New England savour; and I think it no more than +just to say that whatever entertainment he may yield to those who know +him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable condition of properly +appreciating him to have received a personal impression of the +manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great region +of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis. The cold, +bright air of New England seems to blow through his pages, and these, +in the opinion of many people, are the medium in which it is most +agreeable to make the acquaintance of that tonic atmosphere. As to +whether it is worth while to seek to know something of New England in +order to extract a more intimate quality from _The House of Seven +Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_, I need not pronounce; but it is +certain that a considerable observation of the society to which these +productions were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for +enjoying them. I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that +quality of realism which is now so much in fashion, an absence in +regard to which there will of course be more to say; and yet I think I +am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the +society in which he flourished almost as pertinently (proportions +observed) as Balzac and some of his descendants--MM. Flaubert and +Zola--testify to the manners and morals of the French people. He was +not a man with a literary theory; he was guiltless of a system, and I +am not sure that he had ever heard of Realism, this remarkable +compound having (although it was invented some time earlier) come into +general use only since his death. He had certainly not proposed to +himself to give an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his +fellow-citizens, for his touch on such points is always light and +vague, he has none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy +style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy. +Nevertheless he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New +England life that has found its way into literature. His value in this +respect is not diminished by the fact that he has not attempted to +portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has been almost +culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the +variations of colloquial English that may be observed in the New +World. His characters do not express themselves in the dialect of the +_Biglow Papers_--their language indeed is apt to be too elegant, too +delicate. They are not portraits of actual types, and in their +phraseology there is nothing imitative. But none the less, Hawthorne's +work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it is redolent of the +social system in which he had his being. + +This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself was so +deeply rooted in the soil. Hawthorne sprang from the primitive New +England stock; he had a very definite and conspicuous pedigree. He was +born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804, and his +birthday was the great American festival, the anniversary of the +Declaration of national Independence.[1] Hawthorne was in his +disposition an unqualified and unflinching American; he found occasion +to give us the measure of the fact during the seven years that he +spent in Europe toward the close of his life; and this was no more +than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed the honour of coming +into the world on the day on which of all the days in the year the +great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of self-consciousness. Moreover, +a person who has been ushered into life by the ringing of bells and +the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight out of +it again by the uproar of his awakening) receives by this very fact an +injunction to do something great, something that will justify such +striking natal accompaniments. Hawthorne was by race of the clearest +Puritan strain. His earliest American ancestors (who wrote the name +"Hathorne"--the shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who +inserted the _w_,) was the younger son of a Wiltshire family, whose +residence, according to a note of our author's in 1837, was +"Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions the +gentleman who was at that time the head of the family; but it does not +appear that he at any period renewed acquaintance with his English +kinsfolk. Major William Hathorne came out to Massachusetts in the +early years of the Puritan settlement; in 1635 or 1636, according to +the note to which I have just alluded; in 1630 according to +information presumably more accurate. He was one of the band of +companions of the virtuous and exemplary John Winthrop, the almost +life-long royal Governor of the young colony, and the brightest and +most amiable figure in the early Puritan annals. How amiable William +Hathorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently of the stuff +of which the citizens of the Commonwealth were best advised to be +made. He was a sturdy fighting man, doing solid execution upon both +the inward and outward enemies of the State. The latter were the +savages, the former the Quakers; the energy expended by the early +Puritans in resistance to the tomahawk not weakening their disposition +to deal with spiritual dangers. They employed the same--or almost the +same--weapons in both directions; the flintlock and the halberd +against the Indians, and the cat-o'-nine-tails against the heretics. +One of the longest, though by no means one of the most successful, of +Hawthorne's shorter tales (_The Gentle Boy_) deals with this pitiful +persecution of the least aggressive of all schismatic bodies. William +Hathorne, who had been made a magistrate of the town of Salem, where a +grant of land had been offered him as an inducement to residence, +figures in New England history as having given orders that "Anne +Coleman and four of her friends" should be whipped through Salem, +Boston, and Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded +to in that fine passage in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_, +in which Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder of the +American branch of his race:-- + + "The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family + tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my + boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still + haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, + which I scarcely claim in reference to the present, phase of + the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence + here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and + steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so early, with his + Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a + stately port, and make so large a figure as a man of war and + peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is + seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, + legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church; he had all + the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a + bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have + remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of + his hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will + last longer, it is to be feared, than any of his better + deeds, though these were many." + +FOOTNOTES: + +[Footnote 1: It is proper that before I go further I should +acknowledge my large obligations to the only biography of our author, +of any considerable length, that has been written--the little volume +entitled _A Study of Hawthorne_, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the +son-in-law of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this +ingenious and sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great +pains to collect the more interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am +greatly indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not pitched in the key which +many another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to my sense +the truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate +essay the present little volume could not have been prepared.] + +William Hathorne died in 1681; but those hard qualities that his +descendant speaks of were reproduced in his son John, who bore the +title of Colonel, and who was connected, too intimately for his +honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the +persecution of-the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is +introduced into the little drama entitled _The Salem Farms_ in +Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_. I know not whether he had the +compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks of him, in +the continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having made +himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their +blood may be said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain, +indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones +in the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have +not crumbled utterly to dust." Readers of _The House of the Seven +Gables_ will remember that the story concerns itself with a family +which is supposed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against one +of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the +world, whom this ill-advised ancestor had been the means of bringing +to justice for the crime of witchcraft. Hawthorne apparently found the +idea of the history of the Pyncheons in his own family annals. His +witch-judging ancestor was reported to have incurred a malediction +from one of his victims, in consequence of which the prosperity of the +race faded utterly away. "I know not," the passage I have already +quoted goes on, "whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves +to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties, or whether +they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another +state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, hereby take +shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by +them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of +the race for some time back would argue to exist--may be now and +henceforth removed." The two first American Hathornes had been people +of importance and responsibility; but with the third generation the +family lapsed into an obscurity from which it emerged in the very +person of the writer who begs so gracefully for a turn in its affairs. +It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the Introduction to _The +Scarlet Letter_, that from the original point of view such lustre as +he might have contrived to confer upon the name would have appeared +more than questionable. + + "Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have + thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that + after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the family + tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have + borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim + that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; + no success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope, + had ever been brightened by success, would they deem + otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. + 'What is he?' murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to + the other. 'A writer of story-books! What kind of a business + in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable + to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the + degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!' Such + are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and + myself across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me + as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined + themselves with mine." + +In this last observation we may imagine that there was not a little +truth. Poet and novelist as Hawthorne was, sceptic and dreamer and +little of a man of action, late-coming fruit of a tree which might +seem to have lost the power to bloom, he was morally, in an +appreciative degree, a chip of the old block. His forefathers had +crossed the Atlantic for conscience' sake, and it was the idea of the +urgent conscience that haunted the imagination of their so-called +degenerate successor. The Puritan strain in his blood ran clear--there +are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe, +which might almost have been written by the grimmest of the old Salem +worthies. To him as to them, the consciousness of _sin_ was the most +importunate fact of life, and if they had undertaken to write little +tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective, could +hardly have been more frequent in their pages than in those of their +fanciful descendant. Hawthorne had moreover in his composition +contemplator and dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity and +rigidity, a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might +have kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms with him than he +admits to be possible. However little they might have appreciated the +artist, they would have approved of the man. The play of Hawthorne's +intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and +rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper was not +degenerate. + +The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he speaks of in regard +to the fortunes of his family is an allusion to the fact that several +generations followed each other on the soil in which they had been +planted, that during the eighteenth century a succession of Hathornes +trod the simple streets of Salem without ever conferring any especial +lustre upon the town or receiving, presumably, any great delight from +it. A hundred years of Salem would perhaps be rather a dead-weight for +any family to carry, and we venture to imagine that the Hathornes were +dull and depressed. They did what they could, however, to improve +their situation; they trod the Salem streets as little as possible. +They went to sea, and made long voyages; seamanship became the regular +profession of the family. Hawthorne has said it in charming language. +"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; +a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the +quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the +hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the +gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also, +in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a +tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings to grow +old and die and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's +grandfather, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his +biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer during the war of +Independence. His father, from whom he was named, was also a +shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise of his +profession. He was carried off by a fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He +left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's +mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock +almost as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by +our author's biographer as a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an +authority whom he quotes, as being "a minute observer of religious +festivals," of "feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the +poor lady in her Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number +to celebrate; but of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed +the usual, and of Sabbaths even more than the usual, proportion. + +In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part +of his boyhood, as well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop +has much to say about the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and +about the mystic influences it would project upon such a mind and +character as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and in +appreciating them everything depends upon the point of view. Mr. +Lathrop writes for American readers, who in such a matter as this are +very easy to please. Americans have as a general thing a hungry +passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local colour that +they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of +other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as +yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a +deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and +nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming +rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light +of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet but few of +the secrets of the world and none of the weariness of shining; the +vegetation has the appearance of not having reached its majority. A +large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things, and in the +vividness of the present, the past, which died so young and had time +to produce so little, attracts but scanty attention. I doubt whether +English observers would discover any very striking trace of it in the +ancient town of Salem. Still, with all respect to a York and a +Shrewsbury, to a Toledo and a Verona, Salem has a physiognomy in which +the past plays a more important part than the present. It is of course +a very recent past; but one must remember that the dead of yesterday +are not more alive than those of a century ago. I know not of what +picturesqueness Hawthorne was conscious in his respectable birthplace; +I suspect his perception of it was less keen than his biographer +assumes it to have been; but he must have felt at least that of +whatever complexity of earlier life there had been in the country, the +elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a recognisable memento. He has made +considerable mention of the place, here and there, in his tales; but +he has nowhere dilated upon it very lovingly, and it is noteworthy +that in _The House of the Seven Gables_, the only one of his novels of +which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed himself of +the opportunity to give a description of it. He had of course a filial +fondness for it--a deep-seated sense of connection with it; but he +must have spent some very dreary years there, and the two feelings, +the mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in the Introduction to +_The Scarlet Letter_. + + "The old town of Salem," he writes,--"my native place, + though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and + in maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my + affections, the force of which I have never realized during + my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as the + physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried + surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of + which pretend to architectural beauty; its irregularity, + which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its + long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole + extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at + one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other--such + being the features of my native town it would be quite as + reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged + chequer-board." + +But he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense +of intensely belonging to it--that the spell of the continuity of his +life with that of his predecessors has never been broken. "It is no +matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old +wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site and +sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chilliest of social +atmospheres;--all these and whatever faults besides he may see or +imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as +powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise." There is a +very American quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on +Hawthorne's part; it is only in a country where newness and change and +brevity of tenure are the common substance of life, that the fact of +one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a +single spot would become an element of one's morality. It is only an +imaginative American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this +circumstance, to keep analysing and cunningly considering it. + +The Salem of to-day has, as New England towns go, a physiognomy of its +own, and in spite of Hawthorne's analogy of the disarranged +draught-board, it is a decidedly agreeable one. The spreading elms in +its streets, the proportion of large, square, honourable-looking +houses, suggesting an easy, copious material life, the little gardens, +the grassy waysides, the open windows, the air of space and salubrity +and decency, and above all the intimation of larger antecedents--these +things compose a picture which has little of the element that painters +call depth of tone, but which is not without something that they would +admit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most honourable of +the smaller American towns must seem in a manner primitive and rustic; +the shabby, straggling, village-quality appears marked in them, and +their social tone is not unnaturally inferred to bear the village +stamp. Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to +describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages. +But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are +no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence, +where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of +gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege--even a +village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful +patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its +own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and +decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old +coast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New England, and of +which the list is completed by the names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New +Bedford, Newburyport, Newport--superannuated centres of the traffic +with foreign lands, which have seen their trade carried away from them +by the greater cities. As Hawthorne says, their ventures have gone "to +swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at +New York or Boston." Salem, at the beginning of the present century, +played a great part in the Eastern trade; it was the residence of +enterprising shipowners who despatched their vessels to Indian and +Chinese seas. It was a place of large fortunes, many of which have +remained, though the activity that produced them has passed away. +These successful traders constituted what Hawthorne calls "the +aristocratic class." He alludes in one of his slighter sketches (_The +Sister Years_) to the sway of this class and the "moral influence of +wealth" having been more marked in Salem than in any other New England +town. The sway, we may believe, was on the whole gently exercised, and +the moral influence of wealth was not exerted in the cause of +immorality. Hawthorne was probably but imperfectly conscious of an +advantage which familiarity had made stale--the fact that he lived in +the most democratic and most virtuous of modern communities. Of the +virtue it is but civil to suppose that his own family had a liberal +share; but not much of the wealth, apparently, came into their way. +Hawthorne was not born to a patrimony, and his income, later in life, +never exceeded very modest proportions. + +Of his childish years there appears to be nothing very definite to +relate, though his biographer devotes a good many graceful pages to +them. There is a considerable sameness in the behaviour of small boys, +and it is probable that if we were acquainted with the details of our +author's infantine career we should find it to be made up of the same +pleasures and pains as that of many ingenuous lads for whom fame has +had nothing in keeping. + +The absence of precocious symptoms of genius is on the whole more +striking in the lives of men who have distinguished themselves than +their juvenile promise; though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has +made out, as he was almost in duty bound to do, a very good case in +favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. He was not at +any time what would be called a sociable man, and there is therefore +nothing unexpected in the fact that he was fond of long walks in which +he was not known to have had a companion. "Juvenile literature" was +but scantily known at that time, and the enormous and extraordinary +contribution made by the United States to this department of human +happiness was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne, +therefore, like many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse +himself, for want of anything better, with the _Pilgrim's Progress_ +and the _Faery Queen_. A boy may have worse company than Bunyan and +Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles our +author may have had associates of whom there could be no record. When +he was nine years old he met with an accident at school which +threatened for a while to have serious results. He was struck on the +foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at home for a +long time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year. +His school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New +England--the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system +of instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms one of +the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was +fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of +an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond, +near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine. The immense State of Maine, +in the year 1818, must have had an even more magnificently natural +character than it possesses at the present day, and the uncle's +dwelling, in consequence of being in a little smarter style than the +primitive structures that surrounded it, was known by the villagers as +Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop pronounces this region to be of a "weird +and woodsy" character; and Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a +friend as the place where "I first got my cursed habits of solitude." +The outlook, indeed, for an embryonic novelist, would not seem to have +been cheerful; the social dreariness of a small New England community +lost amid the forests of Maine, at the beginning of the present +century, must have been consummate. But for a boy with a relish for +solitude there were many natural resources, and we can understand that +Hawthorne should in after years have spoken very tenderly of this +episode. "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the +freedom I enjoyed." During the long summer days he roamed, gun in +hand, through the great woods, and during the moonlight nights of +winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, "he would +skate until midnight, all alone, upon Sebago Lake, with the deep +shadows of the icy hills on either hand." + +In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school, and in the following year +he wrote to his mother, who had remained at Raymond (the boy had found +a home at Salem with another uncle), "I have left school and have +begun to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in +danger of having one learned man in your family.... I get my lessons +at home and recite them to him (Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the +morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A +Minister I will not be." He adds, at the close of this epistle--"O how +I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a-gunning! +But the happiest days of my life are gone." In 1821, in his +seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine. +This institution was in the year 1821--a quarter of a century after +its foundation--a highly honourable, but not a very elaborately +organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning. I say it +was not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions depend +upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple New +England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of +Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have +seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple, +frugal, "country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp; +exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the +forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the +amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a +very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen, +politicians, and editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving +community that supported it. It did more than this--it numbered poets +and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its +sons it has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's +fellow-students was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who divides with our +author the honour of being the most distinguished of American men of +letters. I know not whether Mr. Longfellow was especially intimate +with Hawthorne at this period (they were very good friends later in +life), but with two of his companions he formed a friendship which +lasted always. One of these was Franklin Pierce, who was destined to +fill what Hawthorne calls "the most august position in the world." +Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852. The other +was Horatio Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the +Navy, and to whom the charming prefatory letter of the collection of +tales published under the name of _The Snow Image_, is addressed. "If +anybody is responsible at this day for my being an author it is +yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads +together at a country college--gathering blueberries in study-hours +under those tall Academic pines; or watching the great logs as they +tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and +grey squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or +catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is +still wandering river-ward through the forest--though you and I will +never cast a line in it again--two idle lads, in short (as we need not +fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things the Faculty never +heard of, or else it had been worse for us--still it was your +prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of +fiction." That is a very pretty picture, but it is a picture of happy +urchins at school, rather than of undergraduates "panting," as +Macaulay says, "for one and twenty." Poor Hawthorne was indeed +thousands of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge; that touch about +the blueberries and the logs on the Androscoggin tells the whole +story, and strikes the note, as it were, of his circumstances. But if +the pleasures at Bowdoin were not expensive, so neither were the +penalties. The amount of Hawthorne's collegiate bill for one term was +less than 4_l._, and of this sum more than 9_s._ was made up of fines. +The fines, however, were not heavy. Mr. Lathrop prints a letter +addressed by the President to "Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hathorne," requesting +her co-operation with the officers of this college, "in the attempt to +induce your son faithfully to observe the laws of this institution." +He has just been fined fifty cents for playing cards for money during +the preceding term. "Perhaps he might not have gamed," the Professor +adds, "were it not for the influence of a student whom we have +dismissed from college." The biographer quotes a letter from Hawthorne +to one of his sisters, in which the writer says, in allusion to this +remark, that it is a great mistake to think that he has been led away +by the wicked ones. "I was fully as willing to play as the person he +suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no +one. I have a great mind to commence playing again, merely to show him +that I scorn to be seduced by another into anything wrong." There is +something in these few words that accords with the impression that the +observant reader of Hawthorne gathers of the personal character that +underlay his duskily-sportive imagination--an impression of simple +manliness and transparent honesty. + +He appears to have been a fair scholar, but not a brilliant one; and +it is very probable that as the standard of scholarship at Bowdoin was +not high, he graduated none the less comfortably on this account. Mr. +Lathrop is able to testify to the fact, by no means a surprising one, +that he wrote verses at college, though the few stanzas that the +biographer quotes are not such as to make us especially regret that +his rhyming mood was a transient one. + + "The ocean hath its silent caves, + Deep, quiet and alone. + Though there be fury on the waves, + Beneath them there is none." + +That quatrain may suffice to decorate our page. And in connection with +his college days I may mention his first novel, a short romance +entitled _Fanshawe_, which was published in Boston in 1828, three +years after he graduated. It was probably also written after that +event, but the scene of the tale is laid at Bowdoin (which figures +under an altered name), and Hawthorne's attitude with regard to the +book, even shortly after it was published, was such as to assign it to +this boyish period. It was issued anonymously, but he so repented of +his venture that he annihilated the edition, of which, according to +Mr. Lathrop, "not half a dozen copies are now known to be extant." I +have seen none of these rare volumes, and I know nothing of _Fanshawe_ +but what the writer just quoted relates. It is the story of a young +lady who goes in rather an odd fashion to reside at "Harley College" +(equivalent of Bowdoin), under the care and guardianship of Dr. +Melmoth, the President of the institution, a venerable, amiable, +unworldly, and henpecked, scholar. Here she becomes very naturally an +object of interest to two of the students; in regard to whom I cannot +do better than quote Mr. Lathrop. One of these young men "is Edward +Wolcott, a wealthy, handsome, generous, healthy young fellow from one +of the sea-port towns; and the other Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor +but ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline through +overmuch devotion to books and meditation. Fanshawe, though the deeper +nature of the two, and intensely moved by his new passion, perceiving +that a union between himself and Ellen could not be a happy one, +resigns the hope of it from the beginning. But circumstances bring him +into intimate relation with her. The real action of the book, after +the preliminaries, takes up only some three days, and turns upon the +attempt of a man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his +protection, then marry her, and secure the fortune to which she is +heiress. This scheme is partly frustrated by circumstances, and +Butler's purpose towards Ellen thus becomes a much more sinister one. +From this she is rescued by Fanshawe, and knowing that he loves her, +but is concealing his passion, she gives him the opportunity and the +right to claim her hand. For a moment the rush of desire and hope is +so great that he hesitates; then he refuses to take advantage of her +generosity, and parts with her for a last time. Ellen becomes engaged +to Wolcott, who had won her heart from the first; and Fanshawe, +sinking into rapid consumption, dies before his class graduates." The +story must have had a good deal of innocent lightness; and it is a +proof of how little the world of observation lay open to Hawthorne, at +this time, that he should have had no other choice than to make his +little drama go forward between the rather naked walls of Bowdoin, +where the presence of his heroine was an essential incongruity. He was +twenty-four years old, but the "world," in its social sense, had not +disclosed itself to him. He had, however, already, at moments, a very +pretty writer's touch, as witness this passage, quoted by Mr. Lathrop, +and which is worth transcribing. The heroine has gone off with the +nefarious Butler, and the good Dr. Melmoth starts in pursuit of her, +attended by young Wolcott. + + "'Alas, youth, these are strange times,' observed the + President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate + set forth, like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of + a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church + militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray + Heaven, however, there be no such encounter in store for us; + for I utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons.' + + "'I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' + replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. + Melmoth's chivalrous comparison. + + "'Aye, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the + divine. 'But wherewith shall I defend myself? my hand being + empty except of this golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. + Langton.' + + "'One of these, if you will accept it,' answered Edward, + exhibiting a brace of pistols, 'will serve to begin the + conflict before you join the battle hand to hand.' + + "'Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that + deadly instrument, since I know not accurately from which + end proceeds the bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. 'But were it not + better, since we are so well provided with artillery, to + betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some + stone wall or other place of strength?' + + "'If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, 'you, as + being most valiant and experienced, should ride forward, + lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while I + annoy the enemy from afar.' + + "'Like Teucer, behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. + Melmoth, 'or David with his stone and sling. No, no, young + man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, + important not only to the present age, but to posterity, for + whose sake I must take heed to my safety. But, lo! who rides + yonder?'" + +On leaving college Hawthorne had gone back to live at Salem. + + * * * * * + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +EARLY MANHOOD. + + +The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or most brilliant +phase of Hawthorne's life; they strike me indeed as having had an +altogether peculiar dreariness. They had their uses; they were the +period of incubation of the admirable compositions which eventually +brought him reputation and prosperity. But of their actual aridity the +young man must have had a painful consciousness; he never lost the +impression of it. Mr. Lathrop quotes a phrase to this effect from one +of his letters, late in life. "I am disposed to thank God for the +gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of +adversity came then, when I bore it alone." And the same writer +alludes to a touching passage in the English Note-Books, which I shall +quote entire:-- + + "I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than ever + before--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children + about me--more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious + for anything beyond it, in this life. My early life was + perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; + it having been such a blank that any thereafter would + compare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have + occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have + an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been + in England. It is, that I am still at college, or, + sometimes, even, at school--and there is a sense that I have + been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to + make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I + seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and + depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when + awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or + thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy + seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after + leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me + behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call + myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy too." + +The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man's +positive choice at the time--or into which he drifted at least under +the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive, +he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he +was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general +impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his +character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him +as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He +was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait +and meditate, than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any +occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality betrays +itself in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold and +light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which +indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his +points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of +Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his +life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time +that there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and +above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities +to which the Note-Books most testify are, on the whole, his serenity +and amenity of mind. They reveal these characteristics indeed in an +almost phenomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in +certain portions almost child-like; of brilliant gaiety, of high +spirits, there is little; but the placidity and evenness of temper, +the cheerful and contented view of the things he notes, never belie +themselves. I know not what else he may have written in this copious +record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been +suppressed; but as his Diaries stand, they offer in a remarkable +degree the reflection of a mind whose development was not in the +direction of sadness. A very clever French critic, whose fancy is +often more lively than his observation is deep, M. Emile Montégut, +writing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, in the year 1860, invents for +our author the appellation of "Un Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially +speaking, perhaps, the title is a happy one; but only superficially. +Pessimism consists in having morbid and bitter views and theories +about human nature; not in indulging in shadowy fancies and conceits. +There is nothing whatever to show that Hawthorne had any such +doctrines or convictions; certainly, the note of depression, of +despair, of the disposition to undervalue the human race, is never +sounded in his Diaries. These volumes contain the record of very few +convictions or theories of any kind; they move with curious evenness, +with a charming, graceful flow, on a level which lies above that of a +man's philosophy. They adhere with such persistence to this upper +level that they prompt the reader to believe that Hawthorne had no +appreciable philosophy at all--no general views that were, in the +least uncomfortable. They are the exhibition of an unperplexed +intellect. I said just now that the development of Hawthorne's mind +was not towards sadness; and I should be inclined to go still further, +and say that his mind proper--his mind in so far as it was a +repository of opinions and articles of faith--had no development that +it is of especial importance to look into. What had a development was +his imagination--that delicate and penetrating imagination which was +always at play, always entertaining itself, always engaged in a game +of hide and seek in the region in which it seemed to him, that the +game could best be played--among the shadows and substructions, the +dark-based pillars and supports, of our moral nature. Beneath this +movement and ripple of his imagination--as free and spontaneous as +that of the sea surface--lay directly his personal affections. These +were solid and strong, but, according to my impression, they had the +place very much to themselves. + +His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by no means +cynical, relish for solitude, imposed themselves upon him, in a great +measure, with a persistency which helped to make the time a tolerably +arid one--so arid a one indeed that we have seen that in the light of +later happiness he pronounced it a blank. But in truth, if these were +dull years, it was not all Hawthorne's fault. His situation was +intrinsically poor--poor with a poverty that one almost hesitates to +look into. When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life, +of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago; +and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of +literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and +colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them, +compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment, and we +see the large dry village picture in perhaps almost too hard a light. +It seems to me then that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that +he was not expansive and inquisitive, that he lived much to himself +and asked but little of his _milieu_. If he had been exacting and +ambitious, if his appetite had been large and his knowledge various, +he would probably have found the bounds of Salem intolerably narrow. +But his culture had been of a simple sort--there was little of any +other sort to be obtained in America in those days, and though he was +doubtless haunted by visions of more suggestive opportunities, we may +safely assume that he was not to his own perception the object of +compassion that he appears to a critic who judges him after half a +century's civilization has filtered into the twilight of that earlier +time. If New England was socially a very small place in those days, +Salem was a still smaller one; and if the American tone at large was +intensely provincial, that of New England was not greatly helped by +having the best of it. The state of things was extremely natural, and +there could be now no greater mistake than to speak of it with a +redundancy of irony. American life had begun to constitute itself from +the foundations; it had begun to _be_, simply; it was at an +immeasurable distance from having begun to enjoy. I imagine there was +no appreciable group of people in New England at that time proposing +to itself to enjoy life; this was not an undertaking for which any +provision had been made, or to which any encouragement was offered. +Hawthorne must have vaguely entertained some such design upon destiny; +but he must have felt that his success would have to depend wholly +upon his own ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to +enjoy, simply because he proposed to be an artist, and because this +enters inevitably into the artist's scheme. There are a thousand ways +of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most innocent. +But for all that, it connects itself with the idea of pleasure. He +proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must first get it. Where +he gets it will depend upon circumstances, and circumstances were not +encouraging to Hawthorne. + +He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to +literature in a community in which the interest in literature was as +yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the +present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not +to be "in business." The young man who attempts to launch himself in a +career that does not belong to the so-called practical order; the +young man who has not, in a word, an office in the business-quarter of +the town, with his name painted on the door, has but a limited place +in the social system, finds no particular bough to perch upon. He is +not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an idler; literature and +the arts have always been held in extreme honour in the American +world, and those who practise them are received on easier terms than +in other countries. If the tone of the American world is in some +respects provincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the +exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentleman or the lady +who has written a book is in many circles the object of an admiration +too indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing. +There is no reason to suppose that this was less the case fifty years +ago; but fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the literary man must +have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The +best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are +members of a group; every man works better when he has companions +working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, +comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by +solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the +pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial +circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and +discussion; he is apt to make awkward experiments; he is in the nature +of the case more or less of an empiric. The empiric may, as I say, be +treated by the world as an expert; but the drawbacks and discomforts +of empiricism remain to him, and are in fact increased by the +suspicion that is mingled with his gratitude, of a want in the public +taste of a sense of the proportions of things. Poor Hawthorne, +beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was empirical enough; +he was one of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up +literature as a profession. The profession in the United States is +still very young, and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its +head could hardly have been seen above ground. It strikes the observer +of to-day that Hawthorne showed great courage in entering a field in +which the honours and emoluments were so scanty as the profits of +authorship must have been at that time. I have said that in the +United States at present authorship is a pedestal, and literature is +the fashion; but Hawthorne's history is a proof that it was possible, +fifty years ago, to write a great many little masterpieces without +becoming known. He begins the preface to the _Twice-Told Tales_ by +remarking that he was "for many years the obscurest man of letters in +America." When once this work obtained recognition, the recognition +left little to be desired. Hawthorne never, I believe, made large sums +of money by his writings, and the early profits of these charming +sketches could not have been considerable; for many of them, indeed, +as they appeared in journals and magazines, he had never been paid at +all; but the honour, when once it dawned--and it dawned tolerably +early in the author's career--was never thereafter wanting. +Hawthorne's countrymen are solidly proud of him, and the tone of Mr. +Lathrop's _Study_ is in itself sufficient evidence of the manner in +which an American story-teller may in some cases look to have his +eulogy pronounced. + +Hawthorne's early attempt to support himself by his pen appears to +have been deliberate; we hear nothing of those experiments in +counting-houses or lawyers' offices, of which a permanent invocation +to the Muse is often the inconsequent sequel. He began to write, and +to try and dispose of his writings; and he remained at Salem +apparently only because his family, his mother and his two sisters, +lived there. His mother had a house, of which during the twelve years +that elapsed until 1838, he appears to have been an inmate. Mr. +Lathrop learned from his surviving sister that after publishing +_Fanshawe_ he produced a group of short stories entitled _Seven Tales +of my Native Land_, and that this lady retained a very favourable +recollection of the work, which her brother had given her to read. But +it never saw the light; his attempts to get it published were +unsuccessful, and at last, in a fit of irritation and despair, the +young author burned the manuscript. + +There is probably something autobiographic in the striking little tale +of _The Devil in Manuscript_. "They have been offered to seventeen +publishers," says the hero of that sketch in regard to a pile of his +own lucubrations. + + "It would make you stare to read their answers.... One man + publishes nothing but school-books; another has five novels + already under examination;... another gentleman is just + giving up business, on purpose, I verily believe, to avoid + publishing my book. In short, of all the seventeen + booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; + and he--a literary dabbler himself, I should judge--has the + impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast + improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of + condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not + be concerned on any terms.... But there does seem to be one + righteous man among these seventeen unrighteous ones, and he + tells me, fairly, that no American publisher will meddle + with an American work--seldom if by a known writer, and + never if by a new one--unless at the writer's risk." + +But though the _Seven Tales_ were not printed, Hawthorne, proceeded to +write others that were; the two collections of the _Twice-Told Tales_, +and the _Snow Image_, are gathered from a series of contributions to +the local journals and the annuals of that day. To make these three +volumes, he picked out the things he thought the best. "Some very +small part," he says of what remains, "might yet be rummaged out (but +it would not be worth the trouble), among the dingy pages of fifteen +or twenty-years-old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers +of faded _Souvenirs_." These three volumes represent no large amount +of literary labour for so long a period, and the author admits that +there is little to show "for the thought and industry of that portion +of his life." He attributes the paucity of his productions to a "total +lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been +most effervescent." "He had no incitement to literary effort in a +reasonable prospect of reputation or profit; nothing but the pleasure +itself of composition, an enjoyment not at all amiss in its way, and +perhaps essential to the merit of the work in hand, but which in the +long run will hardly keep the chill out of a writer's heart, or the +numbness out of his fingers." These words occur in the preface +attached in 1851 to the second edition of the _Twice-Told Tales_; _à +propos_ of which I may say that there is always a charm in Hawthorne's +prefaces which makes one grateful for a pretext to quote from them. At +this time _The Scarlet Letter_ had just made his fame, and the short +tales were certain of a large welcome; but the account he gives of the +failure of the earlier edition to produce a sensation (it had been +published in two volumes, at four years apart), may appear to +contradict my assertion that, though he was not recognised +immediately, he was recognised betimes. In 1850, when _The Scarlet +Letter_ appeared, Hawthorne was forty-six years old, and this may +certainly seem a long-delayed popularity. On the other hand, it must +be remembered that he had not appealed to the world with any great +energy. _The Twice-Told Tales_, charming as they are, do not +constitute a very massive literary pedestal. As soon as the author, +resorting to severer measures, put forth _The Scarlet Letter_, the +public ear was touched and charmed, and after that it was held to the +end. "Well it might have been!" the reader will exclaim. "But what a +grievous pity that the dulness of this same organ should have operated +so long as a deterrent, and by making Hawthorne wait till he was +nearly fifty to publish his first novel, have abbreviated by so much +his productive career!" The truth is, he cannot have been in any very +high degree ambitious; he was not an abundant producer, and there was +manifestly a strain of generous indolence in his composition. There +was a loveable want of eagerness about him. Let the encouragement +offered have been what it might, he had waited till he was lapsing +from middle-life to strike his first noticeable blow; and during the +last ten years of his career he put forth but two complete works, and +the fragment of a third. + +It is very true, however, that during this early period he seems to +have been very glad to do whatever came to his hand. Certain of his +tales found their way into one of the annuals of the time, a +publication endowed with the brilliant title of _The Boston Token and +Atlantic Souvenir_. The editor of this graceful repository was S. G. +Goodrich, a gentleman who, I suppose, may be called one of the +pioneers of American periodical literature. He is better known to the +world as Mr. Peter Parley, a name under which he produced a multitude +of popular school-books, story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize +human knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind. This enterprising +purveyor of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, to have been +Hawthorne's earliest protector, if protection is the proper word for +the treatment that the young author received from him. Mr. Goodrich +induced him in 1836 to go to Boston to edit a periodical in which he +was interested, _The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining +Knowledge_. I have never seen the work in question, but Hawthorne's +biographer gives a sorry account of it. It was managed by the +so-called Bewick Company, which "took its name from Thomas Bewick, the +English restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to +do his memory honour by his admirable illustrations. But in fact it +never did any one honour, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny +popular affair, containing condensed information about innumerable +subjects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the +crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the hands of +several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a +salary of five hundred dollars a year; but it appears that he got next +to nothing, and did not stay in the position long." Hawthorne wrote +from Boston in the winter of 1836: "I came here trusting to Goodrich's +positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; +and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see +that he means to pay at all. I have now broke off all intercourse with +him, and never think of going near him.... I don't feel at all obliged +to him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in +the Bewick Company ... and I defy them to get another to do for a +thousand dollars, what I do for five hundred."--"I make nothing," he +says in another letter, "of writing a history or biography before +dinner." Goodrich proposed to him to write a _Universal History_ for +the use of schools, offering him a hundred dollars for his share in +the work. Hawthorne accepted the offer and took a hand--I know not how +large a one--in the job. His biographer has been able to identify a +single phrase as our author's. He is speaking of George IV: "Even when +he was quite a young man this King cared as much about dress as any +young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is +a pity that he was a King, for he might otherwise have made an +excellent tailor." The _Universal History_ had a great vogue and +passed through hundreds of editions; but it does not appear that +Hawthorne ever received more than his hundred dollars. The writer of +these pages vividly remembers making its acquaintance at an early +stage of his education--a very fat, stumpy-looking book, bound in +boards covered with green paper, and having in the text very small +woodcuts, of the most primitive sort. He associates it to this day +with the names of Sesostris and Semiramis whenever he encounters them, +there having been, he supposes, some account of the conquests of these +potentates that would impress itself upon the imagination of a child. +At the end of four months, Hawthorne had received but twenty +dollars--four pounds--for his editorship of the _American Magazine_. + +There is something pitiful in this episode, and something really +touching in the sight of a delicate and superior genius obliged to +concern himself with such paltry undertakings. The simple fact was +that for a man attempting at that time in America to live by his pen, +there were no larger openings; and to live at all Hawthorne had, as +the phrase is, to make himself small. This cost him less, moreover, +than it would have cost a more copious and strenuous genius, for his +modesty was evidently extreme, and I doubt whether he had any very +ardent consciousness of rare talent. He went back to Salem, and from +this tranquil standpoint, in the spring of 1837, he watched the first +volume of his _Twice-Told Tales_ come into the world. He had by this +time been living some ten years of his manhood in Salem, and an +American commentator may be excused for feeling the desire to +construct, from the very scanty material that offers itself, a slight +picture of his life there. I have quoted his own allusions to its +dulness and blankness, but I confess that these observations serve +rather to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer has of +necessity a relish for detail; his business is to multiply points of +characterisation. Mr. Lathrop tells us that our author "had little +communication with even the members of his family. Frequently his +meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often +that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family +circle. He never read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters.... +It was the custom in this household for the several members to remain +very much by themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as +rigorous recluses as himself, and, speaking of the isolation which +reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, 'We do not even _live_ at our +house!'" It is added that he was not in the habit of going to church. +This is not a lively picture, nor is that other sketch of his daily +habits much more exhilarating, in which Mr. Lathrop affirms that +though the statement that for several years "he never saw the sun" is +entirely an error, yet it is true that he stirred little abroad all +day and "seldom chose to walk in the town except at night." In the +dusky hours he took walks of many miles along the coast, or else +wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, +and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of contact with +life. Life, on such occasions, was not very exuberant, as any one will +reflect who has been acquainted with the physiognomy of a small New +England town after nine o'clock in the evening. Hawthorne, however, +was an inveterate observer of small things, and he found a field for +fancy among the most trivial accidents. There could be no better +example of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled "Night +Sketches," included among the _Twice-Told Tales_. This small +dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is +almost to overrate its importance. This fact is equally true, indeed, +of a great many of its companions, which give even the most +appreciative critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretion--almost +of his own cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, +that simply to mention them is to put them in a false position. The +author's claim for them is barely audible, even to the most acute +listener. They are things to take or to leave--to enjoy, but not to +talk about. Not to read them would be to do them an injustice (to read +them is essentially to relish them), but to bring the machinery of +criticism to bear upon them would be to do them a still greater wrong. +I must remember, however, that to carry this principle too far would +be to endanger the general validity of the present little work--a +consummation which it can only be my desire to avert. Therefore it is +that I think it permissible to remark that in Hawthorne, the whole +class of little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to +which these just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a greater +charm than there is any warrant for in their substance. The charm is +made up of the spontaneity, the personal quality, of the fancy that +plays through them, its mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity +and its _bonhomie_. The Night Sketches are simply the light, familiar +record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, dull, rainy +day, through the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a country town, where +the rare gas-lamps twinkle in the large puddles, and the blue jars in +the druggist's window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say +that the inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force, +and such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem puddles, +nevertheless, springs, flower-like, a charming and natural piece of +prose. + +I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed +he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His +Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual +things, and of his habit of converting them into _memoranda_. These +Note-Books, by the way--this seems as good a place as any other to say +it--are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is +anything exactly corresponding to them in the whole body of +literature. They were published--in six volumes, issued at +intervals--some years after Hawthorne's death, and no person +attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret +that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of +view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the +biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, +then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books, but I am obliged to +confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at +a loss to perceive how they came to be written--what was Hawthorne's +purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial +chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it +is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, +the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its +value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register +of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. +Outward objects play much the larger part in it; opinions, +convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes +his Note-Book into his confidence or commits to its pages any +reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to +describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that +they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and +decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having +suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have +determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is +too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other +hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are +curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of +Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), +but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we +find in them. Our business for the moment, however, is not with the +light that they throw upon his intellect, but with the information +they offer about his habits and his social circumstances. + +I know not at what age he began to keep a diary; the first entries in +the American volumes are of the summer of 1835. There is a phrase in +the preface to his novel of _Transformation_, which must have lingered +in the minds of many Americans who have tried to write novels and to +lay the scene of them in the western world. "No author, without a +trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a +country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no +picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace +prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with +my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books +operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat ominous text. It +does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say +that the effect would be the same for the usual English reader. An +American reads between the lines--he completes the suggestions--he +constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice +in saying that the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American +diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the +whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary +blankness--a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail. +Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for +detail, and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the +diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the +pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple +society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not +invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as +possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce +his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements +that were absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the +blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that +our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for +subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must +have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, +richer, warmer-European spectacle--it takes such an accumulation of +history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a +fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young +Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the +same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world +around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, +however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his +fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The +negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his +contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little +ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of +high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent +from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to +know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and +indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no +personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no +diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor +manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages +nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman +churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor +Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, +no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such +list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American +life--especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect +of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a +general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid +light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left +out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal +remains; what it is that remains--that is his secret, his joke, as one +may say. It would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him +the consolation of his national gift, that "American humour" of which +of late years we have heard so much. + +But in helping us to measure what remains, our author's Diaries, as I +have already intimated, would give comfort rather to persons who might +have taken the alarm from the brief sketch I have just attempted of +what I have called the negative side of the American social situation, +than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensations. +Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the +country, drives in stage-coaches, people he met in taverns. The +minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he deems +worthy of being commemorated is frequently extreme, and from this fact +we get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of vision. +"Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the +windows most cheerfully; as if there were a bright, comfortable light +within its darksome stone wall." "I went yesterday with Monsieur S---- +to pick raspberries. He fell through an old log-bridge, thrown over a +hollow; looking back, only his head and shoulders appeared through the +rotten logs and among the bushes.--A shower coming on, the rapid +running of a little barefooted boy, coming up unheard, and dashing +swiftly past us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran +adown the path and up the opposite side." In another place he devotes +a page to a description of a dog whom he saw running round after its +tail; in still another he remarks, in a paragraph by itself--"The +aromatic odor of peat-smoke, in the sunny autumnal air is very +pleasant." The reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty +gives a place in his mind--and his inkstand--to such trifles as these, +it is because nothing else of superior importance demands admission. +Everything in the Notes indicates a simple, democratic, +thinly-composed society; there is no evidence of the writer finding +himself in any variety or intimacy of relations with any one or with +anything. We find a good deal of warrant for believing that if we add +that statement of Mr. Lathrop's about his meals being left at the door +of his room, to rural rambles of which an impression of the temporary +phases of the local apple-crop were the usual, and an encounter with +an organ-grinder, or an eccentric dog, the rarer, outcome, we +construct a rough image of our author's daily life during the several +years that preceded his marriage. He appears to have read a good deal, +and that he must have been familiar with the sources of good English +we see from his charming, expressive, slightly self-conscious, +cultivated, but not too cultivated, style. Yet neither in these early +volumes of his Note-Books, nor in the later, is there any mention of +his reading. There are no literary judgments or impressions--there is +almost no allusion to works or to authors. The allusions to +individuals of any kind are indeed much less numerous than one might +have expected; there is little psychology, little description of +manners. We are told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem during +the early part of Hawthorne's life "a strong circle of wealthy +families," which "maintained rigorously the distinctions of class," +and whose "entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent." +This is a rather pictorial way of saying that there were a number of +people in the place--the commercial and professional aristocracy, as +it were--who lived in high comfort and respectability, and who, in +their small provincial way, doubtless had pretensions to be exclusive. +Into this delectable company Mr. Lathrop intimates that his hero was +free to penetrate. It is easy to believe it, and it would be difficult +to perceive why the privilege should have been denied to a young man +of genius and culture, who was very good-looking (Hawthorne must have +been in these days, judging by his appearance later in life, a +strikingly handsome fellow), and whose American pedigree was virtually +as long as the longest they could show. But in fact Hawthorne appears +to have ignored the good society of his native place almost +completely; no echo of its conversation is to be found in his tales or +his journals. Such an echo would possibly not have been especially +melodious, and if we regret the shyness and stiffness, the reserve, +the timidity, the suspicion, or whatever it was, that kept him from +knowing what there was to be known, it is not because we have any very +definite assurance that his gains would have been great. Still, since +a beautiful writer was growing up in Salem, it is a pity that he +should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the +types that flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost +all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling faculty, +Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for +the commoner stuff of human nature. Thoroughly American in all ways, +he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social +distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or +intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise +with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself if +possible into their shoes. His Note-Books, and even his tales, are +full of evidence of this easy and natural feeling about all his +unconventional fellow-mortals--this imaginative interest and +contemplative curiosity--and it sometimes takes the most charming and +graceful forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and +delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the +points in his character which his reader comes most to appreciate--that +reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a dusky and malarious +genius. + +But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few, +he must in the nature of things have been more or less of a consenting +democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social +structure in which he played his part. The air of his journals and his +tales alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This feeling +has by no means passed out of New England life; it still flourishes in +perfection in the great stock of the people, especially in rural +communities; but it is probable that at the present hour a writer of +Hawthorne's general fastidiousness would not express it quite so +artlessly. "A shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the town," he +says, in _Chippings with a Chisel_, "was anxious to obtain two or +three gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay +for these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board." This +image of a gentlewoman keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders, +seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all +incongruous. It will be observed that the lady in question was shrewd; +it was probable that she was substantially educated, and of reputable +life, and it is certain that she was energetic. These qualities would +make it natural to Hawthorne to speak of her as a gentlewoman; the +natural tendency in societies where the sense of equality prevails, +being to take for granted the high level rather than the low. Perhaps +the most striking example of the democratic sentiment in all our +author's tales, however, is the figure of Uncle Venner, in _The House +of the Seven Gables_. Uncle Venner is a poor old man in a brimless hat +and patched trousers, who picks up a precarious subsistence by +rendering, for a compensation, in the houses and gardens of the good +people of Salem, those services that are know in New England as +"chores." He carries parcels, splits firewood, digs potatoes, collects +refuse for the maintenance of his pigs, and looks forward with +philosophic equanimity to the time when he shall end his days in the +almshouse. But in spite of the very modest place that he occupies in +the social scale, he is received on a footing of familiarity in the +household of the far-descended Miss Pyncheon; and when this ancient +lady and her companions take the air in the garden of a summer +evening, he steps into the estimable circle and mingles the smoke of +his pipe with their refined conversation. This obviously is rather +imaginative--Uncle Venner is a creation with a purpose. He is an +original, a natural moralist, a philosopher; and Hawthorne, who knew +perfectly what he was about in introducing him--Hawthorne always knew +perfectly what he was about--wished to give in his person an example +of humorous resignation and of a life reduced to the simplest and +homeliest elements, as opposed to the fantastic pretensions of the +antiquated heroine of the story. He wished to strike a certain +exclusively human and personal note. He knew that for this purpose he +was taking a licence; but the point is that he felt he was not +indulging in any extravagant violation of reality. Giving in a letter, +about 1830, an account of a little journey he was making in +Connecticut, he says, of the end of a seventeen miles' stage, that "in +the evening, however, I went to a Bible-class with a very polite and +agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling +tailor of very questionable habits." + +Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absented himself from +Salem, and to have wandered somewhat through the New England States. +But the only one of these episodes of which there is a considerable +account in the Note-Books is a visit that he paid in the summer of +1837 to his old college-mate, Horatio Bridge, who was living upon his +father's property in Maine, in company with an eccentric young +Frenchman, a teacher of his native tongue, who was looking for pupils +among the northern forests. I have said that there was less psychology +in Hawthorne's Journals than might have been looked for; but there is +nevertheless a certain amount of it, and nowhere more than in a number +of pages relating to this remarkable "Monsieur S." (Hawthorne, +intimate as he apparently became with him, always calls him +"Monsieur," just as throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks +of all his friends, even the most familiar, as "Mr." He confers the +prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow-woodsman at +Concord, and upon the emancipated brethren at Brook Farm.) These pages +are completely occupied with Monsieur S., who was evidently a man of +character, with the full complement of his national vivacity. There is +an elaborate effort to analyse the poor young Frenchman's disposition, +something conscientious and painstaking, respectful, explicit, almost +solemn. These passages are very curious as a reminder of the absence +of the off-hand element in the manner in which many Americans, and +many New Englanders especially, make up their minds about people whom +they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder of something that may be +called the importance of the individual in the American world; which +is a result of the newness and youthfulness of society and of the +absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it +were, and, thanks to the absence of a variety of social types and of +settled heads under which he may be easily and conveniently +pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a wonder and a mystery. An +Englishman, a Frenchman--a Frenchman above all--judges quickly, +easily, from his own social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has +not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility +which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes; and he has +the advantage that his standards are fixed by the general consent of +the society in which he lives. A Frenchman, in this respect, is +particularly happy and comfortable, happy and comfortable to a degree +which I think is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the +most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to, +and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the +French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he +is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond +the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and +hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a +little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had +woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which +in Hawthorne was almost as much a quality of race as of genius; albeit +that Hawthorne has paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on +"Lichfield and Uttoxeter," in his volume on England), a tribute of the +finest appreciation. American intellectual standards are vague, and +Hawthorne's countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather +uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated conscience. + + * * * * * + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +EARLY WRITINGS. + + +The second volume of the _Twice-Told Tales_ was published in 1845, in +Boston; and at this time a good many of the stories which were +afterwards collected into the _Mosses from an Old Manse_ had already +appeared, chiefly in _The Democratic Review_, a sufficiently +flourishing periodical of that period. In mentioning these things I +anticipate; but I touch upon the year 1845 in order to speak of the +two collections of _Twice-Told Tales_ at once. During the same year +Hawthorne edited an interesting volume, the _Journals of an African +Cruiser_, by his friend Bridge, who had gone into the Navy and seen +something of distant waters. His biographer mentions that even then +Hawthorne's name was thought to bespeak attention for a book, and he +insists on this fact in contradiction to the idea that his productions +had hitherto been as little noticed as his own declaration that he +remained "for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in +America," might lead one, and has led many people, to suppose. "In +this dismal chamber FAME was won," he writes in Salem in 1836. And we +find in the Note-Books (1840), this singularly beautiful and touching +passage:-- + + "Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to + sit in days gone by.... Here I have written many tales--many + that have been burned to ashes, many that have doubtless + deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted + chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have + appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become + visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he + ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, + because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here + my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad + and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat + a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know + me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, + or whether it would ever know me at all--at least till I + were in my grave. And sometimes it seems to me as if I were + already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled + and benumbed. But oftener I was happy--at least as happy as + I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of + being. By and by the world found me out in my lonely chamber + and called me forth--not indeed with a loud roar of + acclamation, but rather with a still small voice--and forth + I went, but found nothing in the world I thought preferable + to my solitude till now.... And now I begin to understand + why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, + and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and + bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I + should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with + earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude + encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude + till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of + my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I used to think + that I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states + of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!... Indeed, + we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and + all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest + substance of a dream--till the heart be touched. That touch + creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of + reality and inheritors of eternity." + +There is something exquisite in the soft philosophy of this little +retrospect, and it helps us to appreciate it to know that the writer +had at this time just become engaged to be married to a charming and +accomplished person, with whom his union, which took place two years +later, was complete and full of happiness. But I quote it more +particularly for the evidence it affords that, already in 1840, +Hawthorne could speak of the world finding him out and calling him +forth, as of an event tolerably well in the past. He had sent the +first of the _Twice-Told_ series to his old college friend, +Longfellow, who had already laid, solidly, the foundation of his great +poetic reputation, and at the time of his sending it had written him a +letter from which it will be to our purpose to quote a few lines:-- + + "You tell me you have met with troubles and changes. I know + not what these may have been; but I can assure you that + trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there + is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in + either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have + not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that + there may have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the + shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you + cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my + retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant + remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in + thinking that future years may be more varied, and therefore + more tolerable, than the past. You give me more credit than + I deserve in supposing that I have led a studious life. I + have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so + desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it + left me the fruits of study.... I have another great + difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so + little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to + concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a + life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes, + through a peephole, I have caught a glimpse of the real + world, and the two or three articles in which I have + portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others." + +It is more particularly for the sake of the concluding lines that I +have quoted this passage; for evidently no portrait of Hawthorne at +this period is at all exact which, fails to insist upon the constant +struggle which must have gone on between his shyness and his desire to +know something of life; between what may be called his evasive and his +inquisitive tendencies. I suppose it is no injustice to Hawthorne to +say that on the whole his shyness always prevailed; and yet, +obviously, the struggle was constantly there. He says of his +_Twice-Told Tales_, in the preface, "They are not the talk of a +secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so they could +hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but +his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an +intercourse with the world." We are speaking here of small things, it +must be remembered--of little attempts, little sketches, a little +world. But everything is relative, and this smallness of scale must +not render less apparent the interesting character of Hawthorne's +efforts. As for the _Twice-Told Tales_ themselves, they are an old +story now; every one knows them a little, and those who admire them +particularly have read them a great many times. The writer of this +sketch belongs to the latter class, and he has been trying to forget +his familiarity with them, and ask himself what impression they would +have made upon him at the time they appeared, in the first bloom of +their freshness, and before the particular Hawthorne-quality, as it +may be called, had become an established, a recognised and valued, +fact. Certainly, I am inclined to think, if one had encountered these +delicate, dusky flowers in the blossomless garden of American +journalism, one would have plucked them with a very tender hand; one +would have felt that here was something essentially fresh and new; +here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a degree +distinctly appreciable, was an original element in literature. When I +think of it, I almost envy Hawthorne's earliest readers; the sensation +of opening upon _The Great Carbuncle_, _The Seven Vagabonds_, or _The +Threefold Destiny_ in an American annual of forty years ago, must have +been highly agreeable. + +Among these shorter things (it is better to speak of the whole +collection, including the _Snow Image_, and the _Mosses from an Old +Manse_ at once) there are three sorts of tales, each one of which has +an original stamp. There are, to begin with, the stories of fantasy +and allegory--those among which the three I have just mentioned would +be numbered, and which on the whole, are the most original. This is +the group to which such little masterpieces as _Malvin's Burial_, +_Rappacini's Daughter_, and _Young Goodman Brown_ also belong--these +two last perhaps representing the highest point that Hawthorne reached +in this direction. Then there are the little tales of New England +history, which are scarcely less admirable, and of which _The Grey +Champion_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_, and the four beautiful +_Legends of the Province House_, as they are called, are the most +successful specimens. Lastly come the slender sketches of actual +scenes and of the objects and manners about him, by means of which, +more particularly, he endeavoured "to open an intercourse with the +world," and which, in spite of their slenderness, have an infinite +grace and charm. Among these things _A Rill from the Town Pump_, _The +Village Uncle_, _The Toll-Gatherer's Day_, the _Chippings with a +Chisel_, may most naturally be mentioned. As we turn over these +volumes we feel that the pieces that spring most directly from his +fancy, constitute, as I have said (putting his four novels aside), his +most substantial claim to our attention. It would be a mistake to +insist too much upon them; Hawthorne was himself the first to +recognise that. "These fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the +_Mosses from an Old Manse_, "with so little of external life about +them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose--so reserved even while +they sometimes seem so frank--often but half in earnest, and never, +even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they +profess to image--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis +for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly uttered; but it +may be said, partly in answer to it, and partly in confirmation, that +the valuable element in these things was not what Hawthorne put into +them consciously, but what passed into them without his being able to +measure it--the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination. +This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing--this purity and +spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. For the rest, it is interesting +to see how it borrowed a particular colour from the other faculties +that lay near it--how the imagination, in this capital son of the old +Puritans, reflected the hue of the more purely moral part, of the +dusky, overshadowed conscience. The conscience, by no fault of its +own, in every genuine offshoot of that sombre lineage, lay under the +shadow of the sense of _sin_. This darkening cloud was no essential +part of the nature of the individual; it stood fixed in the general +moral heaven, under which he grew up and looked at life. It projected +from above, from outside, a black patch over his spirit, and it was +for him to do what he could with the black patch. There were all sorts +of possible ways of dealing with it; they depended upon the personal +temperament. Some natures would let it lie as it fell, and contrive to +be tolerably comfortable beneath it. Others would groan and sweat and +suffer; but the dusky blight would remain, and their lives would be +lives of misery. Here and there an individual, irritated beyond +endurance, would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what +would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity. Hawthorne's way was the +best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to +himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the very substance +of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and charming +fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was +exceptionally fortunate; he had his genius to help him. Nothing is +more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively _imported_ +character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist +there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample +cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it +was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But +his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not +moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he +treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not +discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and +regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip +through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his +imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature; the light element +that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this +rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers +about the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of +Hawthorne's stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse +itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan +morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with +which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would +see him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more +darkly would they have frowned could they have understood that he had +converted the very principle of their own being into one of his toys! + +It will be seen that I am far from being struck with the justice of +that view of the author of the _Twice-Told Tales_, which is so happily +expressed by the French critic to whom I alluded at an earlier stage +of this essay. To speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montégut does, as a +_romancier pessimiste_, seems to me very much beside the mark. He is +no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much +of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of +human nature; indeed, I should even say that at bottom he does not +take human nature as hard as he may seem to do. "His bitterness," says +M. Montégut, "is without abatement, and his bad opinion of man is +without compensation.... His little tales have the air of confessions +which the soul makes to itself; they are so many little slaps which +the author applies to our face." This, it seems to me, is to +exaggerate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish of +gloomy subjects. What pleased him in such subjects was their +picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro; +but they were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a +predominantly melancholy, feeling about the human soul. Such at least +is my own impression. He is to a considerable degree ironical--this is +part of his charm--part even, one may say, of his brightness; but he +is neither bitter nor cynical--he is rarely even what I should call +tragical. There have certainly been story-tellers of a gayer and +lighter spirit; there have been observers more humorous, more +hilarious--though on the whole Hawthorne's observation has a smile in +it oftener than may at first appear; but there has rarely been an +observer more serene, less agitated by what he sees and less disposed +to call things deeply into question. As I have already intimated, his +Note-Books are full of this simple and almost child-like serenity. +That dusky pre-occupation with the misery of human life and the +wickedness of the human heart which such a critic as M. Emile Montégut +talks about, is totally absent from them; and if we may suppose a +person to have read these Diaries before looking into the tales, we +may be sure that such a reader would be greatly surprised to hear the +author described as a disappointed, disdainful genius. "This marked +love of cases of conscience," says M. Montégut, "this taciturn, +scornful cast of mind, this habit of seeing sin everywhere and hell +always gaping open, this dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world +and a nature draped in mourning, these lonely conversations of the +imagination with the conscience, this pitiless analysis resulting from +a perpetual examination of one's self, and from the tortures of a +heart closed before men and open to God--all these elements of the +Puritan character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or to speak more +justly, have _filtered_ into him, through a long succession of +generations." This is a very pretty and very vivid account of +Hawthorne, superficially considered; and it is just such a view of the +case as would commend itself most easily and most naturally to a hasty +critic. It is all true indeed, with a difference; Hawthorne was all +that M. Montégut says, _minus_ the conviction. The old Puritan moral +sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our +responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster--these +things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had +straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them--to +judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and ĉsthetic point of +view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of +conviction makes the difference; but the difference is great. + +Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that in speaking of him it +is inevitable that we should feel ourselves confronted with the +familiar problem of the difference between the fancy and the +imagination. Of the larger and more potent faculty he certainly +possessed a liberal share; no one can read _The House of the Seven +Gables_ without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. But I am +often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now +chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for +conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called +the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are redolent of a +rich imagination. + + "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only + dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you + will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young + Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a + distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the + night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the + congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, + because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and + drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from + the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with his + hand on the open Bible of the sacred truth of our religion, + and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future + bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown grow + pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the + gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at + midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning + or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he + scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his + wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was + borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an + aged woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly + procession, besides neighbours not a few, they carved no + hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was + gloom." + +There is imagination in that, and in many another passage that I might +quote; but as a general thing I should characterise the more +metaphysical of our author's short stories as graceful and felicitous +conceits. They seem to me to be qualified in this manner by the very +fact that they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne, in his +metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my +sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many +excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in +symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were +another and a very different story. I frankly confess that I have as a +general thing but little enjoyment of it and that it has never seemed +to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. It has produced +assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his younger years +had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great +masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good things--a story +and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible +for a large part of the forcible-feeble writing that has been +inflicted upon the world. The only cases in which it is endurable is +when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself +with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and +fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent and the failure +complete. Then the machinery alone is visible, and the end to which it +operates becomes a matter of indifference. There was but little +literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's +earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe +perhaps held the scales the highest. He at any rate rattled them +loudest, and pretended, more than any one else, to conduct the +weighing-process on scientific principles. Very remarkable was this +process of Edgar Poe's, and very extraordinary were his principles; +but he had the advantage of being a man of genius, and his +intelligence was frequently great. His collection of critical sketches +of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine would call his +_milieu_ and _moment_, is very curious and interesting reading, and +it has one quality which ought to keep it from ever being completely +forgotten. It is probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of +_provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification of men. Poe's +judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great +deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, +sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight +imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter +upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his +estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should +express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in +his tales--in defence of which, he says, "however, or for whatever +object employed, there is scarcely one respectable word to be said.... +The deepest emotion," he goes on, "aroused within us by the happiest +allegory _as_ allegory, is a very, _very_ imperfectly satisfied sense +of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have +preferred his not having attempted to overcome.... One thing is clear, +that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning +a fiction;" and Poe has furthermore the courage to remark that the +_Pilgrim's Progress_ is a "ludicrously overrated book." Certainly, as +a general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity and felicity of +Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; the idea appears to have +made itself at home in them easily. Nothing could be better in this +respect than _The Snow-Image_ (a little masterpiece), or _The Great +Carbuncle_, or _Doctor Heidegger's Experiment_, or _Rappacini's +Daughter_. But in such things as _The Birth-Mark_ and _The +Bosom-Serpent_, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical, +slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its +envelope. But these are matters of light impression, and there would +be a want of tact in pretending to discriminate too closely among +things which all, in one way or another, have a charm. The charm--the +great charm--is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole +deep mystery of man's soul and conscience. They are moral, and their +interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere +accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The +fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, +and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it. This +natural, yet fanciful familiarity with it, this air, on the author's +part, of being a confirmed _habitué_ of a region of mysteries and +subtleties, constitutes the originality of his tales. And then they +have the further merit of seeming, for what they are, to spring up so +freely and lightly. The author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular +dweller in the moral, psychological realm; he goes to and fro in it, +as a man who knows his way. His tread is a light and modest one, but +he keeps the key in his pocket. + +His little historical stories all seem to me admirable; they are so +good that you may re-read them many times. They are not numerous, and +they are very short; but they are full of a vivid and delightful sense +of the New England past; they have, moreover, the distinction, little +tales of a dozen and fifteen pages as they are, of being the only +successful attempts at historical fiction that have been made in the +United States. Hawthorne was at home in the early New England history; +he had thumbed its records and he had breathed its air, in whatever +odd receptacles this somewhat pungent compound still lurked. He was +fond of it, and he was proud of it, as any New Englander must be, +measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics who formed +his earliest precursors, in laying the foundations of a mighty empire. +Hungry for the picturesque as he always was, and not finding any very +copious provision of it around him, he turned back into the two +preceding centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive +annals of Massachusetts should at least _appear_ picturesque. His +fancy, which was always alive, played a little with the somewhat +meagre and angular facts of the colonial period and forthwith +converted a great many of them into impressive legends and pictures. +There is a little infusion of colour, a little vagueness about certain +details, but it is very gracefully and discreetly done, and realities +are kept in view sufficiently to make us feel that if we are reading +romance, it is romance that rather supplements than contradicts +history. The early annals of New England were not fertile in legend, +but Hawthorne laid his hands upon everything that would serve his +purpose, and in two or three cases his version of the story has a +great deal of beauty. _The Grey Champion_ is a sketch of less than +eight pages, but the little figures stand up in the tale as stoutly, +at the least, as if they were propped up on half-a-dozen chapters by a +dryer annalist, and the whole thing has the merit of those cabinet +pictures in which the artist has been able to make his persons look +the size of life. Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the least a +realist--he was not to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine +lover of the good city of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his +courage in attempting to recount the "traditions" of Washington +Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital. The four +_Legends of the Province House_ are certain shadowy stories which he +professes to have gathered in an ancient tavern lurking behind the +modern shop-fronts of this part of the city. The Province House +disappeared some years ago, but while it stood it was pointed to as +the residence of the Royal Governors of Massachusetts before the +Revolution. I have no recollection of it, but it cannot have been, +even from Hawthorne's account of it, which is as pictorial as he +ventures to make it, a very imposing piece of antiquity. The writer's +charming touch, however, throws a rich brown tone over its rather +shallow venerableness; and we are beguiled into believing, for +instance, at the close of _Howe's Masquerade_ (a story of a strange +occurrence at an entertainment given by Sir William Howe, the last of +the Royal Governors, during the siege of Boston by Washington), that +"superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the +wondrous tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture +the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide +through the Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in +a military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping +his iron-shod boots upon the freestone steps, with a semblance of +feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp." Hawthorne +had, as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that +faculty which is called now-a-days the historic consciousness. He +never sought to exhibit it on a large scale; he exhibited it indeed on +a scale so minute that we must not linger too much upon it. His vision +of the past was filled with definite images--images none the less +definite that they were concerned with events as shadowy as this +dramatic passing away of the last of King George's representatives in +his long loyal but finally alienated colony. + +I have said that Hawthorne had become engaged in about his +thirty-fifth-year; but he was not married until 1842. Before this +event took place he passed through two episodes which (putting his +falling in love aside) were much the most important things that had +yet happened to him. They interrupted the painful monotony of his +life, and brought the affairs of men within his personal experience. +One of these was moreover in itself a curious and interesting chapter +of observation, and it fructified, in Hawthorne's memory, in one of +his best productions. How urgently he needed at this time to be drawn +within the circle of social accidents, a little anecdote related by +Mr. Lathrop in connection with his first acquaintance with the young +lady he was to marry, may serve as an example. This young lady became +known to him through her sister, who had first approached him as an +admirer of the _Twice-Told Tales_ (as to the authorship of which she +had been so much in the dark as to have attributed it first, +conjecturally, to one of the two Miss Hathornes); and the two Miss +Peabodys, desiring to see more of the charming writer, caused him to +be invited to a species of _conversazione_ at the house of one of +their friends, at which they themselves took care to be punctual. +Several other ladies, however, were as punctual as they, and Hawthorne +presently arriving, and seeing a bevy of admirers where he had +expected but three or four, fell into a state of agitation, which is +vividly described by his biographer. He "stood perfectly motionless, +but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing +away.... He was stricken with dismay; his face lost colour and took +on a warm paleness ... his agitation was-very great; he stood by a +table and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, he found his +hand trembling so that he was obliged to lay it down." It was +desirable, certainly, that something should occur to break the spell +of a diffidence that might justly be called morbid. There is another +little sentence dropped by Mr. Lathrop in relation to this period of +Hawthorne's life, which appears to me worth quoting, though I am by no +means sure that it will seem so to the reader. It has a very simple +and innocent air, but to a person not without an impression of the +early days of "culture" in New England, it will be pregnant with +historic meaning. The elder Miss Peabody, who afterwards was +Hawthorne's sister-in-law and who acquired later in life a very +honourable American fame as a woman of benevolence, of learning, and +of literary accomplishment, had invited the Miss Hathornes to come to +her house for the evening, and to bring with them their brother, whom +she wished to thank for his beautiful tales. "Entirely to her +surprise," says Mr. Lathrop, completing thereby his picture of the +attitude of this remarkable family toward society--"entirely to her +surprise they came. She herself opened the door, and there, before +her, between his sisters, stood a splendidly handsome youth, tall and +strong, with no appearance whatever of timidity, but instead, an +almost fierce determination making his face stern. This was his +resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really +felt. His hostess brought out Flaxman's designs for Dante, just +received from Professor Felton, of Harvard, and the party made an +evening's entertainment out of them." This last sentence is the one I +allude to; and were it not for fear of appearing too fanciful I +should say that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an +unconscious expression of the lonely frigidity which characterised +most attempts at social recreation in the New England world some forty +years ago. There was at that time a great desire for culture, a great +interest in knowledge, in art, in ĉsthetics, together with a very +scanty supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small things were +made to do large service; and there is something even touching in the +solemnity of consideration that was bestowed by the emancipated New +England conscience upon little wandering books and prints, little +echoes and rumours of observation and experience. There flourished at +that time in Boston a very remarkable and interesting woman, of whom +we shall have more to say, Miss Margaret Fuller by name. This lady was +the apostle of culture, of intellectual curiosity, and in the +peculiarly interesting account of her life, published in 1852 by +Emerson and two other of her friends, there are pages of her letters +and diaries which narrate her visits to the Boston Athenĉum and the +emotions aroused in her mind by turning over portfolios of engravings. +These emotions were ardent and passionate--could hardly have been more +so had she been prostrate with contemplation in the Sistine Chapel or +in one of the chambers of the Pitti Palace. The only analogy I can +recall to this earnestness of interest in great works of art at a +distance from them, is furnished by the great Goethe's elaborate study +of plaster-casts and pencil-drawings at Weimar. I mention Margaret +Fuller here because a glimpse of her state of mind--her vivacity of +desire and poverty of knowledge--helps to define the situation. The +situation lives for a moment in those few words of Mr. Lathrop's. The +initiated mind, as I have ventured to call it, has a vision of a +little unadorned parlour, with the snow-drifts of a Massachusetts +winter piled up about its windows, and a group of sensitive and +serious people, modest votaries of opportunity, fixing their eyes upon +a bookful of Flaxman's attenuated outlines. + +At the beginning of the year 1839 he received, through political +interest, an appointment as weigher and gauger in the Boston +Custom-house. Mr. Van Buren then occupied the Presidency, and it +appears that the Democratic party, whose successful candidate he had +been, rather took credit for the patronage it had bestowed upon +literary men. Hawthorne was a Democrat, and apparently a zealous one; +even in later years, after the Whigs had vivified their principles by +the adoption of the Republican platform, and by taking up an honest +attitude on the question of slavery, his political faith never +wavered. His Democratic sympathies were eminently natural, and there +would have been an incongruity in his belonging to the other party. He +was not only by conviction, but personally and by association, a +Democrat. When in later years he found himself in contact with +European civilisation, he appears to have become conscious of a good +deal of latent radicalism in his disposition; he was oppressed with +the burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for +lightness and freshness and facility of change. But these things are +relative to the point of view, and in his own country Hawthorne cast +his lot with the party of conservatism, the party opposed to change +and freshness. The people who found something musty and mouldy in his +literary productions would have regarded this quite as a matter of +course; but we are not obliged to use invidious epithets in describing +his political preferences. The sentiment that attached him to the +Democracy was a subtle and honourable one, and the author of an +attempt to sketch a portrait of him, should be the last to complain of +this adjustment of his sympathies. It falls much more smoothly into +his reader's conception of him than any other would do; and if he had +had the perversity to be a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would +have been considerably taxed in devising a proper explanation of the +circumstance. At any rate, the Democrats gave him a small post in the +Boston Custom-house, to which an annual salary of $1,200 was attached, +and Hawthorne appears at first to have joyously welcomed the gift. The +duties of the office were not very congruous to the genius of a man of +fancy; but it had the advantage that it broke the spell of his cursed +solitude, as he called it, drew him away from Salem, and threw him, +comparatively speaking, into the world. The first volume of the +American Note-Books contains some extracts from letters written during +his tenure of this modest office, which indicate sufficiently that his +occupations cannot have been intrinsically gratifying. + + "I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during the + winter of 1840, "on board of a black little British + schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. + Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for + the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the dock as + if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel + lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful + prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts + and timbers, half immersed in the water and covered with + ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had + left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. + Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, + appeared the Bunker's Hill Monument, and what interested me + considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a + clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of + the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little + cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, + among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and + innumerable lumber of all sorts--my olfactories meanwhile + being greatly refreshed with the odour of a pipe, which the + captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last + came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light + upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the + signal of my release." + +A worse man than Hawthorne would have measured coal quite as well, and +of all the dismal tasks to which an unremunerated imagination has ever +had to accommodate itself, I remember none more sordid than the +business depicted in the foregoing lines. "I pray," he writes some +weeks later, "that in one year more I may find some way of escaping +from this unblest Custom-house; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I +do detest all offices; all, at least, that are held on a political +tenure, and I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither +away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to +india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that and which will +stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my +Custom-house experience--to know a politician. It is a knowledge which +no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me; because +the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." A few days later +he goes on in the same strain:-- + + "I do not think it is the doom laid upon me of murdering so + many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-house + that makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again + trying to write worthily ... yet with a sense as if all the + noblest part of man had been left out of my composition, or + had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own + keeping.... Never comes any bird of Paradise into that + dismal region. A salt or even a coal-ship is ten million + times preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the + fresh breeze around me, and my thoughts having hardly + anything to do with my occupation, are as free as air. + Nevertheless ... it is only once in a while that the image + and desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the + iron of my chain; for after all a human spirit may find no + insufficiency of food for it, even in the Custom-house. And + with such materials as these I do think and feel and learn + things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know + unless I had learned them there; so that the present + position of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum + of my real existence.... It is good for me, on many + accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know + much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of + power to act as a man among men. I have gained worldly + wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this + world. And when I quit this earthy career where I am now + buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left + behind. Men will not perceive, I trust, by my look or the + tenor of my thoughts and feelings, that I have been a + Custom-house officer." + +He says, writing shortly afterwards, that "when I shall be free again, +I will enjoy all things with the fresh simplicity of a child of five +years old. I shall grow young again, made all over anew. I will go +forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has +collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be +like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon." + +This forecast of his destiny was sufficiently exact. A year later, in +April 1841, he went to take up his abode in the socialistic community +of Brook Farm. Here he found himself among fields and flowers and +other natural products--as well as among many products that could not +very justly be called natural. He was exposed to summer showers in +plenty; and his personal associations were as different as possible +from, those he had encountered in fiscal circles. He made acquaintance +with Transcendentalism and the Transcendentalists. + + * * * * * + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +BROOK FARM AND CONCORD. + + +The history of the little industrial and intellectual association +which formed itself at this time in one of the suburbs of Boston has +not, to my knowledge, been written; though it is assuredly a curious +and interesting chapter in the domestic annals of New England. It +would of course be easy to overrate the importance of this ingenious +attempt of a few speculative persons to improve the outlook of +mankind. The experiment came and went very rapidly and quietly, +leaving very few traces behind it. It became simply a charming +personal reminiscence for the small number of amiable enthusiasts who +had had a hand in it. There were degrees of enthusiasm, and I suppose +there were degrees of amiability; but a certain generous brightness of +hope and freshness of conviction pervaded the whole undertaking and +rendered it, morally speaking, important to an extent of which any +heed that the world in general ever gave to it is an insufficient +measure. Of course it would be a great mistake to represent the +episode of Brook Farm as directly related to the manners and morals of +the New England world in general--and in especial to those of the +prosperous, opulent, comfortable part of it. The thing was the +experiment of a coterie--it was unusual, unfashionable, unsuccessful. +It was, as would then have been said, an amusement of the +Transcendentalists--a harmless effusion of Radicalism. The +Transcendentalists were not, after all, very numerous; and the +Radicals were by no means of the vivid tinge of those of our own day. +I have said that the Brook Farm community left no traces behind it +that the world in general can appreciate; I should rather say that the +only trace is a short novel, of which the principal merits reside in +its qualities of difference from the affair itself. _The Blithedale +Romance_ is the main result of Brook Farm; but _The Blithedale +Romance_ was very properly never recognised by the Brook Farmers as an +accurate portrait of their little colony. + +Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent complaint is +that it is monotonous, that it lacks variety of incident and of type, +the episode, our own business with which is simply that it was the +cause of Hawthorne's writing an admirable tale, might be welcomed as a +picturesque variation. At the same time, if we do not exaggerate its +proportions, it may seem to contain a fund of illustration as to that +phase of human life with which our author's own history mingled +itself. The most graceful account of the origin of Brook Farm is +probably to be found in these words of one of the biographers of +Margaret Fuller: "In Boston and its vicinity, several friends, for +whose character Margaret felt the highest-honour, were earnestly +considering the possibility of making such industrial, social, and +educational arrangements as would simplify economies, combine leisure +for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust collisions of +caste, equalise refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse +courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole." The reader will +perceive that this was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment +failed, the greater was the pity. The writer goes on to say that a +gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in literature (he had +begun by being a clergyman), "convinced by his experience in a +faithful ministry that the need was urgent for a thorough application +of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was +about staking his all of fortune, reputation, and influence, in an +attempt to organize a joint-stock company at Brook Farm." As Margaret +Fuller passes for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure of Zenobia +in _The Blithedale Romance_, and as she is probably, with one +exception, the person connected with the affair who, after Hawthorne, +offered most of what is called a personality to the world, I may +venture to quote a few more passages from her Memoirs--a curious, in +some points of view almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I +have said, an extremely interesting book. It was a strange history and +a strange destiny, that of this brilliant, restless, and unhappy +woman--this ardent New Englander, this impassioned Yankee, who +occupied so large a place in the thoughts, the lives, the affections, +of an intelligent and appreciative society, and yet left behind her +nothing but the memory of a memory. Her function, her reputation, were +singular, and not altogether reassuring: she was a talker, she was +_the_ talker, she was the genius of talk. She had a magnificent, +though by no means an unmitigated, egotism; and in some of her +utterances it is difficult to say whether pride or humility +prevails--as for instance when she writes that she feels "that there +is plenty of room in the Universe for my faults, and as if I could not +spend time in thinking of them when so many things interest me more." +She has left the same sort of reputation as a great actress. Some of +her writing has extreme beauty, almost all of it has a real interest, +but her value, her activity, her sway (I am not sure that one can say +her charm), were personal and practical. She went to Europe, expanded +to new desires and interests, and, very poor herself, married an +impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, she +embarked to return to her own country, and was lost at sea in a +terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death +combined with many of the elements of her life to convert her memory +into a sort of legend, so that the people who had known her well, grew +at last to be envied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to +have been intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an entry as +this in the American Note-Books in 1841: "I was invited to dine at Mr. +Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had +given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful!" It is +true that, later, the lady is the subject of one or two allusions of a +gentler cast. One of them indeed is so pretty as to be worth +quoting:-- + + "After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's, I returned through + the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady + reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was + Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, + meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with + some strange title which I did not understand and have + forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and + was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of + Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of + people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed + a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed + near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground + and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the + beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the + shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about + the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the + crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the + experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon + the character after the recollection of them has passed + away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and + the view from their summits; and about other matters of high + and low philosophy." + +It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a +high relish for the very positive personality of this accomplished and +argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to +reign, as twilight did in his own. He must have been struck with the +glare of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled and +blinked a good deal in conversation with her. But it is tolerably +manifest, nevertheless, that she was, in his imagination, the +starting-point of the figure of Zenobia; and Zenobia is, to my sense, +his only very definite attempt at the representation of a character. +The portrait is full of alteration and embellishment; but it has a +greater reality, a greater abundance of detail, than any of his other +figures, and the reality was a memory of the lady whom he had +encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the wood-walks of +Concord, with strange books in her hand and eloquent discourse on her +lips. _The Blithedale Romance_ was written just after her unhappy +death, when the reverberation of her talk would lose much of its +harshness. In fact, however, very much the same qualities that made +Hawthorne a Democrat in polities--his contemplative turn and absence +of a keen perception of abuses, his taste for old ideals, and +loitering paces, and muffled tones--would operate to keep him out of +active sympathy with a woman of the so-called progressive type. We may +be sure that in women his taste was conservative. + +It seems odd, as his biographer says, "that the least gregarious of +men should have been drawn into a socialistic community;" but although +it is apparent that Hawthorne went to Brook Farm without any great +Transcendental fervour, yet he had various good reasons for casting +his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as yet unable to marry, +but he naturally wished to do so as speedily as possible, and there +was a prospect that Brook Farm would prove an economical residence. +And then it is only fair to believe that Hawthorne was interested in +the experiment, and that though he was not a Transcendentalist, an +Abolitionist, or a Fourierite, as his companions were in some degree +or other likely to be, he was willing, as a generous and unoccupied +young man, to lend a hand in any reasonable scheme for helping people +to live together on better terms than the common. The Brook Farm +scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was devised and +carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who were +careful to place economy first and idealism afterwards, and who were +not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There +were no formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference +whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest +adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as +the relations of the sexes. The relations of the sexes were neither +more nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent; +and in such particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and +irreproachable. Its main characteristic was that each individual +concerned in it should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the +whole machine going. He could choose his work and he could live as he +liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would +make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party. +Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly +traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in +the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of +spirit, of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility +of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year +1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era +of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in +the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak--the soil +of the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an +imported culture. The Transcendentalists read a great deal of French +and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and +many other writers; but the strong and deep New England conscience +accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never +was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in +fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence in +private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live +in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage and +would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have +turned, a man about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm +ploughed the fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer +from another clime and society would have been much more struck with +their spirit of conformity than with their _déréglements_. Their +ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never +rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism. + +A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had not been +more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking class, so that he +might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston +society forty years ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be, +properly, that the biographer's own personal reminiscences should +stretch back to that period and to the persons who animated it. This +would be a guarantee of fulness of knowledge and, presumably, of +kindness of tone. It is difficult to see, indeed, how the generation +of which Hawthorne has given us, in _Blithedale_, a few portraits, +should not at this time of day be spoken of very tenderly and +sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the +lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect chronicler +of these things, a writer just touching them as he passes, and who has +not the advantage of having been a contemporary, there is only one +possible tone. The compiler of these pages, though his recollections +date only from a later period, has a memory of a certain number of +persons who had been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with +the agitations of that interesting time. Something of its interest +adhered to them still--something of its aroma clung to their garments; +there was something about them which seemed to say that when they +were young and enthusiastic, they had been initiated into moral +mysteries, they had played at a wonderful game. Their usual mark (it +is true I can think of exceptions) was that they seemed excellently +good. They appeared unstained by the world, unfamiliar with worldly +desires and standards, and with those various forms of human depravity +which flourish in some high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple +and democratic ways, destitute of pretensions and affectations, of +jealousies, of cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of +fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic--drawbacks, +however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an +interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of +provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a +noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It +produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside, +as a contemporary but not a sharer) only one writer in whom the world +at large has interested itself. The situation was summed up and +transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all +that it contained, and a good deal more, doubtless, besides; he was +the man of genius of the moment; he was the Transcendentalist _par +excellence_. Emerson expressed, before all things, as was extremely +natural at the hour and in the place, the value and importance of the +individual, the duty of making the most of one's self, of living by +one's own personal light and carrying out one's own disposition. He +reflected with beautiful irony upon the exquisite impudence of those +institutions which claim to have appropriated the truth and to dole it +out, in proportionate morsels, in exchange for a subscription. He +talked about the beauty and dignity of life, and about every one who +is born into the world being born to the whole, having an interest and +a stake in the whole. He said "all that is clearly due to-day is not +to lie," and a great many other things which it would be still easier +to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon sincerity and +independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one's +nature, and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being more +comfortable. He urged that a man should await his call, his finding +the thing to do which he should really believe in doing, and not be +urged by the world's opinion to do simply the world's work. "If no +call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want +of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence.... If I +cannot work, at least I need not lie." The doctrine of the supremacy +of the individual to himself, of his originality and, as regards his +own character, _unique_ quality, must have had a great charm for +people living in a society in which introspection, thanks to the want +of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social resource. + +In the United States, in those days, there were no great things to +look out at (save forests and rivers); life was not in the least +spectacular; society was not brilliant; the country was given up to a +great material prosperity, a homely _bourgeois_ activity, a diffusion +of primary education and the common luxuries. There was therefore, +among the cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a +writer who would help one to take a picturesque view of one's internal +possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of +fine sunrise and moonlight effects. "Meantime, while the doors of the +temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of +this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, +namely--it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. +Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can +receive from another soul." To make one's self so much more +interesting would help to make life interesting, and life was +probably, to many of this aspiring congregation, a dream of freedom +and fortitude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy; +but the general tone was magnificent; and I can easily believe that, +coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a +great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One +envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient +period, but the convictions and interests--the moral passion. One +certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson's +orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most +poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and +they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic, +and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the +beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in especial that +one might not have been present on a certain occasion which made a +sensation, an era--the delivery of an address to the Divinity School +of Harvard University, on a summer evening in 1838. In the light, +fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and +institutions established, these things, as the phrase is, told. + +Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at +Brook Farm in the midst of one of those April snow-storms which, +during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of +the vernal process. Miles Coverdale, in _The Blithedale Romance_, is +evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. He is +indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the +observer; his chief identity lies in his success in looking at things +objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them. This +indeed was the part that Hawthorne played socially in the little +community at West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting +"silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the +house, where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment +of the young people, himself almost always holding a book before him, +but seldom turning the leaves." He put his hand to the plough and +supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do, +by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of +his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a +gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of +coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely +psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched +the inmates when they were off their guard, analysing their +characters, and dissecting the amiable ardour, the magnanimous +illusions, which he was too cold-blooded to share. In so far as this +account of Hawthorne's attitude was a complaint, it was a singularly +childish one. If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a +very fortunate circumstance from the point of view of posterity, who +would have preserved but a slender memory of the affair if our +author's fine novel had not kept the topic open. The complaint is +indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us regret that the +author's fellow-communists came off so easily. They certainly would +not have done so if the author of _Blithedale_ had been more of a +satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was a very +harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer specimens of the +reforming genus with which he must have been surrounded, one almost +wishes that, for our entertainment, he had given his old companions +something to complain of in earnest. There is no satire whatever in +the _Romance_; the quality is almost conspicuous by its absence. Of +portraits there are only two; there is no sketching of odd figures--no +reproduction of strange types of radicalism; the human background is +left vague. Hawthorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook Farm he was, +according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his scepticism +was exercised much more in the interest of fancy than in that of +reality. + +There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and pastoral in the +habits of the place during the fine New England summer; but we have no +retrospective envy of the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season +which, as Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves in those regions, "so large +a blank--so melancholy a deathspot--in lives so brief that they ought +to be all summer-time." "Of a summer night, when the moon was full," +says Mr. Lathrop, "they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and +shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or joined +Tom Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other nights there would be an +original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of Shakspeare, with +the parts distributed to different members; and these amusements +failing, some interesting discussion was likely to take their place. +Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm +would drive into Boston, in carriages and waggons, to the opera or the +play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the dishes +in the Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped +them with their work. The men wore blouses of a checked or plaided +stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the +throat, and rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns +and hats." All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and innocent, and it +is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in +some of the features of such a life; in the free, frank, and stainless +companionship of young men and maidens, in the mixture of manual +labour and intellectual flights--dish-washing and ĉsthetics, +wood-chopping and philosophy. Wordsworth's "plain living and high +thinking" were made actual. Some passages in Margaret Fuller's +journals throw plenty of light on this. (It must be premised that she +was at Brook Farm as an occasional visitor; not as a labourer in the +Hive.) + + "All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had + a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, in its + largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and + others. I took my usual ground:--The aim is perfection; + patience the road. Our lives should be considered as a + tendency, an approximation only.... Mr. R. spoke admirably + on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of + the _sans-culotte_ tendency in their manners, throwing + themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they + had heard enough. Yet as the majority differ with me, to + begin with--that being the reason this subject was + chosen--they showed on the whole more interest and + deference than I had expected. As I am accustomed to + deference, however, and need it for the boldness and + animation which my part requires, I did not speak with as + much force as usual.... Sunday.--A glorious day; the woods + full of perfume; I was out all the morning. In the afternoon + Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would be too + uncertain here, as I could not work. ---- said 'they would + all like to work for a person of genius.' ... 'Yes,' I told + her; 'but where would be my repose when they were always to + be judging whether I was worth it or not?.... Each day you + must prove yourself anew.' ... We talked of the principles + of the community. I said I had not a right to come, because + all the confidence I had in it was as an _experiment_ worth + trying, and that it was part of the great wave of inspired + thought.... We had valuable discussion on these points. All + Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the + drawing party; I felt the evils of the want of conventional + refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls + treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I + notice; and by every day's observation of me will see that + she ought not to have done it. In the evening a husking in + the barn ... a most picturesque scene.... I stayed and + helped about half an hour, and then took a long walk beneath + the stars. Wednesday.... In the evening a conversation on + Impulse.... I defended nature, as I always do;--the spirit + ascending through, not superseding, nature. But in the scale + of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I advocated the claims of + Intellect, because those present were rather disposed to + postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk. + ---- seemed in a much more reverent humour than the other + night, and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which + were unrolled.... Saturday,--Well, good-bye, Brook Farm. I + know more about this place than I did when I came; but the + only way to be qualified for a judge of such an experiment + would be to become an active, though unimpassioned, + associate in trying it.... The girl who was so rude to me + stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-bye." + + The young girl in question cannot have been Hawthorne's + charming Priscilla; nor yet another young lady, of a most + humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret's biographers + her recollections of this remarkable woman's visits to Brook + Farm; concluding with the assurance that "after a while she + seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable + peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard." + +Hawthorne's farewell to the place appears to have been accompanied +with some reflections of a cast similar to those indicated by Miss +Fuller; in so far at least as we may attribute to Hawthorne himself +some of the observations that he fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His +biographer justly quotes two or three sentences from _The Blithedale +Romance_, as striking the note of the author's feeling about the +place. "No sagacious man," says Coverdale, "will long retain his +sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive +people, without periodically returning to the settled system of +things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old +standpoint." And he remarks elsewhere that "it struck me as rather odd +that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the +greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the +possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in +their own field of labour. But to tell the truth, I very soon became +sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of +new hostility rather than new brotherhood." He was doubtless oppressed +by the "sultry heat of society," as he calls it in one of the jottings +in the Note-Books. "What would a man do if he were compelled to live +always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself +in cool solitude?" His biographer relates that one of the other Brook +Farmers, wandering afield one summer's day, discovered Hawthorne +stretched at his length upon a grassy hillside, with his hat pulled +over his face, and every appearance, in his attitude, of the desire to +escape detection. On his asking him whether he had any particular +reason for this shyness of posture--"Too much of a party up there!" +Hawthorne contented himself with replying, with a nod in the direction +of the Hive. He had nevertheless for a time looked forward to +remaining indefinitely in the community; he meant to marry as soon as +possible and bring his wife there to live. Some sixty pages of the +second volume of the American Note-Books are occupied with extracts +from his letters to his future wife and from his journal (which +appears however at this time to have been only intermittent), +consisting almost exclusively of descriptions of the simple scenery of +the neighbourhood, and of the state of the woods and fields and +weather. Hawthorne's fondness for all the common things of nature was +deep and constant, and there is always something charming in his +verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to himself about them. +"Oh," he breaks out, of an October afternoon, "the beauty of grassy +slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the +intervals between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and +sits down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue asters as her parting +gifts and memorials!" He was but a single summer at Brook Farm; the +rest of his residence had the winter-quality. + +But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the French +say, a _solitude à deux_. He was married in July 1842, and betook +himself immediately to the ancient village of Concord, near Boston, +where he occupied the so-called Manse which has given the title to one +of his collections of tales, and upon which this work, in turn, has +conferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets "ancient" and +"near" in the foregoing sentence, according to the American +measurement of time and distance. Concord is some twenty miles from +Boston, and even to day, upwards of forty years after the date of +Hawthorne's removal thither, it is a very fresh and well-preserved +looking town. It had already a local history when, a hundred years +ago, the larger current of human affairs flowed for a moment around +it. Concord has the honour of being the first spot in which blood was +shed in the war of the Revolution; here occurred the first exchange of +musket-shots between the King's troops and the American insurgents. +Here, as Emerson says in the little hymn which he contributed in 1836 +to the dedication of a small monument commemorating this +circumstance-- + + "Here once the embattled farmers stood, + And fired the shot heard round the world." + +The battle was a small one, and the farmers were not destined +individually to emerge from obscurity; but the memory of these things +has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered, +moreover, so to speak, by the life-long presence there of one of the +most honoured of American men of letters--the poet from whom I just +quoted two lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and +is an excellent specimen of a New England village of the riper sort. +At the time of Hawthorne's first going there it must have been an even +better specimen than to-day--more homogeneous, more indigenous, more +absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration +had scarcely begun to break upon the rural strongholds of the New +England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt +Hibernian spray. It is very possible, however, that at this period +there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a +village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village +community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England +civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous +summers and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous +field and forest, would have been part of the composition. For the +rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools +and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and +familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to +manage its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the +_Mosses_, Hawthorne has given an account of his dwelling, of his +simple occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics +of the place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the +surface of which--even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to +mosses and lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a +picturesque complexion--a hundred and fifty years of exposure have +imparted a kind of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord +river, and approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It had +been the dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers, +ancestors of the celebrated Emerson, who had himself spent his early +manhood and written some of his most beautiful essays there. "He +used," as Hawthorne says, "to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian +sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its +clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of +theological association--a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic +sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent +quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should +suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in +any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. +In the American Note-Books there is a charming passage (too long to +quote) descriptive of the entertainment the new couple found in +renovating and re-furnishing the old parsonage, which, at the time of +their going into it, was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little +drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed, he writes that +"the shade of our departed host will never haunt it; for its aspect +has been as completely changed as the scenery of a theatre. Probably +the ghost gave one peep into it, uttered a groan, and vanished for +ever." This departed host was a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable +scholar, who left behind him a reputation of learning and sanctity +which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most +distinguished woman in the little Concord circle. Doctor Ripley's +predecessor had been, I believe, the last of the line of the Emerson +ministers--an old gentleman who, in the earlier years of his +pastorate, stood at the window of his study (the same in which +Hawthorne handled a more irresponsible quill) watching, with his hands +under his long coat-tails, the progress of Concord fight. It is not by +any means related, however, I should add, that he waited for the +conclusion to make up his mind which was the righteous cause. + +Hawthorne had a little society (as much, we may infer, as he desired), +and it was excellent in quality. But the pages in the Note-Books which +relate to his life at the Manse, and the introduction to the _Mosses_, +make more of his relations with vegetable nature, and of his customary +contemplation of the incidents of wood-path and way-side, than of the +human elements of the scene; though these also are gracefully touched +upon. These pages treat largely of the pleasures of a kitchen-garden, of +the beauty of summer-squashes, and of the mysteries of apple-raising. +With the wholesome aroma of apples (as is indeed almost necessarily the +case in any realistic record of New England rural life) they are +especially pervaded; and with many other homely and domestic emanations; +all of which derive a sweetness from the medium of our author's +colloquial style. Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with +his pen. The tone of his writing is often that of charming +talk--ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of +gossip, and none of its vulgarity. In the preface to the tales written +at the Manse he talks of many things and just touches upon some of the +members of his circle--especially upon that odd genius, his +fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a little way back that the New +England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the +world at large from not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any +superior talents. But any reference to it would be ungenerous which +should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of _Walden_. +Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I +think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was +eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was +worse than provincial--he was parochial; it is only at his best that he +is readable. But at his best he has an extreme natural charm, and he +must always be mentioned after those Americans--Emerson, Hawthorne, +Longfellow, Lowell, Motley--who have written originally. He was +Emerson's independent moral man made flesh--living for the ages, and not +for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In fact, +however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his +remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and +streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a +kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he +perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human +sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the +latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and +there are some charming touches in the preface to the _Mosses_ in regard +to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord +river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed +himself, and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne, and as expert +in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had once haunted the same +silent stream. The most frequent of Hawthorne's companions on these +excursions appears, however, to have been a local celebrity--as well as +Thoreau a high Transcendentalist--Mr. Ellery Channing, whom I may +mention, since he is mentioned very explicitly in the preface to the +_Mosses_, and also because no account of the little Concord world would +be complete which should omit him. He was the son of the distinguished +Unitarian moralist, and, I believe, the intimate friend of Thoreau, whom +he resembled in having produced literary compositions more esteemed by +the few than by the many. He and Hawthorne were both fishermen, and the +two used to set themselves afloat in the summer afternoons. "Strange and +happy times were those," exclaims the more distinguished of the two +writers, "when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced +habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the +Indians or any less conventional race, during one bright semicircle of +the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we +turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a +mile above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on +earth--nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's +imagination.... It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and +deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream +whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were +hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and +dreams of the sky and the clustering foliage...." While Hawthorne was +looking at these beautiful things, or, for that matter, was writing +them, he was well out of the way of a certain class of visitants whom he +alludes to in one of the closing passages of this long Introduction. +"Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of +queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon +themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were +simply bores of a very intense character." "These hobgoblins of flesh +and blood," he says in a preceding paragraph, "were attracted thither by +the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his +earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.... People that +had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, came to +Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to +ascertain its quality and value." And Hawthorne enumerates some of the +categories of pilgrims to the shrine of the mystic counsellor, who as a +general thing was probably far from abounding in their own sense (when +this sense was perverted), but gave them a due measure of plain +practical advice. The whole passage is interesting, and it suggests that +little Concord had not been ill-treated by the fates--with "a great +original thinker" at one end of the village, an exquisite teller of +tales at the other, and the rows of New England elms between. It +contains moreover an admirable sentence about Hawthorne's +pilgrim-haunted neighbour, with whom, "being happy," as he says, and +feeling therefore "as if there were no question to be put," he was not +in metaphysical communion. "It was good nevertheless to meet him in the +wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual +gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one; +and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man +alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart!" One may +without indiscretion risk the surmise that Hawthorne's perception, of +the "shining" element in his distinguished friend was more intense than +his friend's appreciation of whatever luminous property might reside +within the somewhat dusky envelope of our hero's identity as a collector +of "mosses." Emerson, as a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have +attached but a moderate value to Hawthorne's cat-like faculty of seeing +in the dark. + +"As to the daily coarse of our life," the latter writes in the spring +of 1843, "I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging +from two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various +magazines. I might have written more if it had seemed worth while, but +I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our +immediate wants, having prospect of official station and emolument +which would do away with the necessity of writing for bread. These +prospects have not yet had their fulfilment; and we are well content +to wait, for an office would inevitably remove us from our present +happy home--at least from an outward home; for there is an inner one +that will accompany us wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people +do not pay their debts; so that we taste some of the inconveniences of +poverty. It is an annoyance, not a trouble." And he goes on to give +some account of his usual habits. (The passage is from his Journal, +and the account is given to himself, as it were, with that odd, +unfamiliar explicitness which marks the tone of this record +throughout.) "Every day I trudge through snow and slosh to the +village, look into the post-office, and spend an hour at the +reading-room; and then return home, generally without having spoken a +word to any human being.... In the way of exercise I saw and split +wood, and physically I was never in a better condition than now." He +adds a mention of an absence he had lately made. "I went alone to +Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, +leading the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted away like +a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had got hold of a +reality which never could be taken from me. It was good thus to get +apart from my happiness for the sake of contemplating it." + +These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for, appeared in +the _Democratic Review_, a periodical published at Washington, and +having, as our author's biographer says, "considerable pretensions to +a national character." It is to be regretted that the practice of +keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the magazine in +question, have been thought compatible with these pretensions. The +foregoing lines are a description of a very monotonous but a very +contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the dissonance of +tone of the tales Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances. +It is indeed not a little of an anomaly. The episode of the Manse was +one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best of the +_Mosses_ (though not the greater number of them) are singularly dismal +compositions. They are redolent of M. Montégut's pessimism. "The +reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, "had +been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series +the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking +strength, and the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us." This is very +true (allowing for Mr. Lathrop's rather too emphatic way of putting +it); but the anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our +writer's imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy +one; the old Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to be paid, of the +darkness and wickedness of life, had, as I have already suggested, +passed into it. It had not passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature +corresponding to those occupied by the same horrible vision of things +in his ancestors; but it had still been determined to claim this +later comer as its own, and since his heart and his happiness were to +escape, it insisted on setting its mark upon his genius--upon his most +beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his +fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the +dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a +better proof that he was not the man of a sombre _parti-pris_ whom M. +Montégut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his +invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This +surely indicates that there was but little direct connection between +the products of his fancy and the state of his affections. When he was +lightest at heart, he was most creative, and when he was most +creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old secret of mankind in +general and of the Puritans in particular, most appealed to him--the +secret that we are really not by any means so good as a well-regulated +society requires us to appear. It is not too much to say, even, that +the very condition of production of some of these unamiable tales +would be that they should be superficial, and, as it were, insincere. +The magnificent little romance of _Young Goodman Brown_, for instance, +evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own state of mind, his +conviction of human depravity and his consequent melancholy; for the +simple reason that if it meant anything, it would mean too much. Mr. +Lathrop speaks of it as a "terrible and lurid parable;" but this, it +seems to me, is just what it is not. It is not a parable, but a +picture, which is a very different thing. What does M. Montégut make, +one would ask, from the point of view of Hawthorne's pessimism, of +the singularly objective and unpreoccupied tone of the Introduction to +the _Old Manse_, in which the author speaks from himself, and in which +the cry of metaphysical despair is not even faintly sounded? + +We have seen that when he went into the village he often came home +without having spoken a word to a human being. There is a touching +entry made a little later, bearing upon his mild taciturnity. "A +cloudy veil stretches across the abyss of my nature. I have, however, +no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees +through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he +is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any +mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come +into my depths. But he must find his own way there; I can neither +guide nor enlighten him." It must be acknowledged, however, that if he +was not able to open the gate of conversation, it was sometimes +because he was disposed to slide the bolt himself. "I had a purpose," +he writes, shortly before the entry last quoted, "if circumstances +would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without +speaking a word to any human being." He beguiled these incommunicative +periods by studying German, in Tieck and Bürger, without apparently +making much progress; also in reading French, in Voltaire and +Rabelais. "Just now," he writes, one October noon, "I heard a sharp +tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a +volume of Rabelais), behold, the head of a little bird, who seemed to +demand admittance." It was a quiet life, of course, in which these +diminutive incidents seemed noteworthy; and what is noteworthy here +to the observer of Hawthorne's contemplative simplicity, is the fact +that though he finds a good deal to say about the little bird (he +devotes several lines more to it) he makes no remark upon Rabelais. He +had other visitors than little birds, however, and their demands were +also not Rabelaisian. Thoreau comes to see him, and they talk "upon +the spiritual advantages of change of place, and upon the _Dial_, and +upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated subjects." Mr. +Alcott was an arch-transcendentalist, living in Concord, and the +_Dial_ was a periodical to which the illuminated spirits of Boston and +its neighbourhood used to contribute. Another visitor comes and talks +"of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher +state since their last meeting." There is probably a great deal of +Concord five-and-thirty years ago in that little sentence! + + * * * * * + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS. + + +The prospect of official station and emolument which Hawthorne +mentions in one of those paragraphs from his Journals which I have +just quoted, as having offered itself and then passed away, was at +last, in the event, confirmed by his receiving from the administration +of President Polk the gift of a place in the Custom-house of his +native town. The office was a modest one, and "official station" may +perhaps appear a magniloquent formula for the functions sketched in +the admirable Introduction to The _Scarlet Letter_. Hawthorne's duties +were those of Surveyor of the port of Salem, and they had a salary +attached, which was the important part; as his biographer tells us +that he had received almost nothing for the contributions to the +_Democratic Review_. He bade farewell to his ex-parsonage and went +back to Salem in 1846, and the immediate effect of his ameliorated +fortune was to make him stop writing. None of his Journals of the +period from his going to Salem to 1850 have been published; from which +I infer that he even ceased to journalise. _The Scarlet Letter_ was +not written till 1849. In the delightful prologue to that work, +entitled _The Custom-house_, he embodies some of the impressions +gathered during these years of comparative leisure (I say of leisure +because he does not intimate in this sketch of his occupations that +his duties were onerous). He intimates, however, that they were not +interesting, and that it was a very good thing for him, mentally and +morally, when his term of service expired--or rather when he was +removed from office by the operation of that wonderful "rotatory" +system which his countrymen had invented for the administration of +their affairs. This sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing, +one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the +most gracefully and humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting +to examine it in detail, but I prefer to use my space for making some +remarks upon the work which was the ultimate result of this period of +Hawthorne's residence in his native town; and I shall, for +convenience' sake, say directly afterwards what I have to say about +the two companions of _The Scarlet Letter_--_The House of the Seven +Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_. I quoted some passages from the +prologue to the first of these novels in the early pages of this +essay. There is another passage, however, which bears particularly +upon this phase of Hawthorne's career, and which is so happily +expressed as to make it a pleasure to transcribe it--the passage in +which he says that "for myself, during the whole of my Custom-house +experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of the fire-light, +were just alike in my regard, and neither of them was of one whit more +avail than the twinkle of a tallow candle. An entire class of +susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great richness +or value, but the best I had--was gone from me." He goes on to say +that he believes that he might have done something if he could have +made up his mind to convert the very substance of the commonplace that +surrounded him into matter of literature. + + "I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing + out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the + inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; + since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to + laughter and admiration by his marvellous gift as a + story-teller.... Or I might readily have found a more + serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this + daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to + fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating + a semblance of a world out of airy matter.... The wiser + effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination + through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a + bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and + indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and + wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was + now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that + was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only + because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book + than I shall ever write was there.... These perceptions came + too late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor + tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor + of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is + anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that + one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your + consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every + glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum." + +As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect after three +years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote _The Scarlet Letter_, there +is little reason to complain of the injury he suffered in his +Surveyorship. + +His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled _Yesterdays with +Authors_, has related the circumstances in which Hawthorne's +masterpiece came into the world. "In the winter of 1849, after he had +been ejected from the Custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him +and inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from +illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house.... I found him +alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling, and as the +day was cold he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his +future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very +desponding mood." His visitor urged him to bethink himself of +publishing something, and Hawthorne replied by calling his attention +to the small popularity his published productions had yet acquired, +and declaring that he had done nothing and had no spirit for doing +anything. The narrator of the incident urged upon him the necessity of +a more hopeful view of his situation, and proceeded to take leave. He +had not reached the street, however, when Hawthorne hurried to +overtake him, and, placing a roll of MS. in his hand, bade him take it +to Boston, read it, and pronounce upon it. "It is either very good or +very bad," said the author; "I don't know which." "On my way back to +Boston," says Mr. Fields, "I read the germ of _The Scarlet Letter_; +before I slept that night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration +of the marvellous story he had put into my hands, and told him that I +would come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its +publication. I went on in such an amazing state of excitement, when we +met again in the little house, that he would not believe I was really +in earnest. He seemed to think I was beside myself, and laughed sadly +at my enthusiasm." Hawthorne, however, went on with the book and +finished it, but it appeared only a year later. His biographer quotes +a passage from a letter which he wrote in February, 1850, to his +friend Horatio Bridge. "I finished my book only yesterday; one end +being in the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at +Salem, so that, as you see, my story is at least fourteen miles +long.... My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before +April. He speaks of it in tremendous terms of approbation, so does +Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the conclusion last night. It broke her +heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache--which I look +upon, as a triumphant success. Judging from the effect upon her and +the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten-strike. But +I don't make any such calculation." And Mr. Lathrop calls attention, +in regard to this passage, to an allusion in the English Note-Books +(September 14, 1855). "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at +his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my +emotions when I read the last scene of _The Scarlet Letter_ to my +wife, just after writing it--tried to read it rather, for my voice +swelled and heaved as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it +subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having +gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many +months." + +The work has the tone of the circumstances in which it was produced. +If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, and if his future was painfully +vague, _The Scarlet Letter_ contains little enough of gaiety or of +hopefulness. It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in +it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of +English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the +author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other +generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame. The +subject had probably lain a long time in his mind, as his subjects +were apt to do; so that he appears completely to possess it, to know +it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels; +it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that +charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the +first time he has touched his highest mark--a sort of straightness and +naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of his public, and +freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he +immediately found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who was a +child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced, +and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a +peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to +read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the +book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief +indeed that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that +come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him +that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was +difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester +Prynne's blood-coloured _A_. But the mystery was at last partly +dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the +annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a +representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and +a white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, +fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the +woman's breast was a great crimson _A_, over which the child's +fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously +playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and +that when I grew older I might read their interesting history. But the +picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I had been vaguely +frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I first +read the novel, I seemed to myself to have read it before, and to be +familiar with its two strange heroines, I mention this incident simply +as an indication of the degree to which the success of _The Scarlet +Letter_ had made the book what is called an actuality. Hawthorne +himself was very modest about it; he wrote to his publisher, when +there was a question of his undertaking another novel, that what had +given the history of Hester Prynne its "vogue" was simply the +introductory chapter. In fact, the publication of _The Scarlet Letter_ +was in the United States a literary event of the first importance. The +book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the +country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was +given it--a satisfaction in the idea of America having produced a +novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. +Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as +anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing +was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came +out of the very heart of New England. + +It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest +degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's +best things--an indefinable purity and lightness of conception, a +quality which in a work of art affects one in the same way as the +absence of grossness does in a human being. His fancy, as I just now +said, had evidently brooded over the subject for a long time; the +situation to be represented had disclosed itself to him in all its +phases. When I say in all its phases, the sentence demands +modification; for it is to be remembered that if Hawthorne laid his +hand upon the well-worn theme, upon the familiar combination of the +wife, the lover, and the husband, it was after all but to one period +of the history of these three persons that he attached himself. The +situation is the situation after the woman's fault has been committed, +and the current of expiation and repentance has set in. In spite of +the relation between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, no story of +love was surely ever less of a "love story." To Hawthorne's +imagination the fact that these two persons had loved each other too +well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was +the idea of their moral situation in the long years that were to +follow. The story indeed 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 _dénoûment_ depends. It is upon her +guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold, thin +rays of his fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a +little luminous circle, on the edge of which hovers the livid and +sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. The story goes +on for the most part between the lover and the husband--the tormented +young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from +pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to +the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his +guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to +the misery of atonement--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. The +attitude of Roger Chillingworth, and the means he takes to compensate +himself--these are the highly original elements in the situation that +Hawthorne so ingeniously treats. None of his works are so impregnated +with that after-sense of the old Puritan consciousness of life to +which allusion has so often been made. If, as M. Montégut says, the +qualities of his ancestors _filtered_ down through generations into +his composition, _The Scarlet Letter_ was, as it were, the vessel that +gathered up the last of the precious drops. And I say this not because +the story happens to be of so-called historical cast, to be told of +the early days of Massachusetts and of people in steeple-crowned hats +and sad coloured garments. The historical colouring is rather weak +than otherwise; there is little elaboration of detail, of the modern +realism of research; and the author has made no great point of causing +his figures to speak the English of their period. Nevertheless, the +book is full of the moral presence of the race that invented Hester's +penance--diluted and complicated with other things, but still +perfectly recognisable. Puritanism, in a word, is there, not only +objectively, as Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjectively as +well. Not, I mean, in his judgment of his characters, in any +harshness of prejudice, or in the obtrusion of a moral lesson; but in +the very quality of his own vision, in the tone of the picture, in a +certain coldness and exclusiveness of treatment. + +The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an +abuse of the fanciful element--of a certain superficial symbolism. The +people strike me not as characters, 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. I was made to feel this want of reality, this +over-ingenuity, of _The Scarlet Letter_, by chancing not long since +upon a novel which was read fifty years ago much more than to-day, but +which is still worth reading--the story of _Adam Blair_, by John +Gibson Lockhart. This interesting and powerful little tale has a great +deal of analogy with Hawthorne's novel--quite enough, at least, to +suggest a comparison between them; and the comparison is a very +interesting one to make, for it speedily leads us to larger +considerations than simple resemblances and divergences of plot. + +Adam Blair, like Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Calvinistic minister who +becomes the lover of a married woman, is overwhelmed with remorse at +his misdeed, and makes a public confession of it; then expiates it by +resigning his pastoral office and becoming a humble tiller of the +soil, as his father had been. The two stories are of about the same +length, and each is the masterpiece (putting aside of course, as far +as Lockhart is concerned, the _Life of Scott_) of the author. They +deal alike with the manners of a rigidly theological society, and even +in certain details they correspond. In each of them, between the +guilty pair, there is a charming little girl; though I hasten to say +that Sarah Blair (who is not the daughter of the heroine but the +legitimate offspring of the hero, a widower) is far from being as +brilliant and graceful an apparition as the admirable little Pearl of +_The Scarlet Letter_. The main difference between the two tales is the +fact that in the American story the husband plays an all-important +part, and in the Scottish plays almost none at all. _Adam Blair_ is +the history of the passion, and _The Scarlet Letter_ the history of +its sequel; but nevertheless, if one has read the two books at a short +interval, it is impossible to avoid confronting them. I confess that a +large portion of the interest of _Adam Blair_, to my mind, when once I +had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of +_The Scarlet Letter_, lay in noting its difference of tone. It threw +into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element +of cold and ingenious fantasy, its elaborate imaginative delicacy. +These things do not precisely constitute a weakness in _The Starlet +Letter_; indeed, in a certain way they constitute a great strength; +but the absence of a certain something warm and straightforward, a +trifle more grossly human and vulgarly natural, which one finds in +_Adam Blair_, will always make Hawthorne's tale less touching to a +large number of even very intelligent readers, than a love-story told +with the robust, synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His +novel is not of the first rank (I should call it an excellent +second-rate one), but it borrows a charm from the fact that his +vigorous, but not strongly imaginative, mind was impregnated with the +reality of his subject. He did not always succeed in rendering this +reality; the expression is sometimes awkward and poor. But the reader +feels that his vision was clear, and his feeling about the matter very +strong and rich. Hawthorne's imagination, on the other hand, 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. Lockhart, by means much more vulgar, +produces at moments a greater illusion, and satisfies our inevitable +desire for something, in the people in whom it is sought to interest +us, that shall be of the same pitch and the same continuity with +ourselves. Above all, it is interesting to see how the same subject +appears to two men of a thoroughly different cast of mind and of a +different race. Lockhart was struck with the warmth of the subject +that offered itself to him, and Hawthorne with its coldness; the one +with its glow, its sentimental interest--the other with its shadow, +its moral interest. Lockhart's story is as decent, as severely draped, +as _The Scarlet Letter_; but the author has a more vivid sense than +appears to have imposed itself upon Hawthorne, of some of the +incidents of the situation he describes; his tempted man and tempting +woman are more actual and personal; his heroine in especial, though +not in the least a delicate or a subtle conception, has a sort of +credible, visible, palpable property, a vulgar roundness and relief, +which are lacking to the dim and chastened image of Hester Prynne. +But I am going too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, the +usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of mind impelled +him, but each expressed something more than himself. Lockhart was a +dense, substantial Briton, with a taste for the concrete, and +Hawthorne was a thin New Englander, with a miasmatic conscience. + +In _The Scarlet Letter_ there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, +I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and becomes mechanical; it +ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. The idea of the mystic +_A_ which the young minister finds imprinted upon his breast and +eating into his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered badge that +Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case in point. This +suggestion should, I think, have been just made and dropped; to insist +upon it and return to it, is to exaggerate the weak side of the +subject. Hawthorne returns to it constantly, plays with it, and seems +charmed by it; until at last the reader feels tempted to declare that +his enjoyment of it is puerile. In the admirable scene, so superbly +conceived and beautifully executed, in which Mr. Dimmesdale, in the +stillness of the night, in the middle of the sleeping town, feels +impelled to go and stand upon the scaffold where his mistress had +formerly enacted her dreadful penance, and then, seeing Hester pass +along the street, from watching at a sick-bed, with little Pearl at +her side, calls them both to come and stand there beside him--in this +masterly episode the effect is almost spoiled by the introduction of +one of these superficial conceits. What leads up to it is very +fine--so fine that I cannot do better than quote it as a specimen of +one of the striking pages of the book. + + "But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light + gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was + doubtless caused by one of those meteors which the + night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste in + the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its + radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of + cloud, betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault + brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the + familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of + midday, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted + to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden + houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; + the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing + up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned + earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the + marketplace, margined with green on either side;--all were + visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to + give another moral interpretation to the things of this + world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the + minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, + with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and + little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting-link + between these two. They stood in the noon of that strange + and solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to + reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all + that belong to one another." + +That is imaginative, impressive, poetic; but when, almost immediately +afterwards, the author goes on to say that "the minister looking +upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense +letter--the letter _A_--marked out in lines of dull red light," we +feel that he goes too far and is in danger of crossing the line that +separates the sublime from its intimate neighbour. We are tempted to +say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical comedy. In the same +way, too much is made of the intimation that Hester's badge had a +scorching property, and that if one touched it one would immediately +withdraw one's hand. Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which +shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the +spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search +is of the very essence of poetry. But in such a process discretion is +everything, and when the image becomes importunate it is in danger of +seeming to stand for nothing more serious than itself. When Hester +meets the minister by appointment in the forest, and sits talking with +him while little Pearl wanders away and plays by the edge of the +brook, the child is represented as at last making her way over to the +other side of the woodland stream, and disporting herself there in a +manner which makes her mother feel herself, "in some indistinct and +tantalising manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her +lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in +which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to +return to it." And Hawthorne devotes a chapter to this idea of the +child's having, by putting the brook between Hester and herself, +established a kind of spiritual gulf, on the verge of which her little +fantastic person innocently mocks at her mother's sense of +bereavement. This conception belongs, one would say, quite to the +lighter order of a story-teller's devices, and the reader hardly goes +with Hawthorne in the large development he gives to it. He hardly goes +with him either, I think, in his extreme predilection for a small +number of vague ideas which are represented by such terms as "sphere" +and "sympathies." Hawthorne makes too liberal a use of these two +substantives; it is the solitary defect of his style; and it counts as +a defect partly because the words in question are a sort of specialty +with certain writers immeasurably inferior to himself. + +I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects, which are of +the slenderest and most venial kind. _The Scarlet Letter_ has the +beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and its +weaker spots, whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere +light flaws and inequalities of surface. One can often return to it; +it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of +great works of art. It is admirably written. Hawthorne afterwards +polished his style to a still higher degree, but in his later +productions--it is almost always the case in a writer's later +productions--there is a touch of mannerism. In _The Scarlet Letter_ +there is a high degree of polish, and at the same time a charming +freshness; his phrase is less conscious of itself. His biographer very +justly calls attention to the fact that his style was excellent from +the beginning; that he appeared to have passed through no phase of +learning how to write, but was in possession of his means from the +first of his handling a pen. His early tales, perhaps, were not of a +character to subject his faculty of expression to a very severe test, +but a man who had not Hawthorne's natural sense of language would +certainly have contrived to write them less well. This natural sense +of language--this turn for saying things lightly and yet touchingly, +picturesquely yet simply, and for infusing a gently colloquial tone +into matter of the most unfamiliar import, he had evidently cultivated +with great assiduity. I have spoken of the anomalous character of his +Note-Books--of his going to such pains often to make a record of +incidents which either were not worth remembering or could be easily +remembered without its aid. But it helps us to understand the +Note-Books if we regard them as a literary exercise. They were +compositions, as school boys say, in which the subject was only the +pretext, and the main point was to write a certain amount of excellent +English. Hawthorne must at least have written a great many of these +things for practice, and he must often have said to himself that it +was better practice to write about trifles, because it was a greater +tax upon one's skill to make them interesting. And his theory was +just, for he has almost always made his trifles interesting. In his +novels his art of saying things well is very positively tested, for +here he treats of those matters among which it is very easy for a +blundering writer to go wrong--the subtleties and mysteries of life, +the moral and spiritual maze. In such a passage as one I have marked +for quotation from _The Scarlet Letter_ there is the stamp of the +genius of style. + + "Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a + dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she + knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own + sphere and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of + recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. + She thought of the dim forest with its little dell of + solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, + where, sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and + passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How + deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? + She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped + as it were in the rich music, with the procession of + majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his + worldly position, and still more so in that far vista in + his unsympathising thoughts, through which she now beheld + him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a + delusion, and that vividly as she had dreamed it, there + could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And + thus much of woman there was in Hester, that she could + scarcely forgive him--least of all now, when the heavy + footstep of their approaching fate might be heard, nearer, + nearer, nearer!--for being able to withdraw himself so + completely from their mutual world, while she groped darkly, + and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not!" + +_The House of the Seven Gables_ was written at Lenox, among the +mountains of Massachusetts, a village nestling, rather loosely, in one +of the loveliest corners of New England, to which Hawthorne had +betaken himself after the success of _The Scarlet Letter_ became +conspicuous, in the summer of 1850, and where he occupied for two +years an uncomfortable little red house which is now pointed out to +the inquiring stranger. The inquiring stranger is now a frequent +figure at Lenox, for the place has suffered the process of +lionisation. It has become a prosperous watering-place, or at least +(as there are no waters), as they say in America, a summer-resort. It +is a brilliant and generous landscape, and thirty years ago a man of +fancy, desiring to apply himself, might have found both inspiration +and tranquillity there. Hawthorne found so much of both that he wrote +more during his two years of residence at Lenox than at any period of +his career. He began with _The House of the Seven Gables_, which was +finished in the early part of 1851. This is the longest of his three +American novels, it is the most elaborate, and in the judgment of some +persons it is the finest. It is a rich, delightful, imaginative work, +larger and more various than its companions, and full of all sorts of +deep intentions, of interwoven threads of suggestion But it is not so +rounded and complete as _The Scarlet Letter_; it has always seemed to +me more like a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself. I +think this is partly owing to the fact that the subject, the _donnée_, +as the French say, of the story, does not quite fill it out, and that +we get at the same time an impression of certain complicated purposes +on the author's part, which seem to reach beyond it. I call it larger +and more various than its companions, and it has indeed a greater +richness of tone and density of detail. The colour, so to speak, of +_The House of the Seven Gables_ is admirable. But the story has a sort +of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I lately +laid it down, after reading it for the third time, I had a sense of +having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet the book has a +great fascination, and of all of those of its author's productions +which I have read over while writing this sketch, it is perhaps the +one that has gained most by re-perusal. If it be true of the others +that the pure, natural quality of the imaginative strain is their +great merit, this is at least as true of _The House of the Seven +Gables_, the charm of which is in a peculiar degree of the kind that +we fail to reduce to its grounds--like that of the sweetness of a +piece of music, or the softness of fine September weather. It is +vague, indefinable, ineffable; but it is the sort of thing we must +always point to in justification of the high claim that we make for +Hawthorne. In this case of course its vagueness is a drawback, for it +is difficult to point to ethereal beauties; and if the reader whom we +have wished to inoculate with our admiration inform us after looking a +while that he perceives nothing in particular, we can only reply +that, in effect, the object is a delicate one. + +_The House of the Seven Gables_ comes nearer being a picture of +contemporary American life than either of its companions; but on this +ground it would be a mistake to make a large claim for it. It cannot +be too often repeated that Hawthorne was not a realist. He had a high +sense of reality--his Note-Books super-abundantly testify to it; and +fond as he was of jotting down the items that make it up, he never +attempted to render exactly or closely the actual facts of the society +that surrounded him. I have said--I began by saying--that his pages +were full of its spirit, and of a certain reflected light that springs +from it; but I was careful to add that the reader must look for his +local and national quality between the lines of his writing and in the +_indirect_ testimony of his tone, his accent, his temper, of his very +omissions and suppressions. _The House of the Seven Gables_ has, +however, more literal actuality than the others, and if it were not +too fanciful an account of it, I should say that it renders, to an +initiated reader, the impression of a summer afternoon in an +elm-shadowed New England town. It leaves upon the mind a vague +correspondence to some such reminiscence, and in stirring up the +association it renders it delightful. The comparison is to the honour +of the New England town, which gains in it more than it bestows. The +shadows of the elms, in _The House of the Seven Gables_, are +exceptionally dense and cool; the summer afternoon is peculiarly still +and beautiful; the atmosphere has a delicious warmth, and the long +daylight seems to pause and rest. But the mild provincial quality is +there, the mixture of shabbiness and freshness, the paucity of +ingredients. The end of an old race--this is the situation that +Hawthorne has depicted, and he has been admirably inspired in the +choice of the figures in whom he seeks to interest us. They are all +figures rather than characters--they are all pictures rather than +persons. But if their reality is light and vague, it is sufficient, +and it is in harmony with the low relief and dimness of outline of the +objects that surround them. They are all types, to the author's mind, +of something general, of something that is bound up with the history, +at large, of families and individuals, and each of them is the centre +of a cluster of those ingenious and meditative musings, rather +melancholy, as a general thing, than joyous, which melt into the +current and texture of the story and give it a kind of moral richness. +A grotesque old spinster, simple, childish, penniless, very humble at +heart, but rigidly conscious of her pedigree; an amiable bachelor, of +an epicurean temperament and an enfeebled intellect, who has passed +twenty years of his life in penal confinement for a crime of which he +was unjustly pronounced guilty; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young +girl from the country, a poor relation of these two ancient +decrepitudes, with whose moral mustiness her modern freshness and +soundness are contrasted; a young man still more modern, holding the +latest opinions, who has sought his fortune up and down the world, +and, though he has not found it, takes a genial and enthusiastic view +of the future: these, with two or three remarkable accessory figures, +are the persons concerned in the little drama. The drama is a small +one, but as Hawthorne does not put it before us for its own +superficial sake, for the dry facts of the case, but for something in +it which he holds to be symbolic and of large application, something +that points a moral and that it behoves us to remember, the scenes in +the rusty wooden house whose gables give its name to the story, have +something of the dignity both of history and of tragedy. Miss +Hephzibah Pyncheon, dragging out a disappointed life in her paternal +dwelling, finds herself obliged in her old age to open a little shop +for the sale of penny toys and gingerbread. This is the central +incident of the tale, and, as Hawthorne relates it, it is an incident +of the most impressive magnitude and most touching interest. Her +dishonoured and vague-minded brother is released from prison at the +same moment, and returns to the ancestral roof to deepen her +perplexities. But, on the other hand, to alleviate them, and to +introduce a breath of the air of the outer world into this long +unventilated interior, the little country cousin also arrives, and +proves the good angel of the feebly distracted household. All this +episode is exquisite--admirably conceived, and executed with a kind of +humorous tenderness, an equal sense of everything in it that is +picturesque, touching, ridiculous, worthy of the highest praise. +Hephzibah Pyncheon, with her near-sighted scowl, her rusty joints, her +antique turban, her map of a great territory to the eastward which +ought to have belonged to her family, her vain terrors and scruples +and resentments, the inaptitude and repugnance of an ancient +gentlewoman to the vulgar little commerce which a cruel fate has +compelled her to engage in--Hephzibah Pyncheon is a masterly picture. +I repeat that she is a picture, as her companions are pictures; she is +a charming piece of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic +exhibition. But she is described, like her companions too, so subtly +and lovingly that we enter into her virginal old heart and stand with +her behind her abominable little counter. Clifford Pyncheon is a still +more remarkable conception, though he is perhaps not so vividly +depicted. It was a figure needing a much more subtle touch, however, +and it was of the essence of his character to be vague and +unemphasised. Nothing can be more charming than the manner in which +the soft, bright, active presence of Phoebe Pyncheon is indicated, +or than the account of her relations with the poor dimly sentient +kinsman for whom her light-handed sisterly offices, in the evening of +a melancholy life, are a revelation of lost possibilities of +happiness. "In her aspect," Hawthorne says of the young girl, "there +was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and +yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer offered up in +the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, +moreover, and airy, and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she +wore--neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little +kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings--had ever been put on +before; or if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance +as if they had lain among the rose-buds." Of the influence of her +maidenly salubrity upon poor Clifford, Hawthorne gives the prettiest +description, and then, breaking off suddenly, renounces the attempt in +language which, while pleading its inadequacy, conveys an exquisite +satisfaction to the reader. I quote the passage for the sake of its +extreme felicity, and of the charming image with which it concludes. + + "But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No + adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with + which it impresses us is attainable. This being, made only + for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be + happy--his tendencies so hideously thwarted that some + unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, + never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and + he was now imbecile--this poor forlorn voyager from the + Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, + had been flung by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, + into a quiet harbour. There, as he lay more than half + lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud + had come to his nostrils, and, as odours will, had summoned + up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing + beauty amid which he should have had his home. With his + native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the + slight ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires!" + +I have not mentioned the personage in _The House of the Seven Gables_ +upon whom Hawthorne evidently bestowed most pains, and whose portrait is +the most elaborate in the book; partly because he is, in spite of the +space he occupies, an accessory figure, and partly because, even more +than the others, he is what I have called a picture rather than a +character. Judge Pyncheon is an ironical portrait, very richly and +broadly executed, very sagaciously composed and rendered--the portrait +of a superb, full blown hypocrite, a large-based, full-nurtured +Pharisee, bland, urbane, impressive, diffusing about him a "sultry" +warmth of benevolence, as the author calls it again and again, and +basking in the noontide of prosperity and the consideration of society; +but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate +piece of description, made up of a hundred admirable touches, in which +satire is always winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep +sense of reality. It is difficult to say whether Hawthorne followed a +model in describing Judge Pyncheon; but it is tolerably obvious that +the picture is an impression--a copious impression--of an individual. It +has evidently a definite starting-point in fact, and the author is able +to draw, freely and confidently, after the image established in his +mind. Holgrave, the modern young man, who has been a Jack-of-all-trades +and is at the period of the story a daguerreotypist, is an attempt to +render a kind of national type--that of the young citizen of the United +States whose fortune is simply in his lively intelligence, and who +stands naked, as it were, unbiased and unencumbered alike, in the centre +of the far-stretching level of American life. Holgrave is intended as a +contrast; his lack of traditions, his democratic stamp, his condensed +experience, are opposed to the desiccated prejudices and exhausted +vitality of the race of which poor feebly-scowling, rusty-jointed +Hephzibah is the most heroic representative. It is perhaps a pity that +Hawthorne should not have proposed to himself to give the old +Pyncheon-qualities some embodiment which would help them to balance more +fairly with the elastic properties of the young daguerreotypist--should +not have painted a lusty conservative to match his strenuous radical. As +it is, the mustiness and mouldiness of the tenants of the House of the +Seven Gables crumble away rather too easily. Evidently, however, what +Hawthorne designed to represent was not the struggle between an old +society and a new, for in this case he would have given the old one a +better chance; but simply, as I have said, the shrinkage and extinction +of a family. This appealed to his imagination; and the idea of long +perpetuation and survival always appears to have filled him with a kind +of horror and disapproval. Conservative, in a certain degree, as he was +himself, and fond of retrospect and quietude and the mellowing +influences of time, it is singular how often one encounters in his +writings some expression of mistrust of old houses, old institutions, +long lines of descent. He was disposed apparently to allow a very +moderate measure in these respects, and he condemns the dwelling of the +Pyncheons to disappear from the face of the earth because it has been +standing a couple of hundred years. In this he was an American of +Americans; or rather he was more American than many of his countrymen, +who, though they are accustomed to work for the short run rather than +the long, have often a lurking esteem for things that show the marks of +having lasted. I will add that Holgrave is one of the few figures, among +those which Hawthorne created, with regard to which the absence of the +realistic mode of treatment is felt as a loss. Holgrave is not sharply +enough characterised; he lacks features; he is not an individual, but a +type. But my last word about this admirable novel must not be a +restrictive one. It is a large and generous production, pervaded with +that vague hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life +of man, which is the real sign of a great work of fiction. + +After the publication of _The House of the Seven Gables_, which +brought him great honour, and, I believe, a tolerable share of a more +ponderable substance, he composed a couple of little volumes, for +children--_The Wonder-Book_, and a small collection of stories +entitled _Tanglewood Tales_. They are not among his most serious +literary titles, but if I may trust my own early impression of them, +they are among the most charming literary services that have been +rendered to children in an age (and especially in a country) in which +the exactions of the infant mind have exerted much too palpable an +influence upon literature. Hawthorne's stories are the old Greek +myths, made more vivid to the childish imagination by an infusion of +details which both deepen and explain their marvels. I have been +careful not to read them over, for I should be very sorry to risk +disturbing in any degree a recollection of them that has been at rest +since the appreciative period of life to which they are addressed. +They seem at that period enchanting, and the ideal of happiness of +many American children is to lie upon the carpet and lose themselves +in _The Wonder-Book_. It is in its pages that they first make the +acquaintance of the heroes and heroines of the antique mythology, and +something of the nursery fairy-tale quality of interest which +Hawthorne imparts to them always remains. + +I have said that Lenox was a very pretty place, and that he was able +to work there Hawthorne proved by composing _The House of the Seven +Gables_ with a good deal of rapidity. But at the close of the year in +which this novel was published he wrote to a friend (Mr. Fields, his +publisher,) that "to tell you a secret I am sick to death of +Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here.... The +air and climate do not agree with my health at all, and for the first +time since I was a boy I have felt languid and dispirited.... O that +Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a +rood or two of garden ground, near the sea-coast!" He was at this time +for a while out of health; and it is proper to remember that though +the Massachusetts Berkshire, with its mountains and lakes, was +charming during the ardent American summer, there was a reverse to +the medal, consisting of December snows prolonged into April and May. +Providence failed to provide him with a cottage by the sea; but he +betook himself for the winter of 1852 to the little town of West +Newton, near Boston, where he brought into the world _The Blithedale +Romance_. + +This work, as I have said, would not have been written if Hawthorne +had not spent a year at Brook Farm, and though it is in no sense of +the word an account of the manners or the inmates of that +establishment, it will preserve the memory of the ingenious community +at West Roxbury for a generation unconscious of other reminders. I +hardly know what to say about it save that it is very charming; this +vague, unanalytic epithet is the first that comes to one's pen in +treating of Hawthorne's novels, for their extreme amenity of form +invariably suggests it; but if on the one hand it claims to be +uttered, on the other it frankly confesses its inconclusiveness. +Perhaps, however, in this case, it fills out the measure of +appreciation more completely than in others, for _The Blithedale +Romance_ is the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest, of this +company of unhumorous fictions. + +The story is told from a more joyous point of view--from a point of +view comparatively humorous--and a number of objects and incidents +touched with the light of the profane world--the vulgar, many-coloured +world of actuality, as distinguished from the crepuscular realm of the +writer's own reveries--are mingled with its course. The book indeed is +a mixture of elements, and it leaves in the memory an impression +analogous to that of an April day--an alternation of brightness and +shadow, of broken sun-patches and sprinkling clouds. Its dénoûment is +tragical--there is indeed nothing so tragical in all Hawthorne, unless +it be the murder-of Miriam's persecutor by Donatello, in +_Transformation_, as the suicide of Zenobia; and yet on the whole the +effect of the novel is to make one think more agreeably of life. The +standpoint of the narrator has the advantage of being a concrete one; +he is no longer, as in the preceding tales, a disembodied spirit, +imprisoned in the haunted chamber of his own contemplations, but a +particular man, with a certain human grossness. + +Of Miles Coverdale I have already spoken, and of its being natural to +assume that in so far as we may measure this lightly indicated +identity of his, it has a great deal in common with that of his +creator. Coverdale is a picture of the contemplative, observant, +analytic nature, nursing its fancies, and yet, thanks to an element of +strong good sense, not bringing them up to be spoiled children; having +little at stake in life, at any given moment, and yet indulging, in +imagination, in a good many adventures; a portrait of a man, in a +word, whose passions are slender, whose imagination is active, and +whose happiness lies, not in doing, but in perceiving--half a poet, +half a critic, and all a spectator. He is contrasted, excellently, +with the figure of Hollingsworth, the heavily treading Reformer, whose +attitude with regard to the world is that of the hammer to the anvil, +and who has no patience with his friend's indifferences and +neutralities. Coverdale is a gentle sceptic, a mild cynic; he would +agree that life is a little worth living--or worth living a little; +but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have +to live a great deal. He confesses to a want of earnestness, but in +reality he is evidently an excellent fellow, to whom one might look, +not for any personal performance on a great scale, but for a good deal +of generosity of detail. "As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a +purpose," he writes, at the close of his story. "How strange! He was +ruined, morally, by an over plus of the same ingredient the want of +which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an +emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet were there any cause in this +whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and which +my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did not +involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold to +offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the +battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and +choose a mild sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles +Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the +levelled bayonets. Further than that I should be loth to pledge +myself." + +The finest thing in _The Blithdale Romance_ is the character of +Zenobia, which I have said elsewhere strikes me as the nearest +approach that Hawthorne has made to the complete creation of a +_person_. She is more concrete than Hester or Miriam, or Hilda or +Phoebe; she is a more definite image, produced by a greater +multiplicity of touches. It is idle to inquire too closely whether +Hawthorne had Margaret Fuller in his mind in constructing the figure +of this brilliant specimen of the strong-minded class and endowing her +with the genius of conversation; or, on the assumption that such was +the case, to compare the image at all strictly with the model. There +is no strictness in the representation by novelists of persons who +have struck them in life, and there can in the nature of things be +none. From the moment the imagination takes a hand in the game, the +inevitable tendency is to divergence, to following what may be called +new scents. The original gives hints, but the writer does what he +likes with them, and imports new elements into the picture. If there +is this amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of +Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished woman +of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady +of eminence whom there is any sign of his having known, that she was +proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the +little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook +Farm sprung, and that she had a miserable end and a watery grave--if +these are facts to be noted on one side, I say; on the other, the +beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque +temperament and physical aspects, offers many points of divergence +from the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine culture +in the suburbs of the New England metropolis. This picturesqueness of +Zenobia is very happily indicated and maintained; she is a woman, in +all the force of the term, and there is something very vivid and +powerful in her large expression of womanly gifts and weaknesses. +Hollingsworth is, I think, less successful, though there is much +reality in the conception of the type to which he belongs--the +strong-willed, narrow-hearted apostle of a special form of redemption +for society. There is nothing better in all Hawthorne than the scene +between him and Coverdale, when the two men are at work together in +the field (piling stones on a dyke), and he gives it to his companion +to choose whether he will be with him or against him. It is a pity, +perhaps, to have represented him as having begun life as a blacksmith, +for one grudges him the advantage of so logical a reason for his +roughness and hardness. + + "Hollingsworth scarcely said a word, unless when repeatedly + and pertinaciously addressed. Then indeed he would glare + upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, like a + tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and + betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and + mind.... His heart, I imagine, was never really interested + in our socialist scheme, but was for ever busy with his + strange, and as most people thought, impracticable plan for + the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their + higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me + many a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have + commenced his investigation of the subject by committing + some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the + condition of his-higher instincts afterwards." + +The most touching element in the novel is the history of the grasp +that this barbarous fanatic has laid upon the fastidious and +high-tempered Zenobia, who, disliking him and shrinking, from him at a +hundred points, is drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The +portion of the story that strikes me as least felicitous is that which +deals with Priscilla and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia--with +her mesmeric gifts, her clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled +Lady, her divided subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt, and her +numerous other graceful but fantastic properties--her Sibylline +attributes, as the author calls them. Hawthorne is rather too fond of +Sibylline attributes--a taste of the same order as his disposition, to +which I have already alluded, to talk about spheres and sympathies. As +the action advances, in _The Blithdale Romance_, we get too much out +of reality, and cease to feel beneath our feet the firm ground of an +appeal to our own vision of the world, our observation. I should have +liked to see the story concern itself more with the little community +in which its earlier scenes are laid, and avail itself of so excellent +an opportunity for describing unhackneyed specimens of human nature. I +have already spoken of the absence of satire in the novel, of its not +aiming in the least at satire, and of its offering no grounds for +complaint as an invidious picture. Indeed the brethren of Brook Farm +should have held themselves slighted rather than misrepresented, and +have regretted that the admirable genius who for a while was numbered +among them should have treated their institution mainly as a perch for +starting upon an imaginative flight. But when all is said about a +certain want of substance and cohesion in the latter portions of _The +Blithedale Romance_, the book is still a delightful and beautiful one. +Zenobia and Hollingsworth live in the memory, and even Priscilla and +Coverdale, who linger there less importunately, have a great deal that +touches us and that we believe in. I said just now that Priscilla was +infelicitous; but immediately afterwards I open the volume at a page +in which the author describes some of the out-of-door amusements at +Blithedale, and speaks of a foot-race across the grass, in which some +of the slim young girls of the society joined. "Priscilla's peculiar +charm in a foot-race was the weakness and irregularity with which she +ran. Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers, +she had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting +buoyantly forth therefore, as if no rival less swift than Atalanta +could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and often tumbled on the +grass. Such an incident--though it seems too slight to think of--was a +thing to laugh at, but which brought the water into one's eyes, and +lingered in the memory after far greater joys and sorrows were wept +out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was +full of trifles that affected me in just this way." That seems to me +exquisite, and the book is full of touches as deep and delicate. + +After writing it, Hawthorne went back to live in Concord, where he had +bought a small house in which, apparently, he expected to spend a +large portion of his future. This was in fact the dwelling in which he +passed that part of the rest of his days that he spent in his own +country. He established himself there before going to Europe, in 1853, +and he returned to the Wayside, as he called his house, on coming back +to the United States seven years later. Though he actually occupied +the place no long time, he had made it his property, and it was more +his own home than any of his numerous provisional abodes. I may +therefore quote a little account of the house which he wrote to a +distinguished friend, Mr. George Curtis. + + "As for my old house, you will understand it better after + spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in + hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; + no suggestiveness about it, and no venerableness, although + from the style of its construction it seems to have survived + beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a + central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a + rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest + picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its + situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that + one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing. + Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to + no great purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house + into terraces, and building arbours and summer-houses of + rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. + They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so + still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by + every breeze that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly + with locust trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the + month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed + with a few young elms, and white pines and infant oaks--the + whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, + there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend + delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, + stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand, or + some unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a + breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From + the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level + surfaces and gentle hilly outlines, covered with wood, that + characterise the scenery of Concord.... I know nothing of + the history of the house except Thoreau's telling me that it + was inhabited, a generation or two ago, by a man who + believed he should never die. I believe, however, he is + dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably reappear and + dispute my title to his residence." + +As Mr. Lathrop points out, this allusion to a man who believed he +should never die is "the first intimation of the story of _Septimius +Felton_." The scenery of that romance, he adds, "was evidently taken +from the Wayside and its hill." _Septimius Felton_ is in fact a young +man who, at the time of the war of the Revolution, lives in the +village of Concord, on the Boston road, at the base of a woody hill +which rises abruptly behind his house, and of which the level summit +supplies him with a promenade continually mentioned in the course of +the tale. Hawthorne used to exercise himself upon this picturesque +eminence, and, as he conceived the brooding Septimius to have done +before him, to betake himself thither when he found the limits of his +dwelling too narrow. But he had an advantage which his imaginary hero +lacked; he erected a tower as an adjunct to the house, and it was a +jocular tradition among his neighbours, in allusion to his attributive +tendency to evade rather than hasten the coming guest, that he used to +ascend this structure and scan the road for provocations to retreat. + +In so far, however, as Hawthorne suffered the penalties of celebrity +at the hands of intrusive fellow-citizens, he was soon to escape from +this honourable incommodity. On the 4th of March, 1853, his old +college-mate and intimate friend, Franklin Pierce, was installed as +President of the United States. He had been the candidate of the +Democratic party, and all good Democrats, accordingly, in conformity +to the beautiful and rational system under which the affairs of the +great Republic were carried on, begun to open their windows to the +golden sunshine of Presidential patronage. When General Pierce was put +forward by the Democrats, Hawthorne felt a perfectly loyal and natural +desire that his good friend should be exalted to so brilliant a +position, and he did what was in him to further the good cause, by +writing a little book about its hero. His _Life of Franklin Pierce_ +belongs to that class of literature which is known as the "campaign +biography," and which consists of an attempt, more or less successful, +to persuade the many-headed monster of universal suffrage that the +gentleman on whose behalf it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and +virtue. Of Hawthorne's little book there is nothing particular to +say, save that it is in very good taste, that he is a very fairly +ingenious advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President +qualities which rather faded in the bright light of a high office, +this defect of proportion was essential to his undertaking. He dwelt +chiefly upon General Pierce's exploits in the war with Mexico (before +that, his record, as they say in America, had been mainly that of a +successful country lawyer), and exercised his descriptive powers so +far as was possible in describing the advance of the United States +troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the Montezumas. The mouthpieces +of the Whig party spared him, I believe, no reprobation for +"prostituting" his exquisite genius; but I fail to see anything +reprehensible in Hawthorne's lending his old friend the assistance of +his graceful quill. He wished him to be President--he held afterwards +that he filled the office with admirable dignity and wisdom--and as +the only thing he could do was to write, he fell to work and wrote for +him. Hawthorne was a good lover and a very sufficient partisan, and I +suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made even less of the stuff +of a statesman, he would still have found in the force of old +associations an injunction to hail him as a ruler. Our hero was an +American of the earlier and simpler type--the type of which it is +doubtless premature to say that it has wholly passed away, but of +which it may at least be said that the circumstances that produced it +have been greatly modified. The generation to which he belonged, that +generation which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period +of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of the +young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on which it took +place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited on its +course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it conferred, of +the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in which it all went forward, +there seems to be little room for surprise that it should have +implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the +country, its duration, its immunity from the usual troubles of earthly +empires. This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an +element of genial optimism, in the light of which it appeared that the +great American state was not as other human institutions are, that a +special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously for +ever, and that a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered a +refuge to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world, +must come off easily, in the battle of the ages. From this conception +of the American future the sense of its having problems to solve was +blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme, no +looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication +of the population, and its enjoyment of the benefits of a +common-school education and of unusual facilities for making an +income--this was the form in which, on the whole, the future most +vividly presented itself, and in which the greatness of the country +was to be recognised of men. There was indeed a faint shadow in the +picture--the shadow projected by the "peculiar institution" of the +Southern States; but it was far from sufficient to darken the rosy +vision of most good Americans, and above all, of most good Democrats. +Hawthorne alludes to it in a passage of his life of Pierce, which I +will quote not only as a hint of the trouble that was in store for a +cheerful race of men, but as an example of his own easy-going +political attitude. + + "It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin + Pierce took that stand on the Slavery question from which he + has never since swerved by a hair's breadth. He fully + recognised by his votes and his voice, the rights pledged to + the South by the Constitution. This, at the period when he + declared himself, was an easy thing to do. But when it + became more difficult, when the first imperceptible murmur + of agitation had grown almost to a convulsion, his course + was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that + sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to + love that great and sacred reality--his whole united + country--better than the mistiness of a philanthropic + theory." + +This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not infrequent at +the North, but by no means general, to set a decisive limit to further +legislation in favour of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of +the country. Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in +speaking of his hero's having incurred obloquy by his conservative +attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American +world that suffered in the smallest degree, at this time, from social +persecution, was the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were as +unfashionable as they were indiscreet--which is saying much. Like most +of his fellow-countrymen, Hawthorne had no idea that the respectable +institution which he contemplated in impressive contrast to humanitarian +"mistiness," was presently to cost the nation four long years of +bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete as any the +world has seen. When this event occurred, he was therefore +proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his +feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a +heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such was +the bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which +I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dispelled, and they saw the +best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This +affair had no place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but +to hang their heads and close their eyes. The subsidence of that great +convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may +say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. +It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of +proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place +than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more +difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that +good Americana will be more numerous than ever; but the good American, +in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and +confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will +not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he +will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an +observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, +and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, +as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him +intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so +admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this +reason that Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper President. + +The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a +confidence was to offer his old friend one of the numerous places in +his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something +of the world, so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never +stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged that +something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at +Liverpool there was not a word of reasonable criticism to be offered +on the matter. If General Pierce, who was before all things +good-natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion +than to confer this modest distinction upon the most honourable and +discreet of men of letters, he would have made a more brilliant mark +in the annals of American statesmanship. Liverpool had not been +immediately selected, and Hawthorne had written to his friend and +publisher, Mr. Fields, with some humorous vagueness of allusion to his +probable expatriation. + + "Do make some inquiries about Portugal; as, for instance, in + what part of the world it lies, and whether it is an empire, + a kingdom, or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the + expenses of living there, and whether the Minister would be + likely to be much pestered with his own countrymen. Also, + any other information about foreign countries would be + acceptable to an inquiring mind." + +It would seem from this that there had been a question of offering him +a small diplomatic post; but the emoluments of the place were justly +taken into account, and it is to be supposed that those of the +consulate at Liverpool were at least as great as the salary of the +American representative at Lisbon. Unfortunately, just after +Hawthorne had taken possession of the former post, the salary attached +to it was reduced by Congress, in an economical hour, to less than +half the sum enjoyed by his predecessors. It was fixed at 7,500 +dollars (£1,500); but the consular fees, which were often copious, +were an added resource. At midsummer then, in 1853, Hawthorne was +established in England. + + * * * * * + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +ENGLAND AND ITALY. + + +Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age when he came to Europe--a +fact that should be remembered when those impressions which he +recorded in five substantial volumes (exclusive of the novel written +in Italy), occasionally affect us by the rigidity of their point of +view. His Note-Books, kept during his residence in England, his two +winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published after his +death; his impressions of England, sifted, revised, and addressed +directly to the public, he gave to the world shortly before this +event. The tone of his European Diaries is often so fresh and +unsophisticated that we find ourselves thinking of the writer as a +young man, and it is only a certain final sense of something +reflective and a trifle melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity +which is on the whole the leading characteristic of their pages, is, +though the simplicity of inexperience, not that of youth. When I say +inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's experience had been narrow. His +fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small +American towns--Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox, +West Newton--and he had led exclusively what one may call a +village-life. This is evident, not at all directly and superficially, +but by implication and between the lines, in his desultory history of +his foreign years. In other words, and to call things by their names, +he was exquisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact +not in the least in condemnation, but, on the contrary, in support of +an appreciative view of him. I know nothing more remarkable, more +touching, than the sight of this odd, youthful--elderly mind, +contending so late in the day with new opportunities for learning old +things, and on the whole profiting by them so freely and gracefully. +The Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified degree, +are the sketches of England, in _Our Old Home_; but the beauty and +delicacy of this latter work are so interwoven with the author's air +of being remotely outside of everything he describes, that they count +for more, seem more themselves, and finally give the whole thing the +appearance of a triumph, not of initiation, but of the provincial +point of view itself. + +I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence +in England. He appears to have enjoyed it greatly, in spite of the +deficiency of charm in the place to which his duties chiefly confined +him. His confinement, however, was not unbroken, and his published +journals consist largely of minute accounts of little journeys and +wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through the rest of +the country; together with much mention of numerous visits to London, +a city for whose dusky immensity and multitudinous interest he +professed the highest relish. His Note-Books are of the same cast as +the two volumes of his American Diaries, of which, I have given some +account--chiefly occupied with external matters, with the accidents +of daily life, with observations made during the long walks (often +with his son), which formed his most valued pastime. His office, +moreover, though Liverpool was not a delectable home, furnished him +with entertainment as well as occupation, and it may almost be said +that during these years he saw more of his fellow-countrymen, in the +shape of odd wanderers, petitioners, and inquirers of every kind, than +he had ever done in his native land. The paper entitled "Consular +Experiences," in _Our Old Home_, is an admirable recital of these +observations, and a proof that the novelist might have found much +material in the opportunities of the consul. On his return to America, +in 1860, he drew from his journal a number of pages relating to his +observations in England, re-wrote them (with, I should suppose, a good +deal of care), and converted them into articles which he published in +a magazine. These chapters were afterwards collected, and _Our Old +Home_ (a rather infelicitous title), was issued in 1863. I prefer to +speak of the book now, however, rather than in touching upon the +closing years of his life, for it is a kind of deliberate _résumé_ of +his impressions of the land of his ancestors. "It is not a good or a +weighty book," he wrote to his publisher, who had sent him some +reviews of it, "nor does it deserve any great amount of praise or +censure. I don't care about seeing any more notices of it." +Hawthorne's appreciation of his own productions was always extremely +just; he had a sense of the relations of things, which some of his +admirers have not thought it well to cultivate; and he never +exaggerated his own importance as a writer. _Our Old Home_ is not a +weighty book; it is decidedly a light one. But when he says it is not +a good one, I hardly know what he means, and his modesty at this +point is in excess of his discretion. Whether good or not, _Our Old +Home_ is charming--it is most delectable reading. The execution is +singularly perfect and ripe; of all his productions it seems to be the +best written. The touch, as musicians say, is admirable; the +lightness, the fineness, the felicity of characterisation and +description, belong to a man who has the advantage of feeling +delicately. His judgment is by no means always sound; it often rests +on too narrow an observation. But his perception is of the keenest, +and though it is frequently partial, incomplete, it is excellent as +far as it goes. The book gave but limited satisfaction, I believe, in +England, and I am not sure that the failure to enjoy certain +manifestations of its sportive irony, has not chilled the appreciation +of its singular grace. That English readers, on the whole, should have +felt that Hawthorne did the national mind and manners but partial +justice, is, I think, conceivable; at the same time that it seems to +me remarkable that the tender side of the book, as I may call it, +should not have carried it off better. It abounds in passages more +delicately appreciative than can easily be found elsewhere, and it +contains more charming and affectionate things than, I should suppose, +had ever before been written about a country not the writer's own. To +say that it is an immeasurably more exquisite and sympathetic work +than any of the numerous persons who have related their misadventures +in the United States have seen fit to devote to that country, is to +say but little, and I imagine that Hawthorne had in mind the array of +English voyagers--Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss +Martineau, Mr. Grattan--when he reflected that everything is relative +and that, as such books go, his own little volume observed the +amenities of criticism. He certainly had it in mind when he wrote the +phrase in his preface relating to the impression the book might make +in England. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for +courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute +in the least to any mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear +each other all over with butter and honey." I am far from intending to +intimate that the vulgar instinct of recrimination had anything to do +with the restrictive passages of _Our Old Home_; I mean simply that +the author had a prevision that his collection of sketches would in +some particulars fail to please his English friends. He professed, +after the event, to have discovered that the English are sensitive, +and as they say of the Americans, for whose advantage I believe the +term was invented; thin-skinned. "The English critics," he wrote to +his publisher, "seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen, +and it is perhaps natural that they should, because their self-conceit +can accept nothing short of indiscriminate adulation; but I really +think that Americans have much more cause than they to complain of me. +Looking over the volume I am rather surprised to find that whenever I +draw a comparison between the two people, I almost invariably cast the +balance against ourselves." And he writes at another time:--"I +received several private letters and printed notices of _Our Old Home_ +from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which +they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, +jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion +that there may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of +their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration +impresses them as malicious caricature. But they do me great injustice +in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate my own people." +The idea of his hating the English was of course too puerile for +discussion; and the book, as I have said, is full of a rich +appreciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But it has +a serious defect--a defect which impairs its value, though it helps to +give consistency to such an image of Hawthorne's personal nature as we +may by this time have been able to form. It is the work of an +outsider, of a stranger, of a man who remains to the end a mere +spectator (something less even than an observer), and always lacks the +final initiation into the manners and nature of a people of whom it +may most be said, among all the people of the earth, that to know them +is to make discoveries. Hawthorne freely confesses to this constant +exteriority, and appears to have been perfectly conscious of it. "I +remember," he writes in the sketch of "A London Suburb," in _Our Old +Home_, "I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by +our first English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight of +an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding +occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his +lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if +indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there. +Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his +abode as much a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in +an entry in his journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854. + + "The people, for several days, have been in the utmost + anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation, about + Sebastopol--and all England, and Europe to boot, have been + fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now + turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat + grim in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual + sympathies, it is impossible for an American to be otherwise + than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable, and + already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a + prosperous conclusion of the war, the _Times_ had begun to + throw out menaces against America. I shall never love + England till she sues to us for help, and, in the meantime, + the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties. + An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; + he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper + conception of himself.... I seem to myself like a spy or + traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I + neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they + look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart + 'knoweth its own bitterness,' and as for me, being a + stranger and an alien, I 'intermeddle not with their joy.'" + +This seems to me to express very well the weak side of Hawthorne's +work--his constant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded +him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I +think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most +self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief +that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue +them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of +not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference +of the circle of civilisation rather than at the centre, of the +experimental element not having as yet entirely dropped out of their +great political undertaking. The sense of this relativity, in a word, +replaces that quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards +its own position in the world, which reigns supreme in the British and +in the Gallic genius. Few persons, I think, can have mingled much with +Americans in Europe without having made this reflection, and it is in +England that their habit of looking askance at foreign institutions--of +keeping one eye, as it were, on the American personality, while with the +other they contemplate these objects--is most to be observed. Add to +this that Hawthorne came to England late in life, when his habits, his +tastes, his opinions, were already formed, that he was inclined to look +at things in silence and brood over them gently, rather than talk about +them, discuss them, grow acquainted with them by action; and it will be +possible to form an idea of our writer's detached and critical attitude +in the country in which it is easiest, thanks to its aristocratic +constitution, to the absence of any considerable public fund of +entertainment and diversion, to the degree in which the inexhaustible +beauty and interest of the place are private property, demanding +constantly a special introduction--in the country in which, I say, it is +easiest for a stranger to remain a stranger. For a stranger to cease to +be a stranger he must stand ready, as the French say, to pay with his +person; and this was an obligation that Hawthorne was indisposed to +incur. Our sense, as we read, that his reflections are those of a shy +and susceptible man, with nothing at stake, mentally, in his +appreciation of the country, is therefore a drawback to our confidence; +but it is not a drawback sufficient to make it of no importance that he +is at the same time singularly intelligent and discriminating, with a +faculty of feeling delicately and justly, which constitutes in itself +an illumination. There is a passage in the sketch entitled _About +Warwick_ which is a very good instance of what was probably his usual +state of mind. He is speaking of the aspect of the High Street of the +town. + + "The street is an emblem of England itself. What seems new + in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation of what + such a people as ourselves would destroy. The new things are + based and supported on sturdy old things, and derive a + massive strength from their deep and immemorial foundations, + though with such limitations and impediments as only an + Englishman could endure. But he likes to feel the weight of + all the past upon his back; and moreover the antiquity that + overburdens him has taken root in his being, and has grown + to be rather a hump than a pack, so that there is no getting + rid of it without tearing his whole structure to pieces. In + my judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable + under the mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on with it + as long as he can. He presents a spectacle which is by no + means without its charm for a disinterested and unincumbered + observer." + +There is all Hawthorne, with his enjoyment of the picturesque, his +relish of chiaroscuro, of local colour, of the deposit of time, and +his still greater enjoyment of his own dissociation from these things, +his "disinterested and unincumbered" condition. His want of +incumbrances may seem at times to give him a somewhat naked and +attenuated appearance, but on the whole he carries it off very well. I +have said that _Our Old Home_ contains much of his best writing, and +on turning over the book at hazard, I am struck with his frequent +felicity of phrase. At every step there is something one would like to +quote--something excellently well said. These things are often of the +lighter sort, but Hawthorne's charming diction lingers in the +memory--almost in the ear. I have always remembered a certain +admirable characterisation of Doctor Johnson, in the account of the +writer's visit to Lichfield--and I will preface it by a paragraph +almost as good, commemorating the charms of the hotel in that +interesting town. + + "At any rate I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary + coffee-room, with its heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, + all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a word with except + the waiter, who, like most of his class in England, had + evidently left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No + former practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence, + nor well-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and + amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate + the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such + circumstances as these, with no book at hand save the county + directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of + five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in a huge heap + of ancient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in these + old inns), let my head sink into an unsubstantial pillow, + and slept a stifled sleep, compounded of the night-troubles + of all my predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And + when I awoke, the odour of a bygone century was in my + nostrils--a faint, elusive smell, of which I never had any + conception before crossing the Atlantic." + +The whole chapter entitled "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" is a sort of +graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson, who certainly has nowhere else +been more tenderly spoken of. + + "Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend than + he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was dense; his + awful dread of death showed how much muddy imperfection was + to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of + spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of + life, and never cared to penetrate further than to + ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a + one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes + standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my + native propensities were toward Fairy Land, and also how + much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental sustenance + of a New Englander, it may not have been altogether amiss, + in those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this + heavy-footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he + carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now! And + then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that + enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so + readily amalgamated themselves with the American ideas that + seemed most adverse to them, may have been derived from, or + fostered and kept alive by, the great English moralist. + Never was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than + that! Doctor Johnson's morality was as English an article as + a beef-steak." + +And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear quoting this +passage about the days in a fine English summer:-- + + "For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far + as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer + day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, + at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through + the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath + quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon + their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious + that it is bedtime again, while there is still enough + daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book + distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season, + hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day + beholds its successor; or if not quite true of the latitude + of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern + parts of the island that To-morrow is born before its + Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden + twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face + of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may + simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of + recollection and another of prophecy." + +The Note-Books, as I have said, deal chiefly with, the superficial +aspect of English life, and describe the material objects with which +the author was surrounded. They often describe them admirably, and the +rural beauty of the country has never been more happily expressed. But +there are inevitably a great many reflections and incidental +judgments, characterisations of people he met, fragments of psychology +and social criticism, and it is here that Hawthorne's mixture of +subtlety and simplicity, his interfusion of genius with what I have +ventured to call the provincial quality, is most apparent. To an +American reader this later quality, which is never grossly manifested, +but pervades the Journals like a vague natural perfume, an odour of +purity and kindness and integrity, must always, for a reason that I +will touch upon, have a considerable charm; and such a reader will +accordingly take an even greater satisfaction in the Diaries kept +during the two years Hawthorne spent in Italy; for in these volumes +the element I speak of is especially striking. He resigned his +consulate at Liverpool towards the close of 1857--whether because he +was weary of his manner of life there and of the place itself, as may +well have been, or because he wished to anticipate supersession by the +new government (Mr. Buchanan's) which was just establishing itself at +Washington, is not apparent from the slender sources of information +from which these pages have been compiled. In the month of January of +the following year he betook himself with his family to the +Continent, and, as promptly as possible, made the best of his way to +Rome. He spent the remainder of the winter and the spring there, and +then went to Florence for the summer and autumn; after which he +returned to Rome and passed a second season. His Italian Note-Books +are very pleasant reading, but they are of less interest than the +others, for his contact with the life of the country, its people and +its manners, was simply that of the ordinary tourist--which amounts to +saying that it was extremely superficial. He appears to have suffered +a great deal of discomfort and depression in Rome, and not to have +been on the whole in the best mood for enjoying the place and its +resources. That he did, at one time and another, enjoy these things +keenly is proved by his beautiful romance, _Transformation_, which +could never have been written by a man who had not had many hours of +exquisite appreciation of the lovely land of Italy. But he took It +hard, as it were, and suffered himself to be painfully discomposed by +the usual accidents of Italian life, as foreigners learn to know it. +His future was again uncertain, and during his second winter in Rome +he was in danger of losing his elder daughter by a malady which he +speaks of as a trouble "that pierced to my very vitals." I may +mention, with regard to this painful episode, that Franklin Pierce, +whose presidential days were over, and who, like other ex-presidents, +was travelling in Europe, came to Rome at the time, and that the +Note-Books contain some singularly beautiful and touching allusions to +his old friend's gratitude for his sympathy, and enjoyment of his +society. The sentiment of friendship has on the whole been so much +less commemorated in literature than might have been expected from +the place it is supposed to hold in life, that there is always +something striking in any frank and ardent expression of it. It +occupied, in so far as Pierce was the object of it, a large place in +Hawthorne's mind, and it is impossible not to feel the manly +tenderness of such lines as these:-- + + "I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early + friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as + true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by + the experience of life. We hold just the same relation to + one another as of yore, and we have passed all the + turning-off places, and may hope to go on together, still + the same dear friends, as long as we live. I do not love him + one whit the less for having been President, nor for having + done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks + eloquently in his favour, and perhaps says a little for + myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might + not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the + other, as friend for friend." + +The Note-Books are chiefly taken up with descriptions of the regular +sights and "objects of interest," which we often feel to be rather +perfunctory and a little in the style of the traditional tourist's +diary. They abound in charming touches, and every reader of +_Transformation_ will remember the delightful colouring of the +numerous pages in that novel, which are devoted to the pictorial +aspects of Rome. But we are unable to rid ourselves of the impression +that Hawthorne was a good deal bored by the importunity of Italian +art, for which his taste, naturally not keen, had never been +cultivated. Occasionally, indeed, he breaks out into explicit sighs +and groans, and frankly declares that he washes his hands of it. +Already, in England, he had made the discovery that he could, easily +feel overdosed with such things. "Yesterday," he wrote in 1856, "I +went out at about twelve and visited the British Museum; an +exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much +at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy +heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the +frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite +Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones." + +The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better +proof of it than his curious aversion to the representation of the +nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly +returns to it, exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists +making naked figures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is +not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and +principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as +a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan +ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the +smoothness and whiteness of the marble--speaks of the surface of the +marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he +discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of +the frame is an essential part of his impression of the work--as he +indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. Like a good American, he took +more pleasure in the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr. +Powers and Mr. Hart, American artists who were plying their trade in +Italy, than in the works which adorned the ancient museums of the +country. He suffered greatly from the cold, and found little charm in +the climate, and during the weeks of winter that followed his arrival +in Rome, he sat shivering by his fire and wondering why he had come +to such a land of misery. Before he left Italy he wrote to his +publisher--"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it +farewell for ever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin +that has happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, +I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it." +Hawthorne presents himself to the reader of these pages as the last of +the old-fashioned Americans--and this is the interest which I just now +said that his compatriots would find in his very limitations. I do not +mean by this that there are not still many of his fellow-countrymen +(as there are many natives of every land under the sun,) who are more +susceptible of being irritated than of being soothed by the influences +of the Eternal City. What I mean is that an American of equal value +with Hawthorne, an American of equal genius, imagination, and, as our +forefathers said, sensibility, would at present inevitably accommodate +himself more easily to the idiosyncrasies of foreign lands. An +American as cultivated as Hawthorne, is now almost inevitably more +cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised in advance, +more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in becoming so, he has +lost something of his occidental savour, the quality which excites the +goodwill of the American reader of our author's Journals for the +dislocated, depressed, even slightly bewildered diarist. Absolutely +the last of the earlier race of Americans Hawthorne was, fortunately, +probably far from being. But I think of him as the last specimen of +the more primitive type of men of letters; and when it comes to +measuring what he succeeded in being, in his unadulterated form, +against what he failed of being, the positive side of the image quite +extinguishes the negative. I must be on my guard, however, against +incurring the charge of cherishing a national consciousness as acute +as I have ventured to pronounce his own. + +Out of his mingled sensations, his pleasure and his weariness, his +discomforts and his reveries, there sprang another beautiful work. +During the summer of 1858, he hired a picturesque old villa on the +hill of Bellosguardo, near Florence, a curious structure with a +crenelated tower, which, after having in the course of its career +suffered many vicissitudes and played many parts, now finds its most +vivid identity in being pointed out to strangers as the sometime +residence of the celebrated American romancer. Hawthorne took a fancy +to the place, as well he might, for it is one of the loveliest spots +on earth, and the great view that stretched itself before him contains +every element of beauty. Florence lay at his feet with her memories +and treasures; the olive-covered hills bloomed around him, studded +with villas as picturesque as his own; the Apennines, perfect in form +and colour, disposed themselves opposite, and in the distance, along +its fertile valley, the Arno wandered to Pisa and the sea. Soon after +coming hither he wrote to a friend in a strain of high satisfaction:-- + + "It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from + America--a satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long + as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to be that the + quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was + gradually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on + the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my + own countrymen there. At Rome too it was not much better. + But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this + secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks, + and am really remote. I like my present residence + immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, + and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each + member of the family, including servants, has a separate + suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of + upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring + expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown + tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was + confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being + burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I + hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a + month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a + romance, which I have in my head, ready to be written out." + +This romance was _Transformation_, which he wrote out during the +following winter in Rome, and re-wrote during the several months that +he spent in England, chiefly at Leamington, before returning to +America. The Villa Montauto figures, in fact, in this tale as the +castle of Monte-Beni, the patrimonial dwelling of the hero. "I take +some credit to myself," he wrote to the same friend, on returning to +Rome, "for having sternly shut myself up for an hour or two every day, +and come to close grips with a romance which I have been trying to +tear out of my mind." And later in the same winter he says--"I shall +go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well +contented there.... If I were but a hundred times richer than I am, +how very comfortable I could be! I consider it a great piece of good +fortune that I have had experience of the discomforts and miseries of +Italy, and did not go directly home from England. Anything will seem +like a Paradise after a Roman winter." But he got away at last, late +in the spring, carrying his novel with him, and the book was +published, after, as I say, he had worked it over, mainly during some +weeks that he passed at the little watering-place of Redcar, on the +Yorkshire coast, in February of the following year. It was issued +primarily in England; the American edition immediately followed. It is +an odd fact that in the two countries the book came out under +different titles. The title that the author had bestowed upon it did +not satisfy the English publishers, who requested him to provide it +with another; so that it is only in America that the work bears the +name of _The Marble Fawn_. Hawthorne's choice of this appellation is, +by the way, rather singular, for it completely fails to characterise +the story, the subject of which is the living faun, the faun of flesh +and blood, the unfortunate Donatello. His marble counterpart is +mentioned only in the opening chapter. On the other hand Hawthorne +complained that _Transformation_ "gives one the idea of Harlequin in a +pantomime." Under either name, however, the book was a great success, +and it has probably become the most popular of Hawthorne's four +novels. It is part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon +visitor to Rome, and is read by every English-speaking traveller who +arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go. + +It has a great deal of beauty, of interest and grace; but it has to my +sense a slighter value than its companions, and I am far from +regarding it as the masterpiece of the author, a position to which we +sometimes hear it assigned. The subject is admirable, and so are many +of the details; but the whole thing is less simple and complete than +either of the three tales of American life, and Hawthorne forfeited a +precious advantage in ceasing to tread his native soil. Half the +virtue of _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The House of the Seven Gables_ is +in their local quality; they are impregnated with the New England air. +It is very true that Hawthorne had no pretension to pourtray +actualities and to cultivate that literal exactitude which is now the +fashion. Had this been the case, he would probably have made a still +graver mistake in transporting the scene of his story to a country +which he knew only superficially. His tales all go on more or less "in +the vague," as the French say, and of course the vague may as well be +placed in Tuscany as in Massachusetts. It may also very well be urged +in Hawthorne's favour here, that in _Transformation_ he has attempted +to deal with actualities more than he did in either of his earlier +novels. He has described the streets and monuments of Rome with a +closeness which forms no part of his reference to those of Boston and +Salem. But for all this he incurs that penalty of seeming factitious +and unauthoritative, which is always the result of an artist's attempt +to project himself into an atmosphere in which he has not a +transmitted and inherited property. An English or a German writer (I +put poets aside) may love Italy well enough, and know her well enough, +to write delightful fictions about her; the thing has often been done. +But the productions in question will, as novels, always have about +them something second-rate and imperfect. There is in _Transformation_ +enough beautiful perception of the interesting character of Rome, +enough rich and eloquent expression of it, to save the book, if the +book could be saved; but the style, what the French call the _genre_, +is an inferior one, and the thing remains a charming romance with +intrinsic weaknesses. + +Allowing for this, however, some of the finest pages in all Hawthorne +are to be found in it. The subject, as I have said, is a particularly +happy one, and there is a great deal of interest in the simple +combination and opposition of the four actors. It is noticeable that +in spite of the considerable length of the story, there are no +accessory figures; Donatello and Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda, exclusively +occupy the scene. This is the more noticeable as the scene is very +large, and the great Roman background is constantly presented to us. +The relations of these four people are full of that moral +picturesqueness which Hawthorne was always looking for; he found it in +perfection in the history of Donatello. As I have said, the novel is +the most popular of his works, and every one will remember the figure +of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a +man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent +animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable +conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather +vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself +too little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation. But he is +enough of a creation to make us enter into the situation, and the +whole history of his rise, or fall, whichever one chooses to call +it--his tasting of the tree of knowledge and finding existence +complicated with a regret--is unfolded with a thousand ingenious and +exquisite touches. Of course, to make the interest complete, there is +a woman in the affair, and Hawthorne has done few things more +beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between +his immature and dimly-puzzled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning, +unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely-seeing +feminine nature of Miriam. Deeply touching is the representation of +the manner in which these two essentially different persons--the woman +intelligent, passionate, acquainted with life, and with a tragic +element in her own career; the youth ignorant, gentle, unworldly, +brightly and harmlessly natural--are equalised and bound together by +their common secret, which insulates them, morally, from the rest of +mankind. The character of Hilda has always struck me as an admirable +invention--one of those things that mark the man of genius. It needed +a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the +propriety of such a figure as Hilda's and to perceive the relief it +would both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid New England +girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome, +unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has been +accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by +which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is +_her_ revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has done +no wrong, and yet wrongdoing has become a part of her experience, and +she carries the weight of her detested knowledge upon her heart. She +carries it a long time, saddened and oppressed by it, till at last she +can bear it no longer. If I have called the whole idea of the presence +and effect of Hilda in the story a trait of genius, the purest touch +of inspiration is the episode in which the poor girl deposits her +burden. She has passed the whole lonely summer in Rome, and one day, +at the end of it, finding herself in St. Peter's, she enters a +confessional, strenuous daughter of the Puritans as she is, and pours +out her dark knowledge into the bosom of the Church--then comes away +with her conscience lightened, not a whit the less a Puritan than +before. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but this +admirable scene, and the pages describing the murder committed by +Donatello under Miriam's eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, afterwards, +of the guilty couple, through the "blood-stained streets of Rome," it +would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of +our day. + +Like all of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many light threads +of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture of the tale, but which are +apt to break and remain in our fingers if we attempt to handle them. +These things are part of Hawthorne's very manner--almost, as one might +say, of his vocabulary; they belong much more to the surface of his +work than to its stronger interest. The fault of _Transformation_ is +that the element of the unreal is pushed too far, and that the book is +neither positively of one category nor of another. His "moonshiny +romance," he calls it in a letter; and, in truth, the lunar element is +a little too pervasive. The action wavers between the streets of Rome, +whose literal features the author perpetually sketches, and a vague +realm of fancy, in which quite a different verisimilitude prevails. +This is the trouble with Donatello himself. His companions are +intended to be real--if they fail to be so, it is not for want of +intention; whereas he is intended to be real or not, as you please. He +is of a different substance from them; it is as if a painter, in +composing a picture, should try to give you an impression of one of +his figures by a strain of music. The idea of the modern faun was a +charming one; but I think it a pity that the author should not have +made him more definitely modern, without reverting so much to his +mythological properties and antecedents, which are very gracefully +touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque conceits, +much more than to that of real psychology. Among the young Italians of +to-day there are still plenty of models for such an image as Hawthorne +appears to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatello. +And since I am speaking critically, I may go on to say that the art of +narration, in _Transformation_, seems to me more at fault than in the +author's other novels. The story straggles and wanders, is dropped and +taken up again, and towards the close lapses into an almost fatal +vagueness. + + * * * * * + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +LAST YEARS. + + +Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell +that I have not already told. He returned to America in the summer of +1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord +before going to Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been +brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon the +fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all +things, during his residence in Europe, from the standpoint of that +little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the +good Mohammedan carries the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to +face towards Mecca. But it does not appear, nevertheless, that he +found himself treading with any great exhilaration the larger section +of his native soil upon which, on his return, he disembarked. Indeed, +the closing part of his life was a period of dejection, the more acute +that it followed directly upon seven years of the happiest +opportunities he was to have known. And his European residence had +been brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely with those +habits of extreme seclusion into which he was to relapse on his return +to Concord. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote from London, +shortly before leaving it for the last time, "to see how quietly I +accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my +engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London life, somehow +or other," he adds in the same letter, "has done me a wonderful deal +of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for +if I had my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I do." +"When he found himself once more on the old ground," writes Mr. +Lathrop, "with the old struggle for subsistence staring him in the +face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of +depression would follow." There is indeed not a little sadness in the +thought of Hawthorne's literary gift, light, delicate, exquisite, +capricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy burden of +the maintenance of a family. We feel that it was not intended for such +grossness, and that in a world ideally constituted he would have +enjoyed a liberal pension, an assured subsistence, and have been able +to produce his charming prose only when the fancy took him. + +The brightness of the outlook at home was not made greater by the +explosion of the Civil War in the spring of 1861. These months, and +the three years that followed them, were not a cheerful time for any +persons but army-contractors; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud appears +to have dropped a permanent shadow. The whole affair was a bitter +disappointment to him, and a fatal blow to that happy faith in the +uninterruptedness of American prosperity which I have spoken of as the +religion of the old-fashioned American in general, and the +old-fashioned Democrat in particular. It was not a propitious time for +cultivating the Muse; when history herself is so hard at work, +fiction has little left to say. To fiction, directly, Hawthorne did +not address himself; he composed first, chiefly during the year 1862, +the chapters of which our _Our Old Home_ was afterwards made up. I +have said that, though this work has less value than his purely +imaginative things, the writing is singularly good, and it is well to +remember, to its greater honour, that it was produced at a time when +it was painfully hard for a man of Hawthorne's cast of mind to fix his +attention. The air was full of battle-smoke, and the poet's vision was +not easily clear. Hawthorne was irritated, too, by the sense of being +to a certain extent, politically considered, in a false position. A +large section of the Democratic party was not in good odour at the +North; its loyalty was not perceived to be of that clear strain which +public opinion required. To this wing of the party Franklin Pierce +had, with reason or without, the credit of belonging; and our author +was conscious of some sharpness of responsibility in defending the +illustrious friend of whom he had already made himself the advocate. +He defended him manfully, without a grain of concession, and described +the ex-President to the public (and to himself), if not as he was, +then as he ought to be. _Our Old Home_ is dedicated to him, and about +this dedication there was some little difficulty. It was represented +to Hawthorne that as General Pierce was rather out of fashion, it +might injure the success, and, in plain terms, the sale of his book. +His answer (to his publisher), was much to the point. + + "I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to + withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My + long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the + dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this + book, which would have had no existence without his + kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his + name ought to sink the volume, there is so much the more + need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, + merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary + reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and + thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the + dedication I should never look at the volume again without + remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must + accept my book precisely as I think fit to give it, or let + it alone. Nevertheless I have no fancy for making myself a + martyr when it is honourably and conscientiously possible to + avoid it; and I always measure out heroism very accurately + according to the exigencies of the occasion, and should be + the last man in the world to throw away a bit of it + needlessly. So I have looked over the concluding paragraph + and have amended it in such a way that, while doing what I + know to be justice to my friend, it contains not a word that + ought to be objectionable to any set of readers. If the + public of the North see fit to ostracise me for this, I can + only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two + dollars, rather than retain the goodwill of such a herd of + dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels." + +The dedication was published, the book was eminently successful, and +Hawthorne was not ostracised. The paragraph under discussion stands as +follows:--"Only this let me say, that, with the record of your life in +my memory, and with a sense of your character in my deeper +consciousness, as among the few things that time has left as it found +them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful for ever to that +grand idea of an irrevocable Union which, as you once told me, was the +earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there may be +a choice of paths--for you but one; and it rests among my certainties +that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or +apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply +heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of +personal happiness, than those of Franklin Pierce." I know not how +well the ex-President liked these lines, but the public thought them +admirable, for they served as a kind of formal profession of faith, on +the question of the hour, by a loved and honoured writer. That some of +his friends thought such a profession needed is apparent from the +numerous editorial ejaculations and protests appended to an article +describing a visit he had just paid to Washington, which Hawthorne +contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1862, and which, +singularly enough, has not been reprinted. The article has all the +usual merit of such sketches on Hawthorne's part--the merit of +delicate, sportive feeling, expressed with consummate grace--but the +editor of the periodical appears to have thought that he must give the +antidote with the poison, and the paper is accompanied with several +little notes disclaiming all sympathy with the writer's political +heresies. The heresies strike the reader of to-day as extremely mild, +and what excites his emotion, rather, is the questionable taste of the +editorial commentary, with which it is strange that Hawthorne should +have allowed his article to be encumbered. He had not been an +Abolitionist before the War, and that he should not pretend to be one +at the eleventh hour, was, for instance, surely a piece of consistency +that might have been allowed to pass. "I shall not pretend to be an +admirer of old John Brown," he says, in a page worth quoting, "any +further than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may +go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any +apophthegm of a sage whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden +sentences"--the allusion here, I suppose, is to Mr. Emerson--"as from +that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honoured a name), that +the death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as +venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won +his martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly. He himself, I am persuaded +(such was his natural integrity), would have acknowledged that +Virginia had a right to take the life which he had staked and lost; +although it would have been better for her, in the hour that is fast +coming, if she could generously have forgotten the criminality of his +attempt in its enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible +man, looking at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain +intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in +requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Now +that the heat of that great conflict has passed away, this is a +capital expression of the saner estimate, in the United States, of the +dauntless and deluded old man who proposed to solve a complex +political problem by stirring up a servile insurrection. There is much +of the same sound sense, interfused with light, just appreciable +irony, in such a passage as the following:-- + + "I tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a + Southern army would be in a sober town of Massachusetts; and + the thought considerably lessened my wonder at the cold and + shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the + sullen demeanour, the declared, or scarcely hidden, sympathy + with rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange + thing in human life that the greatest errors both of men + and women often spring from their sweetest and most generous + qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warmhearted, + generous, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not + from any real zeal for the cause, but because, between two + conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay + nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government + against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself + by such plausible arguments, as against that of the United + States. The anomaly of two allegiances, (of which that of + the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and + includes the altar and the hearth, while the General + Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, + and has no symbol but a flag,) is exceedingly mischievous in + this point of view; for it has converted crowds of honest + people into traitors, who seem to themselves not merely + innocent but patriotic, and who die for a bad cause with a + quiet conscience as if it were the best. In the vast extent + of our country--too vast by far to be taken into one small + human heart--we inevitably limit to our own State, or at + farthest, to our own little section, that sentiment of + physical love for the soil which renders an Englishman, for + example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and + well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot, + treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each + individual breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore, + and is content to be ruined with her, let us shoot him, if + we can, but allow him an honourable burial in the soil he + fights for." + +To this paragraph a line of deprecation from the editor is attached; +and indeed from the point of view of a vigorous prosecution of the war +it was doubtless not particularly pertinent. But it is interesting as +an example of the way an imaginative man judges current events--trying +to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary +feels, and present his view of the case. + +But he had other occupations for his imagination than putting himself +into the shoes of unappreciative Southerners. He began at this time +two novels, neither of which he lived to finish, but both of which +were published, as fragments, after his death. The shorter of these +fragments, to which he had given the name of _The Dolliver Romance_, +is so very brief that little can be said of it. The author strikes, +with all his usual sweetness, the opening notes of a story of New +England life, and the few pages which have been given to the world +contain a charming picture of an old man and a child. + +The other rough sketch--it is hardly more--is in a manner complete; it +was unfortunately deemed complete enough to be brought out in a +magazine as a serial novel. This was to do it a great wrong, and I do +not go too far in saying that poor Hawthorne would probably not have +enjoyed the very bright light that has been projected upon this +essentially crude piece of work. I am at a loss to know how to speak +of _Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life_; I have purposely +reserved but a small space for doing so, for the part of discretion +seems to be to pass it by lightly. I differ therefore widely from the +author's biographer and son-in-law in thinking it a work of the +greatest weight and value, offering striking analogies with Goethe's +_Faust_; and still more widely from a critic whom Mr. Lathrop quotes, +who regards a certain portion of it as "one of the very greatest +triumphs in all literature." It seems to me almost cruel to pitch in +this exalted key one's estimate of the rough first draught of a tale +in regard to which the author's premature death operates, virtually, +as a complete renunciation of pretensions. It is plain to any reader +that _Septimius Felton_, as it stands, with its roughness, its gaps, +its mere allusiveness and slightness of treatment, gives us but a +very partial measure of Hawthorne's full intention; and it is equally +easy to believe that this intention was much finer than anything we +find in the book. Even if we possessed the novel in its complete form, +however, I incline to think that we should regard it as very much the +weakest of Hawthorne's productions. The idea itself seems a failure, +and the best that might have come of it would have been very much +below _The Scarlet Letter_ or _The House of the Seven Gables_. The +appeal to our interest is not felicitously made, and the fancy of a +potion, to assure eternity of existence, being made from the flowers +which spring from the grave of a man whom the distiller of the potion +has deprived of life, though it might figure with advantage in a short +story of the pattern of the _Twice-Told Tales_, appears too slender to +carry the weight of a novel. Indeed, this whole matter of elixirs and +potions belongs to the fairy-tale period of taste, and the idea of a +young man enabling himself to live forever by concocting and imbibing +a magic draught, has the misfortune of not appealing to our sense of +reality or even to our sympathy. The weakness of _Septimius Felton_ is +that the reader cannot take the hero seriously--a fact of which there +can be no better proof than the element of the ridiculous which +inevitably mingles itself in the scene in which he entertains his +lady-love with a prophetic sketch of his occupations during the +successive centuries of his earthly immortality. I suppose the answer +to my criticism is that this is allegorical, symbolic, ideal; but we +feel that it symbolises nothing substantial, and that the +truth--whatever it may be--that it illustrates, is as moonshiny, to +use Hawthorne's own expression, as the allegory itself. Another fault +of the story is that a great historical event--the war of the +Revolution--is introduced in the first few pages, in order to supply +the hero with a pretext for killing the young man from whose grave the +flower of immortality is to sprout, and then drops out of the +narrative altogether, not even forming a background to the sequel. It +seems to me that Hawthorne should either have invented some other +occasion for the death of his young officer, or else, having struck +the note of the great public agitation which overhung his little group +of characters, have been careful to sound it through the rest of his +tale. I do wrong, however, to insist upon these things, for I fall +thereby into the error of treating the work as if it had been cast +into its ultimate form and acknowledged by the author. To avoid this +error I shall make no other criticism of details, but content myself +with saying that the idea and intention of the book appear, relatively +speaking, feeble, and that even had it been finished it would have +occupied a very different place in the public esteem from the writer's +masterpieces. + +The year 1864 brought with it for Hawthorne a sense of weakness and +depression from which he had little relief during the four or five +months that were left him of life. He had his engagement to produce +_The Dolliver Romance_, which had been promised to the subscribers of +the _Atlantic Monthly_ (it was the first time he had undertaken to +publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to +write, and his consciousness of an unperformed task weighed upon him, +and did little to dissipate his physical inertness. "I have not yet +had courage to read the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his +publisher in December, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with +terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful +to you," he went on, "for protecting me from that visitation of the +elephant and his cub. If you happen to see Mr.----, of L----, a young +man who was here last summer, pray tell him anything that your +conscience will let you, to induce him to spare me another visit, +which I know he intended. I really am not well, and cannot be +disturbed by strangers, without more suffering than it is worth while +to endure." A month later he was obliged to ask for a further +postponement. "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an +effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful +that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with +decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old +spirit and vigour. That trouble perhaps still awaits you, after I +shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, +for the time, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an +instinct that I had better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new +spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." The winter +passed away, but the "new spirit of vigour" remained absent, and at +the end of February he wrote to Mr. Fields that his novel had simply +broken down, and that he should never finish it. "I hardly know what +to say to the public about this abortive romance, though I know pretty +well what the case will be. I shall never finish it. Yet it is not +quite pleasant for an author to announce himself, or to be announced, +as finally broken down as to his literary faculty.... I cannot finish +it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an +effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I should care much for +that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus ending a +life of much smoulder and a scanty fire, in a blaze of glory. But I +should smother myself in mud of my own making.... I am not +low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to me +realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I +could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage and the 'old +Home' might set me all right." + +But he was not to go to England; he started three months later upon a +briefer journey, from which he never returned. His health was +seriously disordered, and in April, according to a letter from Mrs. +Hawthorne, printed by Mr. Fields, he had been "miserably ill." His +feebleness was complete; he appears to have had no definite malady, +but he was, according to the common phrase, failing. General Pierce +proposed to him that they should make a little tour together among the +mountains of New Hampshire, and Hawthorne consented, in the hope of +getting some profit from the change of air. The northern New England +spring is not the most genial season in the world, and this was an +indifferent substitute for the resource for which his wife had, on his +behalf, expressed a wish--a visit to "some island in the Gulf Stream." +He was not to go far; he only reached a little place called Plymouth, +one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain scenery of +New Hampshire, when, on the 18th of May, 1864, death overtook him. His +companion, General Pierce, going into his room in the early morning, +found that he had breathed his last during the night--had passed away, +tranquilly, comfortably, without a sign or a sound, in his sleep. This +happened at the hotel of the place--a vast white edifice, adjacent to +the railway station, and entitled the Pemigiwasset House. He was +buried at Concord, and many of the most distinguished men in the +country stood by his grave. + +He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been +singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It +had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his work. He had +lived primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the +tenderest kind; and then--without eagerness, without pretension, but +with a great deal of quiet devotion--in his charming art. His work +will remain; it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the +men of imagination he will always have his niche. No one has had just +that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more +successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was +not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a +sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He +combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with +a haunting care for moral problems. Man's conscience was his theme, +but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its +own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance. + +THE END. + + * * * * * + + +Now publishing, in crown 8vo, price 2_s._ 6_d._ + +ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. + +Edited by JOHN MORLEY. + +JOHNSON. BY LESLIE STEPHEN. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch + of Dr. Johnson. It could hardly have been done better, and + it will convey to the readers for whom it is intended a + juster estimate of Johnson than either of the two essays of + Lord Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._ + +SCOTT. By R. H. HUTTON. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to + Scott and his poems and novels."--_Examiner._ + +GIBBON. By J. C. MORISON. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life + and works of the greatest among the world's historians, it + deserves the highest praise."--_Examiner._ + +SHELLEY. By J. A. SYMONDS. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "The lovers of this great poet are to be congratulated at + having at their command so fresh, clear, and intelligent a + presentment of the subject, written by a man of adequate and + wide culture."--_Athenĉum_.' + +HUME. By Professor HUXLEY, F.R.S. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "It may fairly be said that no one now living could have + expounded Hume with more sympathy or with equal + perspicuity."--_Athenĉum_. + +GOLDSMITH. By WILLIAM BLACK. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "Mr. Black brings a fine sympathy and taste to bear in his + criticism of Goldsmith's writings, as well as his sketch of + the incidents of his life,"--_Athenĉum_. + +DEFOE. By W. MINTO. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "Mr. Minto's book is careful and accurate in all that is + stated, and faithful in all that it suggests. It will repay + reading more than once."--_Athenĉum_. + +BURNS. By Principal SHAIRP. Crown 8vo. 2_s._ 6_d._ + + "It is impossible to desire fairer criticism than Principal + Shairp's on Burns's poetry.... None of the series has given + a truer estimate either of character or of genius than this + volume."--_Spectator_. + +SPENSER. By the Very Rev. the DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S. 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MORRIS, with a Memoir by J. W. HALES, M.A. With +Glossary. pp. lv. 736. + + "_Worthy--and higher praise it needs not--of the beautiful + 'Globe Series_.'"--DAILY NEWS. + +Sir Walter Scott's Poetical Works. Edited, with a Biographical and +Critical Memoir, by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, and copious Notes, pp. +xliii., 559. + + "_We can almost sympathise with a middle-aged grumbler, who, + after reading Mr. Palgrave's memoir and introduction, should + exclaim, 'Why was there not such an edition of Scott when I + was a school-boy?_'"--GUARDIAN. + +Complete Works of Robert Burns. Edited from the best Printed and +Manuscript authorities, with Glossarial Index, Notes, and a +Biographical Memoir by ALEXANDER SMITH, pp. lxii., 636. + + "_Admirable in all respects_."--SPECTATOR. + +Robinson Crusoe. Edited after the Original Editions, with a +Biographical Introduction by HENRY KINGSLEY. pp. xxxi., 607. + + "_A most excellent and in every way desirable + edition_."--COURT CIRCULAR. + +Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works. Edited, with Biographical +Introduction, by PROFESSOR MASSON. pp. lx., 695. + + "_Such an admirable compendium of the facts of Goldsmith's + life, and so careful and minute a delineation of the mixed + traits of his peculiar character as to be a very model of a + literary biography in little_."--SCOTSMAN. + +Pope's Poetical Works. Edited, with Notes and Introductory Memoir, by +A. W. WARD, M.A., Professor of History in Owens College, Manchester. +pp. lii., 508. + + _The_ LITERARY CHURCHMAN _remarks: "The Editor's own notes + and introductory memoir are excellent, the memoir alone + would be cheap and well worth buying at the price of the + whole volume_." + +Dryden's Poetical Works. Edited, with a Memoir, Revised Text, and +Notes, by W. D. CHRISTIE, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge. pp. +lxxxvii., 662. + + "_An admirable edition, the result of great research and of + a careful revision of the text_."--PALL MALL GAZETTE. + +Cowper's Poetical Works. Edited, with Notes and Biographical +Introduction, by WILLIAM BENHAM, Vicar of Margate. pp. lxxiii., 536. + + _"Mr. Benham's edition of Cowper is one of permanent + value_."--SATURDAY REVIEW. + +Morte d'Arthur.--SIR THOMAS MALORY'S BOOK OF KING ARTHUR AND OF HIS +NOBLE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE. The original Edition of Caxton, +revised for Modern Use. With an Introduction by Sir EDWARD STRACHEY, +Bart. pp. xxxvii., 509. + + _"It is with perfect confidence that we recommend this + edition of the old romance to every class of + readers_."--PALL MALL GAZETTE. + +The Works of Virgil. Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions, +Notes, Running Analysis, and an Index. 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