initial commit of ebook 7301HEADmain

5 files changed, 7737 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/7301-8.txt b/7301-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..81b48c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/7301-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7721 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by George E. Woodberry
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Author: George E. Woodberry
+
+Release Date: January, 2005  [EBook #7301]
+[This file was first posted on April 9, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ***
+
+
+
+
+V-M Österman, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The narrative of Hawthorne's life has been partly told in the
+autobiographical passages of his writings which he himself addressed to
+his readers from time to time, and in the series of "Note Books," not
+meant for publication but included in his posthumous works; the
+remainder is chiefly contained in the family biography, "Nathaniel
+Hawthorne and his Wife" by his son Julian Hawthorne, "Memories of
+Hawthorne" by his daughter, Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, and "A Study of
+Hawthorne," by his son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop. Collateral
+material is also to be found abundantly in books of reminiscences by his
+contemporaries. These are the printed sources of the present biography.
+
+The author takes pleasure in expressing his thanks to his publishers for
+the ample material they have placed at his disposal; and also to Messrs.
+Harper and Brothers for their permission to make extracts from Horatio
+Bridge's "Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne," and to Samuel
+T. Pickard, Esq., author of "Hawthorne's First Diary," and to Dr.
+Moncure D. Conway, author of "Nathaniel Hawthorne" (Appleton's), for a
+like courtesy.
+
+COLUMBIA COLLEGE, April 1, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAP.
+
+I. FIRST YEARS
+
+II. THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES
+
+III. WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER
+
+IV. THE OLD MANSE
+
+V. THE SCARLET LETTER
+
+VI. LITERARY LABORS
+
+VII. LIFE ABROAD
+
+VIII. LAST YEARS
+
+
+
+
+NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+FIRST YEARS.
+
+
+The Hathorne family stock, to name it with the ancient spelling, was
+English, and its old home is said to have been at Wigeastle, Wilton, in
+Wiltshire. The emigrant planter, William Hathorne, twenty-three years
+old, came over in the Arbella with Winthrop in 1630. He settled at
+Dorchster, but in 1637 removed to Salem, where he received grants of
+land; and there the line continued generation after generation with
+varying fortune, at one time coming into public service and local
+distinction, and at another lapsing again into the common lot, as was
+the case of the long settled families generally. The planter, William
+Hathorne, shared to the full in the vigor and enterprise of the first
+generation in New England. He was a leader in war and peace, trade and
+politics, with the versatility then required for leadership, being
+legislator, magistrate, Indian fighter, explorer, and promoter, as well
+as occasionally a preacher; and besides this practical force he had a
+temper to sway and incite, which made him reputed the most eloquent man
+in the public assembly. He possessed--and this may indicate another side
+to his character--a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," certainly a
+rare book in the wilderness. He was best remembered, both in local
+annals and family tradition, as a patriot and a persecutor, for he
+refused to obey the king's summons to England, and he ordered Quaker
+women to be whipped through the country-side.
+
+The next generation, born in the colony, were generally of a narrower
+type than their fathers, though in their turn they took up the work of
+the new and making world with force and conscience; and the second
+Hathorne, John, of fanatical memory, was as characteristically a
+latter-day Puritan as his father had been a pioneer. He served in the
+council and the field, but he left a name chiefly as a magistrate. His
+duty as judge fell in the witchcraft years, and under that adversity of
+fortune he showed those qualities of the Puritan temperament which are
+most darkly recalled; he examined and sentenced to death several of the
+accused persons, and bore himself so inhumanely in court that the
+husband of one of the sufferers cursed him,--it must have been
+dramatically done to have left so vivid a mark in men's minds,--him and
+his children's children. This was the curse that lingered in the family
+memory like a black blot in the blood, and was ever after used to
+explain any ill luck that befell the house. The third heir of the name,
+Joseph, was a plain farmer, in whose person the family probably ceased
+from the ranks of the gentry, as the word was then used. The fourth,
+Daniel, "bold Hathorne" of the Revolutionary ballad, was a
+privateersman, robust, ruddy of face, blue-eyed, quick to wrath,--a
+strong-featured type of the old Salem shipmaster. His son, Nathaniel,
+the fifth descendant, was also bred to the sea, a young man of slight,
+firm figure, and in face and build so closely resembling his famous
+son--for he was the father of Hawthorne--that a passing sailor once
+recognized the latter by the likeness. What else he transmitted to his
+son, in addition to physique, by way of temperament and inbred capacity
+and inclination, was to suffer more than a sea-change; but he is
+recalled as a stern man on deck, of few words, showing doubtless the
+early aging of those days under the influence of active responsibility,
+danger, and the habit of command, and, like all these shipmasters--for
+they were men of some education--he took books to sea with him. He died
+at Surinam in 1808, when thirty-two years old. He had married Elizabeth
+Clarke Manning, herself a descendant in the fifth generation of Richard
+Manning, of St. Petrox Parish, Dartmouth, whose widow emigrated to New
+England with her children in 1679. Other old colonial families that had
+blended with the Hathornes and Mannings in these American years were the
+Gardner, Bowditch, and Phelps stocks, on the one side, and the Giddings,
+Potter, and Lord, on the other. Of such descent, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
+the second child and only son of this marriage, was born at Salem, July
+4, 1804, in his grandfather Daniel's house, on Union Street, near the
+wharves.
+
+The pleasant, handsome, bright-haired boy was four years old when his
+mother called him into her room and told him that his father was dead.
+She soon removed with him and his sisters, of whom Elizabeth was four
+years older and Louisa two years younger than himself, to her father's
+house in the adjoining yard, which faced on Herbert Street; and there
+the young mother, who was still but twenty-seven, following a custom
+which made much of widows' mourning in those times, withdrew to a life
+of seclusion in her own room, which, there or elsewhere, she maintained
+till her death, through a period of forty years; and, as a perpetual
+outward sign of her solitude, she took her meals apart, never eating at
+the common table. There is a touch of mercy in life which allows
+childhood to reconcile itself with all conditions; else one might regret
+that the lad was to grow up from his earliest memory in the visible
+presence of this grief separating him in some measure from his mother's
+life; it was as if there were a ghost in the house; and though early
+anecdotes of him are few and of little significance, yet in his childish
+threat to go away to sea and never come back again, repeated through
+years, one can but trace the deep print of that sorrow of the
+un-returning ones which was the tragedy of women's lives all along this
+coast. His mother cared for him none the less, though she was less his
+companion, and there seems to have been no diminution of affection and
+kindness between them, though an outward habit of coldness sprang up as
+time went on. He had his sisters for playmates at first, and as he grew
+up, he was much looked after by his uncles. His first master was Dr.
+Worcester, the lexicographer, then just graduated from Yale, who set up
+a school in Salem; and, the lad being lamed in ball-playing, the young
+teacher came to the house to carry on the lessons. The accident happened
+when Hawthorne was nine years old, and the injury, which reduced him to
+crutches, continued to trouble him till he was twelve, at least, after
+which, to judge by the fact that he attended dancing-school, he seems to
+have entirely recovered from it. The habit of reading came to him
+earlier, perhaps because of his confinement and disability for sports in
+these three or four years; he was naturally thrown back upon himself. He
+is seen lying upon the floor habitually, and when not playing with
+cats--the only boyish fondness told of him--reading Shakspere, Milton,
+Thomson, the books of the household, not uncommon in New England homes,
+where good books were as plenty then as all books are now; and on
+Sundays, at his grandmother Hathorne's, across the yard, he would crouch
+hour after hour over Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that refuge of
+boyhood on the oldtime Sabbaths. It is recollected that, by the time he
+was fourteen, he had read Clarendon, Froissart, and Rousseau, besides
+"The Newgate Calendar," a week-day favorite; and he may be said to have
+begun youth already well versed in good English books, and with the
+habit and taste of literary pleasure established as a natural part of
+life. "The Faërie Queene" was the first book he bought with his own
+money. He was vigorous enough now; but the two outward circumstances
+that most affected his boyhood, the monotone of his mother's sorrow and
+his own protracted physical disability, must have given him touches of
+gravity and delicacy beyond his years. It is noticeable that nothing is
+heard of any boy friends; nor did he contract such friendships,
+apparently, before college days.
+
+In the fall of 1818, when Hawthorne was fourteen years old, the family
+removed to Raymond, in Maine, where the Mannings possessed large tracts
+of land. The site of this township was originally a grant to the
+surviving members and the heirs of Captain Raymond's militia company of
+Beverly, the next town to Salem, for service in the French and Indian
+war; and Hawthorne's grandfather, Richard Manning, being the secretary
+of the proprietors, who managed the property and held their meetings in
+Beverly, had toward the close of the century bought out many of their
+rights. After his death the estate thus acquired was kept undivided, and
+was managed for his children by his sons Richard and Robert, and finally
+at any rate, more particularly by the latter, who stood in the closest
+relation to Hawthorne of all his uncles, having undertaken to provide
+for his education. He had built a large, square, hip-roofed house at
+Raymond, after the model common in his native county of Essex, as a
+comfortable dwelling, but so seemingly grand amid the humble
+surroundings of the Maine clearing as to earn the name of "Manning's
+folly;" and, about 1814, he built a similar house for his sister, near
+his own, but she had not occupied it until now, when she came to live
+there, at first boarding with a tenant. It was pleasantly situated, with
+a garden and apple orchard, and with rows of butternut-trees planted
+beside it; and perhaps she had sought this retirement with the hope of
+its being consonant with her own solitude. The country round about was
+wilderness, most of it primeval woods. The little settlement, only a
+mill and a country store and a few scattered houses, lay on a broad
+headland making out into Sebago Lake, better known as the Great Pond, a
+sheet of water eight miles across and fourteen miles long, and connected
+with other lakes in a chain of navigable water; to the northwest the
+distant horizon was filled with the White Mountains, and northward and
+eastward rose the unfrequented hill and lake country, remarkable only,
+then as now, for its pure air and waters, and presenting a vast
+solitude. This was the Maine home of Hawthorne, of which he cherished
+the memory as the brightest part of his boyhood. The spots that can be
+named which may have excited his curiosity or interested his imagination
+are few, and similar places would not be far off anywhere on the coast.
+There was near his home a Pulpit Rock, such as tradition often
+preserves, and by the Pond there was a cliff with the usual legend of a
+romantic leap, and under it were the Indian rock-paintings called the
+Images; but the essential charm of the place was that in all directions
+the country lay open for adventure by boat or by trail. Hawthorne had
+visited the scene before, in summer times, and he revisited it afterward
+in vacations, but his long stay here was in his fifteenth year, the
+greater part of which he passed in its neighborhood.
+
+The contemporary record of these days is contained in a diary [Footnote:
+Hawthorne's First Diary, with an account of its discovery and loss. By
+Samuel T. Pickard. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1897. The volume has
+been withdrawn by its editor in consequence of his later doubts of its
+authenticity.] which has been regarded as Hawthorne's earliest writing.
+The original has never been produced, and the copy was communicated for
+publication under circumstances of mystery that easily allow doubts of
+its authenticity to arise. The diary is said to have been given to him
+by his uncle Richard "with the advice that he write out his thoughts,
+some every day, in as good words as he can, upon any and all subjects,
+as it is one of the best means of his securing for mature years command
+of thought and language,"--these words being written on the first leaf
+with the date, "Raymond, June 1, 1816." Whether this inscription and the
+entries which follow it are genuine must be left undetermined; there is
+nothing strange in Hawthorne's keeping a boy's diary, and being urged to
+do so, in view of his tastes and circumstances, and it would be
+interesting to trace to so early a beginning that habit of the note-book
+that was such a resource to him in mature years; but the evidence is
+inconclusive. Whether by his hand or not, the diary embodies the life he
+led in this region on his visits and during his longer stay; the names
+and places, the incidents, the people, the quality of the days are the
+same that the boy knew, wrote of in letters of the time, and remembered
+as a man; and though the story may be the fabrication of his mulatto boy
+comrade of those days, it is woven of shreds and patches of reality.
+After all, the little book is but a lad's log of small doings,--swapping
+knives, swimming and fishing, of birds and snakes and bears, incidents
+of the road and excursions into the woods and on the lake, and notices
+of the tragic accidents of the neighborhood. It has some importance as
+illustrating the external circumstances of the place, a very rural place
+indeed, and suggesting that among these country people Hawthorne found
+the secret of that fellowship--all he ever had--with the rough and
+unlearned, on a footing of democratic equality, with the ease and
+naturalness of a man. Here at Raymond in his youth, where his personal
+superiority was too much a matter of course to be noticed, he must have
+learned this freemasonry with young and old at the same time that he
+held apart from all in his own life. For the rest, he has told himself
+in his undoubted words how he swam and hunted, shot hen-hawks and
+partridges, caught trout, and tracked bear in the snow, and ran wild,
+yet not wholly free of the call-whistle of his master-passion: "I ran
+quite wild," he wrote a quarter-century later, "and would, I doubt not,
+have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or
+shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on
+rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and
+any poetry or light books within my reach. These were delightful
+days.... I would skate all alone on Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows
+of the icy hills on either hand. When I found myself far from home, and
+weary with the exhaustion of skating, I would sometimes take refuge in a
+log cabin where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. I
+would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great
+aperture through which the flames went roaring up. Ah, how well I recall
+the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the
+woods of Maine!" In these memories, it is evident, many years, younger
+and older, are diffused in one recollection. For him, here rather than
+by his native sea were those open places of freedom that boyhood loves,
+and with them he associated the beginnings of his spirit,--the dark as
+well as the bright; near his end he told Fields, as his mind wandered
+back to these days, "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect
+was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits
+of solitude." The tone of these reminiscences is verified by his
+letters, when he went back to Salem; in the first months he writes of
+"very hard fits of homesickness;" a year later he breaks out,--"Oh, that
+I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly hence and be at rest! How
+often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could again savageize with
+you! But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be
+so happy as when I did;" and, after another year's interval, "I have
+preferred and still prefer Raymond to Salem, through every change of
+fortune." There can be no doubt where his heart placed the home of his
+boyhood; nor is it, perhaps, fanciful to observe that in his books the
+love of nature he displays is rather for the woods than the sea, though
+he was never content to live long away from the salt air.
+
+It was plainly the need of schooling that took him from his mother's
+home at Raymond and brought him back to Salem by the summer of 1819,
+when he was just fifteen years old. Even in the winter interval he seems
+to have gone for a few weeks to the house of the Rev. Caleb Bradley,
+Stroudwater, Westbrook, in the same county as Raymond, to be tutored. He
+remained in Salem with his uncles for the next two years, and was
+prepared for college, partly, at least, by Benjamin Oliver, a lawyer, at
+the expense of his uncle Robert, and during a portion of this time he
+earned some money by writing in the office of his uncle William; but he
+was occupied chiefly with his studies, reading, and early compositions.
+At the beginning of this period, in his first autumn letters, he
+mentions having lately read "Waverley," "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "The
+Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom," "Roderick Random," and a volume
+of "The Arabian Nights;" and he has learned the easy rhyming of first
+verses, and stuffs his letters with specimens of his skill, clever
+stanzas, well written, modulated in the cadences of the time, with
+melancholy seriousness and such play of sad fancy as youthful poets use.
+He laid little store by his faculty for verse, and yet he had practiced
+it from an early childish age and had a fair mastery of its simple
+forms; and once or twice in mature life he indulged himself in writing
+and even in publishing serious poems. In these years, however, verses
+were only a part of the ferment of his literary talent, nor have any of
+them individuality. He practiced prose, too, and in the next summer,
+1820, issued four numbers of a boy's paper, "The Spectator," bearing
+weekly date from August 21 to September 18, and apparently he had made
+an earlier experiment, without date, in such adolescent journalism; it
+was printed with a pen on small note-paper, and contained such serious
+matter as belongs to themes at school on "Solitude" and "Industry," with
+the usual addresses to subscribers and the liveliness natural to family
+news-columns. The composition is smooth and the manner entertaining, and
+there is abundance of good spirits and fun of a boyish sort. The paper
+shows the literary spirit and taste in its very earliest bud; but no
+precocity of talent distinguished it, though doubtless the thought of
+authorship fed on its tender leaves. Such experiments belong to the life
+of growing boys where education is common and literary facility is
+thought to be a distinction and sign of promise in the young; and
+Hawthorne did not in these ways differ from the normal boy who was
+destined for college. Nothing more than these trifles is to be gleaned
+of his intellectual life at that time, but two or three letters
+pleasantly illustrate his brotherly feeling, his spirits, and his
+uncertainties in regard to the future, at the same time that they
+display his absorption in the author's craft; and they conclude the
+narrative of these early days before college. The first was written in
+October, 1820, just after the last issue of "The Spectator," to his
+younger sister Louisa, and shows incidentally that these literary
+pleasures were a family diversion:--
+
+Dear Sister,--I am very angry with you for not sending me some of your
+poetry, which I consider a great piece of ingratitude. You will not see
+one line of mine until you return the confidence which I have placed in
+you. I have bought the "Lord of the Isles," and intend either to send or
+to bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems. I
+have read Hogg's "Tales," "Caleb Williams," "St. Leon," and
+"Mandeville." I admire Godwin's novels, and intend to read them all. I
+shall read the "Abbot," by the author of "Waverley," as soon as I can
+hire it. I have read all Scott's novels except that. I wish I had not,
+that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I
+like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can
+be a Poet and a bookkeeper at the same time. I do find this place most
+"dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I
+think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the
+"Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I
+can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert for four years
+longer. How happy I should be to be able to say, "I am Lord of myself!"
+You may cut off this part of my letter, and show the other to Uncle
+Richard. Do write me some letters in skimmed milk. I must conclude, as I
+am in a "monstrous hurry"!
+
+Your affectionate brother,
+
+NATH. HATHORNE.
+
+P. S. The most beautiful poetry I think I ever saw begins:--
+
+  "She 'a gone to dwell in Heaven, my lassie,
+  She's gone to dwell in Heaven:
+  Ye're ow're pure quo' a voice aboon
+  For dwalling out of Heaven."
+
+It is not the words, but the thoughts. I hope you have read it, as I
+know you would admire it.
+
+A passage from a second letter, six months later, March 13, 1821, to his
+mother, reveals the character of his relationship with her:--
+
+I don't read so much now as I did, because I am more taken up in
+studying. I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend
+the vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a
+great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I
+shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I
+should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way
+of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one
+place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as--a puddle of water.
+As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them
+(upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A
+physician, then, seems to be "Hobson's choice;" but yet I should not
+like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And
+it would weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my
+practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient "ad inferum,"
+which being interpreted is, "to the realms below." Oh that I was rich
+enough to live without a profession! What do you think of my becoming an
+author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the
+illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would
+feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest
+productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull! But authors are always
+poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same
+predicament as the honest gentleman in "Espriella's Letters:"--
+
+  "I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
+  A-musing in my mind what garment I shall wear."
+
+But as the mail closes soon, I must stop the career of my pen. I will
+only inform you that I now write no poetry, or anything else. I hope
+that either Elizabeth or you will write to me next week. I remain
+
+Your affectionate son,
+
+NATHL. HATHORNE.
+
+Do not show this letter.
+
+A third letter, June 19, 1821, also to his mother, on the eve of his
+departure for college, is interesting for the solicitude it exhibits for
+her happiness in the solitary life she had come to live.
+
+"I hope, dear mother, that you will not be tempted by my entreaties to
+return to Salem to live. You can never have so much comfort here as you
+now enjoy. You are now undisputed mistress of your own house.... If you
+remove to Salem, I shall have no mother to return to during the college
+vacations, and the expense will be too great for me to come to Salem. If
+you remain at Raymond, think how delightfully the time will pass, with
+all your children round you, shut out from the world, and nothing to
+disturb us. It will be a second Garden of Eden.
+
+  'Lo, what an entertaining sight
+  Are kindred who agree!'
+
+"Elizabeth is as anxious for you to stay as myself. She says she is
+contented to remain here for a short time, but greatly prefers Raymond
+as a permanent place of residence. The reason for my saying so much on
+this subject is that Mrs. Dike and Miss Manning are very earnest for you
+to return to Salem, and I am afraid they will commission uncle Robert to
+persuade you to it. But, mother, if you wish to live in peace, I conjure
+you not to consent to it. Grandmother, I think, is rather in favor of
+your staying."
+
+A few weeks later, in the summer of 1821, being then seventeen years
+old, Hawthorne left Salem for Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, by
+the mail stage from Boston eastward, and before reaching his destination
+picked up by the way a Sophomore, Franklin Pierce, afterwards President
+of the United States, and two classmates of his own, Jonathan Cilley,
+who went to Congress and was the victim of the well-remembered political
+duel with Graves, and Alfred Mason; he made friends with these new
+companions, and Mason became his room-mate for two years. Bowdoin was a
+small college, graduating at that time about thirty students at its
+annual Commencement; its professors were kindly and cultivated men, and
+its curriculum the simple academic course of those days. Hawthorne's
+class, immortalized fifty years later by Longfellow's grave and tender
+anniversary lines, "Morituri Salutamus," was destined to unusual
+distinction in after life. Longfellow, its scholastic star, was a boy of
+fourteen, favored by the regard of the professors, and belonging to the
+more studious and steady set of fellows, who gathered in the Peucinian
+Society. Hawthorne joined the rival organisation, the Athenaeum, a more
+free and boisterous group of lower standing in their studies, described
+as the more democratic in their feelings. He is remembered as "a slender
+lad, having a massive head, with dark, brilliant, and most expressive
+eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion of dark hair." He carried his head
+on one side, which gave a singularity to his figure, and he had
+generally a countrified appearance; but he took his place among his
+mates without much observation. He was reticent in speech and reserved
+in manner, and he was averse to intimacy; he had, nevertheless, a full
+share in collegiate life and showed no signs of withdrawal from the
+common arena. He did not indulge in sports, saving some rough-and-tumble
+play, nor did he ride horseback or drive, nor apparently did he care for
+that side of youthful life at all, though he was willing to fight on
+occasion, and joined the military company of which Pierce was captain.
+His athleticism seems to have been confined to his form. He played cards
+for small stakes, being a member of the Androscoggin Loo Club, and he
+took his part in the convivial drinking of the set where he made one,
+winning the repute of possessing a strong head. These indulgences were
+almost too trifling to deserve mention, for the scale of life at Bowdoin
+was of the most inexpensive order, and though there was light gambling
+and occasional jollification, bad habits were practically impossible in
+these directions. He was certainly not ashamed of his doings, for on
+being detected in one of these scrapes, at the end of his Freshman year,
+anticipating a letter of the President, he wrote to his mother, May 30,
+1822, an account of the affair:--
+
+MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have nothing
+particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in college
+have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number. One has
+been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself,
+have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President intends to
+write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case,
+you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have
+the honor of being suspended; when the President asked what we played
+for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents, although it
+happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of that, he would
+probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no untruth in the
+case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at all this term.
+I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term, and shall not
+till the last week.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He takes up the subject again in a letter to one of his sisters, August
+5, 1822:--
+
+"To quiet your suspicions, I can assure you that I am neither 'dead,
+absconded, or anything worse.' I have involved myself in no 'foolish
+scrape,' as you say all my friends suppose; but ever since my misfortune
+I have been as steady as a sign-post, and as sober as a deacon, have
+been in no 'blows' this term, nor drank any kind of 'wine or strong
+drink.' So that your comparison of me to the 'prodigious son' will hold
+good in nothing, except that I shall probably return penniless, for I
+have had no money this six weeks.... The President's message is not so
+severe as I expected. I perceive that he thinks I have been led away by
+the wicked ones, in which, however, he is greatly mistaken. I was full
+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."
+
+The last week of the term and the close of the Senior year appear to
+have been the seasons of conviviality, and Hawthorne's life of this sort
+ended with his being an officer of the Navy Club, an impromptu
+association of those of his classmates, fourteen out of thirty-eight,
+who for one reason or another were not to have a Commencement part on
+graduation. The Club met at the college tavern, Miss Ward's, near the
+campus, for weekly suppers and every night during Commencement week;
+this entertainment was for these youths the happy climax of their
+academic life together.
+
+In his studies Hawthorne must have followed his own will very freely. He
+refused to declaim, and no power could make him do so, and for this
+reason he was denied the honor of a Commencement part, which he had won,
+being number eighteen by rank in his class; he was nervously shy about
+declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at on his
+first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read
+a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to
+mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in
+recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin
+scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens,
+were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a
+collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he
+especially mentions Rees's Cyclopĉdia--such was the wealth of a boy of
+genius in those days--but among the eight hundred books it is certain
+that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing
+somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by
+sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those
+destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes
+on ways of exterminating it,--all for the benefit of his uncle, who took
+the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a memory
+of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my novel."
+His way of life intellectually had not changed since his schoolboy days,
+for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his studies, but only
+the books he read; so now he read the books for pleasure, and let his
+studies subsist as best they could in the realm of duty. He was poor,
+and even in the modest simplicity of this country college, where his
+expenses could hardly have been three hundred dollars a year, was
+evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the state of his clothes
+seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he was self-respecting,
+patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of hating debt; and he
+went on his way little burdened except by doubtful hopes.
+
+Though he was familiar with his classmates and contemporaries at
+college, and firm and fast friends with a few, like Pierce and Cilley,
+forming with them the ties that last through all things, he had but one
+confidant, Horatio Bridge, afterwards of the United States Navy.
+Hawthorne roomed at first with Alfred Mason, in Maine Hall, and being
+burned out in their Freshman year, they found temporary quarters
+elsewhere, but when the Hall was rebuilt returned to it and occupied
+room number nineteen for the Sophomore year. The two chums, however, did
+not become intimate, beyond pleasant companionship, and they belonged to
+different societies; and the last two years Hawthorne roomed alone in a
+private house, Mrs. Cunning's, where both he and Bridge also boarded. It
+is from the latter, who remained through life one of Hawthorne's most
+serviceable friends, that the account of his college days mainly comes.
+He especially remembered, besides such matters of fact as have been
+recounted, their walks and rambles together in the pine woods that
+stretched about the college unbroken for miles, and by the river with
+its rafts of spring logs, and over to the little bay sent up by a
+far-reaching arm of the sea; and he recalled the confidences of
+Hawthorne in speaking of his hopes of being a writer, in repeating to
+him verses as they leaned in the moonlight over the railing of the
+bridge below the falls, listening to the moving waters, and in allowing
+him some inward glimpses of his solitary life in the brooding time of
+youth. Bridge was a fellow of infinite cheer, and praised him, and
+clapped him, and urged him on, and gave him the best companionship in
+the world for that time of life, if not for all times,--the
+companionship of being believed in by a friend. Hawthorne did not forget
+it, and in due time paid the tribute of grateful remembrance in the
+preface to the volume he dedicated to Bridge, where he recalled his
+college days and his friend's part in them.
+
+"If anybody is responsible for my being at this day 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 or
+gray 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 riverward 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 that the Faculty never heard
+of, or else it would have been the worse for us--still, it was your
+prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of
+fiction."
+
+The picture is a vignette of the time, and being in the open, too,
+pleasantly ends the tale of college. On separating, it is pleasant to
+notice, the friends exchanged keepsakes.
+
+The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who now
+adopted the fanciful spelling of the name after his personal whim, was
+man grown. There had been trying circumstances in these early days, but
+he had met them hardily and lightly, as a matter of course; he had
+practically educated himself by the help of books, and had also
+discharged his duties as they seemed to the eyes of others; he could go
+home feeling that he had satisfied his friends. He seems to have feared
+that he might have satisfied them too well; and, some commendation
+having preceded him, he endeavored to put them right by a letter to his
+sister, July 14, 1825:--
+
+"The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents,
+and had probably formed expectations which I shall never realize. I have
+thought much upon the subject, and have finally come to the conclusion
+that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I
+hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do not say this for
+the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set mother
+and the rest of you right upon a point where your partiality has led you
+astray. I did hope that uncle Robert's opinion of me was nearer to the
+truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high
+estimation of my abilities."
+
+This has the ring of sincerity, like all his home letters, and it is
+true that so far there had been nothing precocious, brilliant, or
+extraordinary in him to testify of genius,--he was only one of hundreds
+of New England boys bred on literature under the shelter of academic
+culture; and yet there may have been in his heart something left
+unspoken, another mood equally sincere in its turn, for the heart is a
+fickle prophet. As Mr. Lathrop suggests in that study of his
+father-in-law which is so subtly appreciative of those vital suggestions
+apt to escape record and analysis, another part of the truth may lie in
+the words of "Fanshawe" where Hawthorne expresses the feelings of his
+hero in a like situation with himself at the end of college days:--
+
+"He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in
+solitary study,--in conversation with the dead,--while he had scorned to
+mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives.
+Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world,
+unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his
+pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost
+heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that
+dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a
+thousand realities."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES.
+
+
+In the summer of 1825 Hawthorne returned to Salem, going back to the old
+house on Herbert Street,--the home of his childhood, where his mother,
+disregarding his boyish dissuasions, had again taken up her abode three
+years before. He occupied a room on the second floor in the southwest
+sunshine under the eaves, looking out on the business of the
+wharf-streets; and in it he spent the next twelve years, a period which
+remained in his memory as an unbroken tract of time preserving a
+peculiar character. The way of his life knew little variation from the
+beginning to the end. He lived in an intellectual solitude deepened by
+the fact that it was only an inner cell of an outward seclusion almost
+as complete, for the house had the habits of a hermitage. His mother,
+after nearly a score of years of widowhood, still maintained her
+separation even from her home world; she is said to have seen none of
+her husband's relatives and few of her own, and a visitor must have been
+a venturesome person. The custom of living apart spread through the
+household. The elder sister, Elizabeth, who was of a strong and active
+mind capable of understanding and sympathizing with her brother, and the
+younger sister, Louisa, who was more like other people, stayed in their
+rooms. The meals of the family, even, which usually go on when
+everything else fails in the common life of house-mates, had an
+uncertain and variable element in their conduct, as was not unnatural
+where the mother never came to the table. The recluse habits of all
+doubtless increased with indulgence, and after a while Hawthorne
+himself, who was plainly the centre of interest there, fell into the
+common ways of isolation. "He had little communication," writes Mr.
+Lathrop, "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, as might be imagined
+from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his
+new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he
+sometimes read older literature to them. 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!'" He seldom went out by day,
+unless for long excursions in the country; an early sea bath on summer
+mornings and a dark walk after supper, longer in the warm weather,
+shorter in the winter season, were habitual, and a bowl of thick
+chocolate with bread crumbed into it, or a plate of fruit, on his return
+prepared him for the night's work. Study in the morning, composition in
+the afternoon, and reading in the evening, are described as his routine,
+but it is unlikely that any such regularity ruled where times and
+seasons were so much at his own command. He had no visitors and made no
+friends; hardly twenty persons in the town, he thought, were aware of
+his existence; but he brought home hundreds of volumes from the Salem
+Athenaeum, and knew the paths of the woods and pastures and the way
+along the beaches and rocky points, and he had the stuff of his fantasy
+with which to occupy himself when nature and books failed to satisfy
+him. At first there must have been great pleasure in being at home, for
+he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and
+he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer
+and his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the
+first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind,
+to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the
+sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances: but as youth passed and
+manhood came, and yet fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence
+became insufficient for him,--it grew burdensome as it showed barren,
+and depression set in upon him like a chill and obscure fog over the
+marshes where he walked. This, however, year dragging after year, was a
+slow process; and the kind of life he led, its gray and deadening
+monotone, sympathetic though it was with his temperament, was seen by
+him better in retrospect than in its own time.
+
+It is singular that Hawthorne should have undertaken to live by his pen,
+or been allowed to do so by his friends, as a practical way of life, but
+he was indulged at home, the young lord of the family. "We were in those
+days," says Elizabeth, "almost absolutely obedient to him." Occasionally
+he thought of going into his uncle's counting-room and so obtaining a
+business and place in the world, but he never took this step. He
+probably drifted, more or less, into authorship, partly through a
+dilatory reluctance to do anything else, and partly led on by the hope
+of a success with some one of his tales which would justify him.
+
+The first attempts he made in the craft are involved in some obscurity.
+He may have merely carried over from college days what he then had in
+hand. At all events his sister Elizabeth, from whom the information
+comes in respect to these details, remembered a little collection which
+he had prepared for publication with the title "Seven Tales of my Native
+Land," and she says that she read it in the summer of 1825; in that case
+these stories must have been written at college, but her memory may have
+erred. She gives the names of two of them as "Alice Doane" and "Susan
+Grey," and adds that he told her, while the volume was still in the
+stage of being offered to publishers, that he would first "write a story
+which would make a smaller book, and get it published immediately if
+possible, before the arrangements for bringing out the 'Tales' were
+completed." This was presumably "Fanshawe," which may also have been the
+novel she recollected his writing to her about while at college.
+
+"Fanshawe" [Footnote: _Fanshawe_. A Tale. Boston: Marsh & Capen,
+362 Washington St. Press of Putnam and Hunt, 1828. 12mo. Pp. 141.] was
+published in 1828 by Marsh and Capen, at Boston, without the author's
+name but at his expense, one hundred dollars being the sum paid; it
+failed, and Hawthorne looked on it with so much subsequent displeasure
+that he called in all the copies he could find and destroyed them, and
+thus nearly succeeded in sinking the book in oblivion, but the few
+copies which survived secured its republication after his death. The
+novel is brief, with a melodramatic plot, well-marked scenes, and
+strongly contrasted character; the style flows on pleasantly; but the
+book is without distinction. Like many a just graduated collegian,
+Hawthorne had recourse to his academic experience in lieu of anything
+else, and in the setting of the story and some of its delineation of
+character Longfellow recognized the strong suggestion of Bowdoin days;
+in the same way the hero, Fanshawe, borrowed something from Hawthorne's
+own temperament. The figure of the villain, too, adumbrates, though
+faintly, the type which engaged Hawthorne's mind in later years.
+"Fanshawe" as a whole in all its scenes, whether in the house of the old
+President, the tavern, the hut, or the outdoor encounters of the lovers
+and rivals, is strongly reminiscent of Scott, the management being
+entirely in his manner; its low-life tragedy, its romantic scenery, and
+its bookish humor, as well as the characterization in general, are also
+from Scott; in fact, notwithstanding what Hawthorne had taken from his
+own observation and feelings, this provincial sketch, for it is no more,
+is a Scott story, done with a young man's clever mastery of the manner,
+but weak internally in plot, character, and dramatic reality. It is as
+destitute of any brilliant markings of his genius as his undergraduate
+life itself had been, and is important only as showing the serious care
+with which he undertook the task of authorship. It is the only relic,
+except the shadowy "Seven Tales," of his literary work in the first
+three years after leaving college. The "Tales" he is said to have
+burned; no better publisher appearing, a young Salem printer, Ferdinand
+Andrews, undertook to bring them out, but as he delayed the matter
+through lack of capital, Hawthorne, growing impatient and exasperated,
+recalled the manuscript and destroyed it.
+
+The example of Scott was, perhaps, the potent influence in fixing
+Hawthorne's attention on a definite object, and incited him to seek in
+the history of his own country, and especially in the colonial tradition
+of New England, which was so near at hand, the field of fiction. He
+stored his mind, certainly, with the story of his own people during the
+two centuries since the settlement, and prepared himself to describe its
+stirring events and striking characters under the veil of imaginative
+history. The nature of his reading shows that this was a conscious aim;
+and, besides, it was an opinion, loudly proclaimed and widely shared in
+that decade, that American writers should look to their own country for
+their themes; Cooper was doing so in fiction, and Longfellow felt this
+predilection in his choice of subject for verse. Salem was a true centre
+of the old times; and a young imagination in that town and neighborhood,
+already disposed to writing prose romance, would feel the charm of
+historical association and naturally catch impulse from the past,
+especially if, as in the case of Hawthorne, the history of his ancestors
+was inwoven with its good and evil. It is not surprising therefore that,
+as Hawthorne had begun, though unsuccessfully, with tales of his native
+land, he should continue to work the vein; and, to adopt what seems to
+be a reasonable inference, he now gathered from his materials a new
+series which he knew as "Provincial Tales," in which it remains doubtful
+how much of the old survived, for the burnt manuscripts of youth have
+something of the phoenix in their ashes.
+
+The first trace of these is "The Young Provincial," an anonymous piece,
+[Footnote: It is unquestionable that Hawthorne contributed to annuals
+and periodicals anonymous tales and sketches that he never claimed, as
+he states in the preface to _Twice-Told Tales_ and in a letter to
+Fields in which he beseeches him not to revive them. The identification
+of such work, however, is beset with much temptation to find a tale
+genuine, if it can be plausibly so represented, and in few cases can the
+proof be conclusive. Mr. F. B. Sanborn presents the fullest list, all
+from _The Token_, which he accepts as genuine, as follows: _The
+Adventures of a Raindrop_, 1828, _The Young Provincial_, 1830,
+_The Haunted Quack_ and _The New England Village_, 1831, _My
+Wife's Novel_, 1832, _The Bald Eagle_, 1833, _The Modern
+Job_, or _The Philosopher's Stone_, 1834. The correspondence
+with Goodrich does not indicate that Hawthorne contributed to _The
+Token_ before the issue for 1831. _The Young Provincial_ seems
+to be the same sort of a tale as _The Downer's Banner_, as has been
+intimated above: yet it would, perhaps, be more readily accepted,
+together with _The Haunted Quack_ and _The Modern Job_. The
+latest edition of Hawthorne includes all of these tales, given above,
+except the first and last, but its editor does not vouch for their
+authenticity.] ascribed to him on internal evidence and contributed to
+"The Token," an annual published at Boston, for its issue of 1830. The
+story relates the adventures of a youthful Revolutionary soldier who had
+handed down to his descendants a "grandfather's gun;" it tells of Bunker
+Hill, of imprisonment at Halifax and of escape, and it may be from
+Hawthorne's pen. It must have been written early in 1829, if not before,
+and it is noticed in the review of "The Token" in Willis's Boston
+periodical, "The American Monthly Magazine" for September, 1829, where
+it is described as a "pleasing story, told quite inartificially," and is
+illustrated by a brief extract. It may not be irrelevant to observe that
+a similar "provincial tale" appeared in this number of the magazine,
+"The Downer's Banner," and if it was not by the same youthful author, it
+shows that the same kind of subject had singularly interested two
+writers in that neighborhood. It is, however, only in "The Token" that
+Hawthorne can be further traced.
+
+The editor of this annual, which was intended as a literary gift-book
+for Christmas, was S. G. Goodrich, famous as "Peter Parley" in after
+days, and to him belongs the honor of being Hawthorne's first literary
+friend, and he always remained a faithful one. He was a promoter of
+publishers' enterprises, in that part of the field of literature which
+is distinctly pervaded with business; and in it he was successful, as
+the millions of the Peter Parley books abundantly attest. At this time
+he was sincerely interested, it must be believed, in furthering the
+interests of American writers and artists, according to his lights and
+means, and Griswold, who was a good judge, said of him, "It is
+questionable whether any other person has done as much to improve the
+style of the book manufacture or to promote the arts of engraving." With
+such ambitions he had begun, in 1828, the issue of the annual, which is
+now best remembered, and which in its own day longest survived the
+changes of public taste. The nature of these volumes, of which there
+were many in different publishing centres, is well described by a writer
+in Willis's "Magazine" for 1829: "A few years ago, an elegant taste,
+joined, perhaps, to a love of 'filthy lucre,' induced some English
+publishers to give to the world the first specimens of those souvenirs
+and 'Forget Me Nots' which are now so common through our country. How
+beautiful they were at their first appearance, the eagerness with which
+they were read will testify. How rapid was their increase, may be seen
+by referring to the counters of every book-store. America, ready and
+willing as she ever is to acknowledge the excellence, and imitate the
+example of the parent country in every good thing, has imitated and
+improved upon the plan. We can now boast of a species of literature,
+which is conducted almost wholly by young men, and which has merited the
+affection, because it has developed the power of our native genius.
+Those who have made their first essays in literature, through the medium
+of the pages of a Souvenir, will gain confidence in proportion as they
+have tested their own strength. The American annuals do not profess to
+be the works of the most finished or most accomplished writers of this
+country. They should not be taken as specimens of what our literature
+is, but as indications of what it may one day be. They are not the
+matured fruits, but the bright promise and blossoming of genius; and
+thus far they have been an honor to the taste and talent of American
+writers, and monuments of the swift progress of our artists towards
+excellence in their profession."
+
+Such was the contemporary view of the annuals, and it is justified,
+perhaps, by the fact that Longfellow, for example, was then contributing
+to the "Atlantic Souvenir" of Philadelphia, the first of the brood, and
+that Hawthorne found in "The Token" the principal opportunity to obtain
+a hearing for himself in his first productive years.
+
+Mr. Goodrich, in his "Recollections," states that he sought out
+Hawthorne. "I had seen," he says, "some anonymous publications which
+seemed to me to indicate extraordinary powers. I inquired of the
+publishers as to the writer, and through them a correspondence ensued
+between me and 'N. Hawthorne.' This name I considered a disguise, and it
+was not till after many letters had passed, that I met the author, and
+found it to be a true title, representing a very substantial personage."
+This correspondence began, as nearly as can be judged, in 1829, and in
+the course of it Hawthorne had already sent to Goodrich "The Young
+Provincial," if that is to be accepted as by him, and also "Roger
+Malvin's Burial," and, apparently later than this last, at least three
+other tales, "The Gentle Boy," "My Uncle Molineaux," and "Alice Doane."
+He had presented these as specimens of the "Provincial Tales," for which
+he desired a publisher. Goodrich acknowledges these, January 19, 1830,
+from Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived, and promises in the note to
+endeavor to find a publisher for the book when he returns to Boston in
+April. He adds, "Had 'Fanshawe' been in the hands of more extensive
+dealers, I do believe it would have paid you a profit;" from which it
+may be inferred that "Fanshawe" was the anonymous work which had
+attracted Goodrich's attention. He praises the tales, and offers
+thirty-five dollars for "The Gentle Boy" to be used in "The Token." The
+first letter from Hawthorne, in respect to the matter, which has come to
+light, is on May 6, 1830, and is given in Derby's "Fifty Years."
+
+"I send you the two pieces for 'The Token.' They were ready some days
+ago, but I kept them in expectation of hearing from you. I have complied
+with your wishes in regard to brevity. You can insert them (if you think
+them worthy a place in your publication) as by the author of 'Provincial
+Tales,'--such being the title I propose giving my volume. I can conceive
+no objection to your designating them in this manner, even if my tales
+should not be published as soon as 'The Token,' or, indeed, if they
+never see the light at all. An unpublished book is not more obscure than
+many that creep into the world, and your readers will suppose that the
+'Provincial Tales' are among the latter." The "two pieces" to which he
+refers were clearly not members of the series he proposed to publish in
+the book, and perhaps they should be identified as "Sights from a
+Steeple," certainly, and for the other either "The New England Village"
+or "The Haunted Quack," both which, besides the first, were published in
+"The Token" for 1831, and have been ascribed to Hawthorne on internal
+evidence of the same sort as that on which "The Young Provincial" has
+been accepted.
+
+Goodrich did not find a publisher for the "Provincial Tales," and
+Hawthorne allowed him to use such as he desired for "The Token" for
+1832. The publication of this annual, it should be observed, was
+prepared for early in the preceding year, and the tales which it
+contained must be regarded as at least a year old when issued. Thus, in
+respect to the issue for 1832, just mentioned, Goodrich writes May 31,
+1831: "I have made a very liberal use of the privilege you gave me as to
+the insertion of your pieces in 'The Token.' I have already inserted
+four of them; namely, 'The Wives of the Dead,' 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'
+'Major Molineaux,' and 'The Gentle Boy;'" and he adds that they are as
+good if not better than anything else he gets; and in a later note,
+written on the publication of the volume, in October, he says, "I am
+gratified to find that all whose opinion I have heard agree with me as
+to the merit of the various pieces from your pen." In this issue,
+besides the four mentioned, the story "My Wife's Novel" has also been
+attributed to Hawthorne.
+
+The project of the "Provincial Tales" had by this time been abandoned,
+temporarily at least, and the author's mind turned to other kinds of
+writing. He had already opened new veins in attempting to sketch
+contemporary scenes, either after the fashion of the pleasant meditative
+essay, such as "Sights from a Steeple," or else in the way of humorous
+description. The scenes he looked down on, in fancy, in this first
+paper, were the roof-tops and streets and horizon of Salem; but he had
+wandered in other parts of his native land also, though not widely, and
+he used these journeys in his compositions. It is noticeable that
+Hawthorne always used all his material, consumed it, and made stories,
+essays, and novels of it, except the slag. It was his characteristic
+from youth. There is the same dubiousness about these journeys, his
+earliest ventures in the world, as about his first attempts in the field
+of authorship. He himself says, in the autobiographical notes he
+furnished to Stoddard, that he left Salem "once a year or thereabouts,"
+for a few weeks; and in his sketches there are traces of these
+excursions, as at Martha's Vineyard, for example; but their times and
+localities are verifiable only to a slight degree. It is stated that the
+fact that his uncles, the Mannings, were interested in stage-lines gave
+him some privileges as a traveller, or perhaps this only gave occasion
+for a journey now and then, in which he joined his uncles on some
+convenient business; thus, it was in company with his uncle Samuel, that
+he was in New Hampshire in 1831, and visited the Shaker community at
+Canterbury. Another known journey was in 1830, and took him through
+Connecticut; and it is said, probably on conjecture, that it was at this
+time that he went on, by the canal, to Niagara, and visited Ticonderoga
+on his return. If his writings, in which he described these places, are
+to be taken literally, he even embarked for Detroit; but information in
+respect to the whole Niagara excursion is of the scantiest. All that is
+known is that in some way, during his long stay at Salem in these years,
+he made himself acquainted with portions of Connecticut, Vermont, New
+York, and New Hampshire, to add to his knowledge of Massachusetts and
+Maine; within this rather limited circle his wanderings were confined;
+and the period when he went about with most freedom and vivacity of
+impression was the summer of 1830 and, perhaps, the next year or two.
+
+These experiences gave him the suggestion and in part the scene of his
+next compositions, "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and "The Seven Vagabonds,"
+the one a New Hampshire, the other a Connecticut tale, and in
+Connecticut, too, is laid "The Bald Eagle," a humorous sketch of a
+reception of Lafayette which failed to come off, attributed to Hawthorne
+on the same grounds as the other doubtful pieces of these years; these
+three appeared in "The Token" for 1833, "The Seven Vagabonds" as by the
+author of "The Gentle Boy," the others anonymously, and, in addition,
+that issue also contained the historical sketch, "Sir William
+Pepperell," described as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple." If
+"The Haunted Quack," which had already appeared in 1831, be regarded as
+Hawthorne's, the journey by the canal which it records must have taken
+place as early as 1829, in order for the manuscript to have been ready
+in time for publication. The particular times and stories, however, are
+of less importance; nor are these provincial travels noteworthy except
+for the fact that Hawthorne found in them, whenever or wherever they
+occurred, suggestions for his pen.
+
+The idea which was the germ of his next conception for a book arose out
+of this country rambling before the days of railroads. At the end of
+"The Seven Vagabonds," he represented himself as taking up the character
+of an itinerant story-teller on the impulse of the moment. To this he
+now returned, and proposed to write a series of tales on the thread of
+the adventures of this vagrant, and call it "The Story-Teller." The
+work, such as he here conceived it, exists only as a fragment, "Passages
+from a Relinquished Work," though he doubtless used elsewhere the
+stories he intended to incorporate into it. In the young man as he is
+sketched in the opening passage there is, notwithstanding the
+affectation of levity, a touch of Hawthorne's own position:--
+
+"I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
+of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
+fanciful. What a character was this, to be brought in contact with the
+stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
+thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
+pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
+profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
+purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
+have been a dangerous resolution, anywhere in the world; it was fatal,
+in New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my
+countrymen; they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist
+with what they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a
+young man who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a
+store, nor takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible
+disposition to be satisfied with what his father left him. The principle
+is excellent, in its general influence, but most miserable in its effect
+on the few that violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public
+opinion, and felt as if it ranked me with the tavern-haunters and
+town-paupers,--with the drunken poet, who hawked his own Fourth of July
+odes, and the broken soldier who had been good for nothing since the
+last war. The consequence of all this was a piece of light-hearted
+desperation."
+
+The youth then takes up the character of the writer of "The Seven
+Vagabonds," saying, "The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had
+been suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
+vagabonds in a showman's wagon, where they and I had sheltered
+ourselves, during a summer shower;" and he announces that he determined
+to follow that life, the account of which he proceeds to give with this
+preliminary word of explanation:--
+
+"The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
+intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
+mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
+cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
+was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty, wherever chance had
+collected a little audience, idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
+were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed, the
+flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly, that its indulgence was
+its own reward; though the hope of praise, also, became a powerful
+incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought, as I
+did then, let me beseech the reader to believe, that my tales were not
+always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be given
+a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my
+air-drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the
+pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
+characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages
+and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book for the
+sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by, though it
+is the experience of a wandering story-teller."
+
+He makes the acquaintance of another itinerant, a preacher, Eliakim
+Abbott, drawn after the fashion of that crude grotesque which is found
+in Hawthorne's early work, and is not without a reminiscence of Scott in
+the literary handling; and the two become fellows of the road, the one
+with a sermon, the other with a story, and their fortune with their
+audiences is related. The only adventure of note, however, is the
+appearance of the Story-Teller as an attraction of a traveling
+theatrical company, by special engagement, announced by posters, which
+also bear on a pasted slip of paper a notice of Eliakim Abbott's
+religious meeting. On this occasion he recited with great applause the
+tale of "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe." With this the fragment ends.
+
+It is plain that Hawthorne intended by this scheme to unite with his
+stories sketches of country life and scenes as he had noticed their
+features in his wayside travels, and use the latter as the background
+for his imaginative and fanciful work. These were the two sides of his
+literary faculty, so far as he had tried his hand, and he would have the
+benefit of both in one work, which would thereby gain variety and unity.
+The success of the experiment cannot be thought striking, and it is
+doubtful how far he carried the actual composition of the intervening
+scenes. He confided the plan to Goodrich, who did not encourage it, so
+far as can be judged, but took the opening chapters to the editors of
+"The New England Magazine" on Hawthorne's behalf. This periodical, which
+had three years before absorbed Willis's "Magazine," had been conducted
+on somewhat grave and serious lines, as a kind of Boston cousin, as it
+were, of the "North American," and was now in a state of change. Mr.
+Buckingham relinquished the editorship, and the magazine went into the
+hands of Dr. Samuel G. Howe and John O. Sargent. It was at this
+favorable moment that Goodrich appeared with Hawthorne's manuscript; the
+piece was accepted; and it was published, half in the first and half in
+the second number issued by the new editors, in November and December,
+1834. The connection proved a fortunate one for Hawthorne, and "The New
+England Magazine" [Footnote: In the Riverside edition of Hawthorne's
+works a paper, _Hints to Young Ambition_, which appeared in _The
+New England Magazine,_ 1832, signed "H.," is included. The piece is
+one of several, with the same signature, and there can he little
+hesitation in rejecting it, as Goodrich would hardly have needed to
+introduce Hawthorne to a magazine to which he already contributed. The
+other pieces are not in his vein, and "H." is a common signature in the
+periodicals of the time. At all events, Hawthorne would have gone
+further afield for a pseudonym than the initial of his own name, which
+he is not known ever to have used.] now became equally with "The Token"
+a constant medium for the publication of his writings of all sorts. Park
+Benjamin, who was soon associated with Howe and Sargent in the
+editorship, took sole charge in March, 1835, and was from the first, and
+always remained, a firm admirer of the new author's genius. To him, next
+to Goodrich, Hawthorne owed his introduction to such readers as he then
+had.
+
+If Hawthorne made any effort to break a way for himself in reaching the
+public, it has not been traced, except that one letter exists, January
+27, 1832, in which he offers his pen to the "Atlantic Souvenir" of
+Philadelphia; but that annual was bought out by Goodrich the same year
+and merged with "The Token," so that Hawthorne's venture only brought
+him back to the old stand. In 1833 his connection with Goodrich appears
+to have been temporarily broken, as "The Token" for 1834, which appeared
+that fall, contains nothing by him. For 1835 he contributed to it "The
+Haunted Mind" and "The Mermaid, A Revery," now known as "The Village
+Uncle," anonymously, and "Alice Doane's Appeal" as by the author of "The
+Gentle Boy." In "Youth's Keepsake" for the same year appeared "Little
+Annie's Ramble." These stories were published in the fall of 1834,
+before the venture of "The Story-Teller." Early in 1835 he furnished for
+the next year's "Token," 1836, "The Wedding Knell" and "The Minister's
+Black Veil" as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple," and "The
+May-pole of Merry Mount" as by the author of "The Gentle Boy." What
+there was left in his hands must have gone almost as a block to "The New
+England Magazine," and perhaps his stock of unused papers was thus
+exhausted. To complete the record, he published in this magazine "The
+Gray Champion" as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," in January; "Old
+News" anonymously, in February, March, and May; "My Visit to Niagara,"
+in February; "Young Goodman Brown," in April; "Wakefield," in May; "The
+Ambitious Guest," in June, and in the same month, anonymously in both
+instances, "Graves and Goblins" and "A Bill from the Town Pump;" "The
+Old Maid in the Winding Sheet," now known as "The White Old Maid," in
+July; "The Vision of the Fountain," in August; "The Devil in Manuscript"
+as by "Ashley A. Royce," in November; "Sketches from Memory" as by "A
+Pedestrian," in November and December. All these pieces, except as
+stated above, are given as by the author of "The Gray Champion." It may
+fairly be thought that he had emptied his desk of its accumulations,
+though a few tales may have been reserved for Goodrich.
+
+Hawthorne had now been before the public with increasing frequency for
+five years, but he had made little impression, and his success as an
+author must have remained as doubtful to him as at the start. Goodrich,
+in the passage already quoted from his "Recollections," went on to
+describe him during this early time of their acquaintance, and shows how
+slight was his progress in winning attention:--
+
+"At this period he was unsettled as to his views; he had tried his hand
+in literature, and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff
+from the reading world. His mind vacillated between various projects,
+verging, I think, toward a mercantile profession. I combated his
+despondence, and assured him of triumph if he would persevere in a
+literary career. He wrote numerous articles which appeared in 'The
+Token;' occasionally an astute critic seemed to see through them, and to
+discover the soul that was in them; but in general they passed without
+notice. Such articles as 'Sights from a Steeple,' 'Sketches beneath an
+Umbrella,' 'The Wives of the Dead,' 'The Prophetic Pictures,' now
+universally acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth,
+meaning, and power, extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame,
+while columns were given to pieces since totally forgotten. I felt
+annoyed, almost angry, indeed, at this. I wrote several articles in the
+papers, directing attention to these productions, and finding no echo to
+my views, I recollect to have asked John Pickering to read some of them,
+and give me his opinion of them. He did as I requested; his answer was
+that they displayed a wonderful beauty of style, with a kind of double
+vision, a sort of second sight, which revealed, beyond the outward forms
+of life and being, a sort of Spirit World."
+
+Park Benjamin, in a notice of "The Token" for 1836 published in "The New
+England Magazine," October, 1835, gave a single line to the author,
+speaking of him as "the most pleasing writer of fanciful prose, except
+Irving, in the country;" and in November of the same year, in a review
+of the same work, Chorley, the critic of the London "Athenaeum,"
+commended his tales and gave extracts from them. This was the first
+substantial praise of a nature to encourage the author.
+
+In Hawthorne's own eyes the stories and sketches had become a source of
+depression, and the difficulties he had met with in getting out a book
+had especially irritated him. It might be thought, perhaps, that he had
+destroyed a good deal of his work, to judge by his own words, but this
+seems unlikely, although he may have rewritten some of the earlier
+pieces. The tale of "The Devil in Manuscript" is taken to be the
+autobiographical parable, at least, commemorating the burning of the
+"Seven Tales of my Native Land;" but it was written some years later,
+and reflects his general experience as a discouraged storyteller, and it
+contains touches of bitterness more marked than occur elsewhere. Its
+personal character is emphasized by the hero's name, "Oberon," a
+familiar signature Hawthorne used in his letters to his old college
+friend, Bridge. The following passages are distinctly autobiographical,
+and afford the most vivid view of the young author's inner life:--
+
+"You cannot conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has
+had on me. I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid
+reputation. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by
+aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten
+path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude,--a
+solitude in the midst of men,--where nobody wishes for what I do, nor
+thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are
+ashes, perhaps I shall be as I was before they had existence. Moreover,
+the sacrifice is less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish
+them....
+
+"But the devil of the business is this. These people have put me so out
+of conceit with the tales, that I loathe the very thought of them, and
+actually experience a physical sickness of the stomach, whenever I
+glance at them on the table. I tell you there is a demon in them! I
+anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing them in the blaze; such as I
+should feel in taking vengeance on an enemy, or destroying something
+noxious....
+
+"But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn over these leaves!
+This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a
+starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air, I became all
+soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the
+Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself during a dark
+and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the
+wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a
+dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes
+shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight: they would not
+depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and
+feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!...
+
+"Sometimes my ideas were like precious stones under the earth, requiring
+toil to dig them up, and care to polish and brighten them; but often a
+delicious stream of thought would gush out upon the page at once, like
+water sparkling up suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I
+gnawed my pen hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil,
+as if there were a wall of ice between me and my subject."
+
+"Do you now perceive a corresponding difference," inquired I, "between
+the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the
+mind?"
+
+"No," said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. "I find no
+traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My
+treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture,
+painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded
+and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and
+humorous in a dream,--and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am
+awake....
+
+"I will burn them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have
+me a damned author--To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect,
+and faint praise, bestowed, for pity's sake, against the giver's
+conscience! A hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous
+thoughts! An outlaw from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes
+every careless foot might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered
+scornfully in death! Am I to bear all this, when yonder fire will insure
+me from the whole? No! There go the tales! May my hand wither when it
+would write another!"
+
+These extracts set forth the mixed emotions of young authorship in a
+life-like manner. They have the stamp of personal experience. A
+supplement to them is found in one of his more obscure pieces, "The
+Journal of a Solitary Man," in which Hawthorne bids farewell to that
+eidolon of himself which he had embodied as "Oberon." He describes the
+character as an imaginary friend, from whose journals he gives extracts;
+but the veil thrown over his own personality is transparent.
+
+"Merely skimming the surface of life, I know nothing, by my own
+experience, of its deep and warm realities. I have achieved none of
+those objects which the instinct of mankind especially prompts them to
+pursue, and the accomplishment of which must therefore beget a native
+satisfaction. The truly wise, after all their speculations, will be led
+into the common path, and, in homage to the human nature that pervades
+them, will gather gold, and till the earth, and set out trees, and build
+a house. But I have scorned such wisdom. I have rejected, also, the
+settled, sober, careful gladness of a man by his own fireside, with
+those around him whose welfare is committed to his trust, and all their
+guidance to his fond authority. Without influence among serious affairs,
+my footsteps were not imprinted on the earth, but lost in air; and I
+shall leave no son to inherit my share of life, with a better sense of
+its privileges and duties, when his father should vanish like a bubble;
+so that few mortals, even the humblest and the weakest, have been such
+ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I must. Even a
+young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand vagrant fantasies,
+I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to loneliness
+throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my soul has never
+married itself to the soul of woman.
+
+"Such are the repinings of one who feels, too late, that the sympathies
+of his nature have avenged themselves upon him. They have prostrated,
+with a joyless life and the prospect of a reluctant death, my selfish
+purpose to keep aloof from mortal disquietudes, and be a pleasant idler
+among care-stricken and laborious men. I have other regrets, too,
+savoring more of my old spirit. The time has been when I meant to visit
+every region of the earth, except the poles and Central Africa. I had a
+strange longing to see the Pyramids. To Persia and Arabia, and all the
+gorgeous East, I owed a pilgrimage for the sake of their magic tales.
+And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep
+would not be quiet in the grave unless I should return, as it were, to
+my home of past ages, and see the very cities, and castles, and
+battle-fields of history, and stand within the holy gloom of its
+cathedrals, and kneel at the shrines of its immortal poets, there
+asserting myself their hereditary countryman. This feeling lay among the
+deepest in my heart. Yet, with this homesickness for the fatherland, and
+all these plans of remote travel,--which I yet believe that my peculiar
+instinct impelled me to form, and upbraided me for not accomplishing,--
+the utmost limit of my wanderings has been little more than six
+hundred miles from my native village. Thus, in whatever way I consider
+my life, or what must be termed such, I cannot feel as if I had lived
+at all.
+
+"I am possessed, also, with the thought that I have never yet discovered
+the real secret of my powers; that there has been a mighty treasure
+within my reach, a mine of gold beneath my feet, worthless because I
+have never known how to seek for it; and for want of perhaps one
+fortunate idea, I am to die
+
+  'Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.'"
+
+"Oberon" is represented as in the position of the "Story-Teller," and
+leaves home because of some fancied oppression; he visits Niagara, of
+which he gives some scenes as well as other anecdotes of his pedestrian
+journey, but he falls ill and determines to return home to die. As he
+approaches his birthplace he pleases himself with the fancy that there
+is some youth there whom he can teach by the lesson of his life, and he
+moralizes in a vein in which self-criticism may be read between the
+lines:--
+
+"He shall be taught by my life, and by my death, that the world is a sad
+one for him who shrinks from its sober duties. My experience shall warn
+him to adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to,
+that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen
+earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an
+eccentric path, nor, by stepping aside from the highway of human
+affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a
+text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an
+American."
+
+Finally he describes the power he has obtained by the use of his
+imagination, in the view of life:--
+
+"I have already a spiritual sense of human nature, and see deeply into
+the hearts of mankind, discovering what is hidden from the wisest. The
+loves of young men and virgins are known to me, before the first kiss,
+before the whispered word, with the birth of the first sigh. My glance
+comprehends the crowd, and penetrates the breast of the solitary man. I
+think better of the world than formerly, more generously of its virtues,
+more mercifully of its faults, with a higher estimate of its present
+happiness, and brighter hopes of its destiny."
+
+These passages from "The Devil in Manuscript" and "The Journal of a
+Solitary Man" may fairly be taken as a contemporary general account of
+Hawthorne's secret life in the years before his own "Note-Books" begin.
+The latter afford rather a view of his existence, from day to day. The
+earliest of them which has survived opens in the summer of 1835, and
+while containing scraps of information that he had jotted down as in a
+commonplace book, and also brief memoranda of ideas for tales and
+sketches, it also keeps record of his observations in his walks and
+drives, and thus pictures his outward life. He lived at Salem still, in
+the habits of seclusion that had always obtained in the house, and saw
+little of mankind. Society, if he sought it at all, was found for him
+among common people at the tavern or by the wayside, and was of the sort
+that he enjoyed on his summer journeys. But solitude was his normal
+state. This was indulged in his own room; or else he took a morning or
+afternoon to wander out to the near Salem beaches and points, or to the
+pleasant lanes of Danvers or across the river to the upland or seashore
+of Beverly. He occasionally drove a dozen miles or more to Ipswich,
+Nahant, or Andover. What he saw, however, was only rustic life of the
+countryside, or the natural views of wood and sky and sea, with the
+nearer objects to attract particular attention, of which he has left so
+many minute descriptions. His observation at such times, though without
+the naturalist's preoccupation,--rather with the poet's or
+novelist's,--was as keen and detailed as Thoreau's. These Note-Books,
+however, do not open his familiar life except as a record of changing
+seasons and of detached thoughts to be worked up in fiction. Many of his
+later tales are found here in the germ, in 1835 and for the year or two
+after; but the diary is not so much a confidant as it afterward became.
+
+The time had now come when he must make some further step in
+establishing himself in some means of livelihood. He never showed much
+power of initiative, and at every stage was materially aided by his
+friends in obtaining employment and position. In this instance it was
+Goodrich again who gave him opportunity. It was not a great chance, but
+it was doubtless all Goodrich had to offer. He procured for him the
+editorship of a small publication which undertook to disseminate popular
+information, called "The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
+Knowledge," and published by the Bewick Company, at Boston, with which
+Goodrich had some connection through his interests in engraving. His
+salary was to be five hundred dollars, and he entered on his duties
+about the beginning of 1836. The change was welcomed by his friends, or
+such of them as were still near enough to him to know of his affairs;
+and from this time his college mates, Pierce, Cilley, and especially
+Bridge, interested themselves in his fortunes. Bridge, writing from
+Havana, February 20, 1836, congratulated him, as did also Pierce from
+Washington, on the intelligence concerning his "late engagement in
+active and responsible business," and particularly on his having got
+"out of Salem," which he credits with "a peculiar dulness;" and in later
+letters he continues to hearten him, subscribes for his magazine, reads
+and praises it, in the most cordial and cheering way. But the event did
+not justify these hopes and prognostications of a better fortune. The
+magazine was, after all, the merest hack-work. Hawthorne, with the aid
+of his sister Elizabeth, wrote most of it, compiling the matter from
+books or utilizing his own notes of travel. In it appeared, of such
+pieces as have found a place in his works, "An Ontario Steamboat," "The
+Duston Family," "Nature of Sleep," "Bells," besides much that has been
+suffered to repose in its scarce pages. The material, though
+conscientiously dealt with according to the measure of time at his
+disposal, is the slightest in interest, and the least re-worked from the
+raw state, of any of his writings. He had, however, little temptation to
+do more for the magazine than its limited scope required. He found great
+difficulty in collecting his salary, and for this he blames Goodrich,
+who had made promises of pay which he kept very imperfectly. Hawthorne
+states that of forty-five dollars he was to receive on coming to Boston
+he got only a small part, and on June 3, 1836, he received a notice, in
+answer to a dunning letter, that the Bewick Company had made an
+assignment, and he would have to wait until the settlement. Shortly
+after this he gave up the editorship, and returned to Salem. The
+incident was unfortunate, as in the course of it he developed a great
+deal of irritation toward Goodrich, who was his best friend in practical
+ways, and broke off communication with him. This, however, did not last
+long; and Goodrich offered him the job of compiling a "Peter Parley"
+book, for one hundred dollars. He wrote this, also with the aid of his
+sister Elizabeth, and gave her the money. The volume was "Peter Parley's
+Universal History on the basis of Geography," [Footnote: _Peter
+Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography._ For the Use of
+Families. Illustrated by Maps and Engravings. Boston: American
+Stationers' Company. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo, cloth. 2 vols., pp.
+380, 374.] and was published in 1837, and had a very large sale,
+amounting finally, it is said, to more than a million copies.
+
+In the mean time, Hawthorne had found cause of complaint also in his
+relations with "The New England Magazine." This periodical had come to
+an end in 1835, and at the close of that year was merged in "The
+American Monthly Magazine" of New York, whither Park Benjamin, its
+editor, went. It paid, according to its own statement, only one dollar a
+page for contributions, but it appears to have been in arrears with
+Hawthorne at the time of the change. Bridge states that when Hawthorne,
+in consequence, stopped writing for it, the editor "begged for a mass of
+manuscript in his possession, as yet unpublished, and it was scornfully
+bestowed. 'Thus,' wrote Hawthorne, 'has this man, who would be
+considered a Mĉcenas, taken from a penniless writer material
+incomparably better than any his own brain can supply.'" In this
+Hawthorne, if correctly reported, was scarcely just. Park Benjamin, who
+had a violent quarrel with Goodrich, exempted Hawthorne from any adverse
+criticism, even when writing a short notice of "The Token," and always
+spoke well of him. The manuscripts he carried to New York could have
+been but few and slight, unless they were burned in the fire which
+destroyed the archives of the "American Monthly Magazine" not long
+afterwards. At all events, the only paper by Hawthorne in that magazine
+appears to have been "Old Ticonderoga," a note of travel, published in
+February, 1836, unless "The Journal of a Solitary Man," which did not
+appear till July, 1837, be added as one of the left-over manuscripts,
+and also a paper, never yet attributed to him but which seems clearly
+from his pen, "A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather," anonymously
+published in May, 1836. Whatever the coolness was between Hawthorne and
+Benjamin, it was overcome by the end of the year, and the quarrel was
+made up. In 1836, too, he kept his temper with Goodrich sufficiently to
+allow him to contribute to "The Token" of 1837, published in the
+preceding fall, a group of tales, eight in number: "Monsieur du Miroir,"
+as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple;" "Mrs. Bullfrog," as by the
+author of "The Wives of the Dead;" "Sunday at Home" and "The Man of
+Adamant," both as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," "David Swan, A
+Fantasy," "Fancy's Show Box, A Morality," and "The Prophetic Pictures,"
+all anonymously; and "The Great Carbuncle," as by the author of "The
+Wedding Knell." These papers constituted one third of the volume, and
+for them he was paid a dollar a page, or one hundred and eight dollars,
+which may be regarded therefore as the normal price he received from
+Goodrich. Two of these tales are on subjects set down in his "Note-Book"
+of 1835; the others are perhaps earlier in conception. These tales were
+his substantial work for the year.
+
+They gave occasion for what appears to have been the first public
+mention of Nathaniel Hawthorne as the author who had hitherto disguised
+himself under so many descriptions. It is not surprising that his name
+was unknown, for he had sedulously suppressed it. His sister, referring
+to these years, said, "He kept his very existence a secret so far as
+possible." He had never signed an article in the twelve years since
+leaving college. He had preferred to become known in "the author of
+Waverley" style, but the charm did not work. In "The Token" he was, in
+the main, the author of "Sights from a Steeple" or "The Gentle Boy;" in
+"The New England Magazine" he was the author of "The Gray Champion." But
+now his anonymity was to be dissipated in a friendly if rude way. It
+was, doubtless, Park Benjamin, in New York, who wrote thus of these last
+tales in "The Token," in "The American Monthly Magazine" for October,
+1836:--
+
+"The author of 'Sights from a Steeple,' of 'The Gentle Boy,' and of 'The
+Wedding Knell,' we believe to be one and the same individual. The
+assertion may sound very bold, yet we hesitate not to call this author
+second to no man in this country, except Washington Irving. We refer
+simply to romance writing; and trust no wise man of Gotham will talk of
+Dewey, and Channing, and Everett, and Verplanck. Yes, to us the style of
+NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE is more pleasing, more fascinating, than any one's
+except their dear Geoffry Crayon! This mention of the real name of our
+author may be reprobated by him. His modesty is the best proof of his
+true excellence. How different does such a man appear to us from one who
+anxiously writes his name on every public post! We have read a
+sufficient number of his pieces to make the reputation of a dozen of our
+Yankee scribblers; and yet how few have heard the name above written! He
+does not even cover himself with the same anonymous shield at all times;
+but liberally gives the praise, which, concentrated on one, would be
+great, to several unknowns. If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his
+various tales and essays into one volume, we can assure him that their
+success would be brilliant--certainly in England, perhaps in this
+country."
+
+It was in this way that the world began to hear of Mr. Nathaniel
+Hawthorne, of Salem; but it was still long before the public knew him.
+Meanwhile, at the very moment of the disclosure, he was in the lowest
+ebb of discouragement, in spirits, that he ever knew. It is to this time
+that his gloomiest memories attached themselves. He had tried to enter
+the world, he had even tried to earn a living, and had failed. Cilley,
+his old college mate, was just elected to Congress from Maine, Pierce
+was just elected Senator from New Hampshire, and Longfellow had found
+the ways of literature as smooth as the primrose path to the everlasting
+bonfire. Hawthorne was of a noble disposition, and glad of the fortunes
+that came to these of his circle in boyhood at Bowdoin; but it was not
+in human nature to be oblivious of the difference in his own lot. To
+this mood must be referred the dream he described afterwards as one that
+recurred through life:--
+
+"For a long, long while I have been occasionally 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."
+
+Under another picture, he describes this same state in the preface to
+"The Snow Image," dedicated to Bridge:--
+
+"I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a
+shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and
+the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the
+entangling depths of my obscurity. And there, perhaps, I should be
+sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks,
+and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if
+it had not been for you. For it was through your interposition--and
+that, moreover, unknown to himself--that your early friend was brought
+before the public, somewhat more prominently than heretofore, in the
+first volume of 'Twice-Told Tales.'"
+
+Bridge had been, in fact, his only confidant from boyish days. To him he
+showed the misery of "hope deferred" that then was in his heart, and to
+him allowed himself to speak in words that went beyond his steady sense
+of the situation, though representing moments of low courage. "I'm a
+doomed man," he wrote to him, "and over I must go."
+
+It was under the impulse of the sight of this deep discouragement in
+Hawthorne, in 1836, that this cheerful and sanguine friend made up his
+mind to find out why Hawthorne could not get a volume of tales
+published. He applied to Goodrich for information, and received an
+answer, October 20, 1836, in which it was stated that if a guarantee of
+two hundred and fifty dollars were furnished by Bridge, an edition of
+one thousand copies, costing four hundred and fifty dollars and paying
+Hawthorne a royalty of ten per cent, would be issued. Goodrich was not
+himself a publisher, at that time, and he elsewhere says that he had
+previously attempted to have the Stationers' Company, which now
+undertook the volume on Bridge's guarantee, publish it, but without
+success; he adds that he relinquished his own rights to Hawthorne, who
+had sold the tales to him so far as they had appeared in "The Token,"
+and that he also joined in the bond given by Bridge; but in these
+remarks he seems to be taking credit to himself, for the tales were
+valueless to him and his property in them was of a sort not often
+claimed by an editor, while Bridge took the real risk. This transaction
+was unknown to Hawthorne at the time, and Bridge felt obliged to warn
+him not to be too grateful to Goodrich. A glance at the other letters of
+this month shows that Bridge was almost alarmed by Hawthorne's
+depression, and endeavoring in thoughtful ways to reassure him, as well
+as to bring him forward in public. "I have just received your last," he
+writes, October 22, 1836, "and do not like its tone at all. There is a
+kind of desperate coolness about it that seems dangerous. I fear you are
+too good a subject for suicide, and that some day you will end your
+mortal woes on your own responsibility." The prospect of the book, even,
+was not wholly an undoubted blessing to Hawthorne, now he had come to
+its realization, and in December, on Christmas Day, the work being then
+in proofs, Bridge writes to him again:--
+
+"Whether your book will sell extensively may be doubtful; but that is of
+small importance in the first one you publish. At all events, keep up
+your spirits till the result is ascertained; and, my word for it, there
+is more honor and emolument in store for you, from your writings, than
+you imagine. The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept
+you back for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would
+long ago have given you what you must now wait a short time for. It may
+be for the best, but I doubt it.
+
+"I have been trying to think what you are so miserable for. Although you
+have not much property, you have good health and powers of writing,
+which have made, and can still make, you independent.
+
+"Suppose you get but $300 per annum for your writings. You can, with
+economy, live upon that, though it would be a tight squeeze. You have no
+family dependent upon you, and why should you 'borrow trouble'?
+
+"This is taking the worst view of your case that it can possibly bear.
+It seems to me that you never look at the bright side with any hope or
+confidence. It is not the philosophy to make one happy.
+
+"I expect, next summer, to be full of money, a part of which shall be
+heartily at your service, if it comes."
+
+Before the new volume went to press Hawthorne had made a connection,
+apparently on the editor's initiative, with S. Gaylord Clark's
+"Knickerbocker Magazine," and contributed to it, in the January number,
+"The Fountain of Youth," now known as "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment"; and
+in the opening months of the year he was engaged in preparing his usual
+group of articles for the next "Token." Goodrich had also offered to him
+a new "Peter Parley" book, on the manners and customs of all nations,
+for three hundred dollars, but this Hawthorne seems to have declined.
+
+"Twice-Told Tales" [Footnote: _Twice-Told Tales_. By Nathaniel
+Hawthorne. Boston: American Stationers' Co. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo,
+cloth. Pp. 334. It contained the following tales: The Gray Champion,
+Sunday at Home, The Wedding Knell, The Minister's Black Veil, The
+May-Pole of Merry Mount, The Gentle Boy, Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe,
+Little Annie's Ramble, Wakefield, A Rill from the Town Pump, The Great
+Carbuncle, The Prophetic Pictures, David Swan, Sights from a Steeple,
+The Hollow of the Three Hills, The Vision of the Fountain, Fancy's Show
+Box, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment.] appeared, under the author's name,
+from the press of the Boston American Stationers' Co., early in March,
+1837. It contained eighteen pieces only, out of the thirty-six
+undoubtedly by Hawthorne published up to this time, to neglect all
+others which have been ascribed to him during this period; and it must
+reflect his own judgment of what was best in his work. Far as it was
+from being a complete collection, it was large and varied enough to
+afford an adequate experiment of the public taste, and it included all
+those articles, whether tale or essay, which had made him known in the
+circle of his readers. The reception of the volume was, he thought,
+cool, but it sold somewhat from the first, and within two months six or
+seven hundred copies had been disposed of. Goodrich states that it "was
+deemed a failure for more than a year, when a breeze seemed to rise and
+fill its sails, and with it the author was carried on to fame and
+fortune." Bridge was much pleased with the success of his venture, and
+when he met Goodrich, in April, some of his good feeling overflowed upon
+him: "I like him very much better than before," he wrote. "He told me
+that the book was successful. It seemed that he was inclined to take too
+much credit to himself for your present standing, on the ground of
+having early discovered and brought you forward. But, on the whole, I
+like him much." Hawthorne's view of Goodrich is contained in a letter
+written to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, twenty years later:--
+
+"As regards Goodrich's accounts of the relations between him and me, it
+is funny enough to see him taking the airs of a patron; but I do not
+mind it in the least, nor feel the slightest inclination to defend
+myself or be defended. I should as soon think of controverting his
+statement about my personal appearance (of which he draws no very lovely
+picture) as about anything else that he says. So pray do not take up the
+cudgels on my behalf; especially as I perceive that your recollections
+are rather inaccurate. For instance, it was Park Benjamin, not Goodrich,
+who cut up the 'Storyteller.' As for Goodrich, I have rather a kindly
+feeling towards him, and he himself is a not unkindly man, in spite of
+his propensity to feed and fatten himself on better brains than his own.
+Only let him do that, and he will really sometimes put himself to some
+trouble to do a good-natured act. His quarrel with me was, that I broke
+away from him before he had quite finished his meal, and while a portion
+of my brain was left; and I have not the slightest doubt that he really
+felt himself wronged by my so doing. Really, I half think so too. He was
+born to do what he did, as maggots to feed on rich cheese."
+
+There is something too little generous in this. The record shows beyond
+any cavil that Goodrich was the first and most constant friend of
+Hawthorne in the way of helping him to get his work before the public;
+he was also interested in him, thoughtful for him, and gave him hack
+work to do, which, though it be a lowly is a true service, however
+unwelcome the task may be in itself; and he used such influence as he
+had in introducing Hawthorne to other employers and to publishers.
+During these twelve years it may fairly be said that Goodrich was the
+only person, not a relative, who cared for Hawthorne's genius or did
+anything for him until Park Benjamin appeared as a second in the
+periodical world and Horatio Bridge came to the rescue as a business
+friend. It is true that Goodrich did not succeed in exploiting his
+author; but he paid him the market price and gave him his chance, and
+after all those days were not for Goodrich what our days have since
+become for men of his calibre. Advertisement was not then the tenth
+Muse.
+
+If the papers were "cool," as Hawthorne thought, there was a word of
+comfort here and there in the periodicals. "The American Monthly
+Magazine," recalling its announcement of Hawthorne as the author of
+these tales in the preceding fall, took occasion in a notice of "The
+Token" for 1838 to flatter itself that the new volume was due to its own
+suggestion; and the writer, who is presumably Park Benjamin, renews his
+old praise. A later notice of the book itself, ascribed by Mr. Lathrop
+to Charles Fenno Hoffman, appeared in March, 1838, and, while somewhat
+ineffective and sentimental, discovers at the end the right new word to
+say: "His pathos we would call New England pathos, if we were not afraid
+it would excite a smile; it is the pathos of an American, of a New
+Englander. It is redolent of the images, objects, thoughts, and feelings
+that spring up in that soil and nowhere else." It was, however, to
+Longfellow that both Bridge and Hawthorne looked to help his old college
+mate's book with the criticism that would have the accent of good taste
+and literary authority, and would carry weight in those higher social
+circles where fame was lost and won, at least as was then believed.
+Hawthorne sent him the volume as soon as it was issued, with a note
+regretting that they were not better acquainted at college and
+expressing his gladness in Longfellow's success as a writer, author of
+"Outre-Mer," and also in obtaining his Harvard professorship; and some
+three months later he followed this with a letter, so characteristic and
+valuable autobiographically that it cannot be passed over, and
+interesting also as beginning that easy and amiable friendliness which
+continued between them unbroken thereafter:--
+
+"Not to burden you with my correspondence, I have delayed a rejoinder to
+your very kind and cordial letter, until now. It gratifies me that you
+have occasionally felt an interest in my situation; but your quotation
+from Jean Paul about the 'lark's nest' makes me smile. You would have
+been much nearer the truth if you had pictured me as dwelling in an
+owl's nest; for mine is about as dismal, and like the owl I seldom
+venture abroad till after dusk. By some witchcraft or other--for I
+really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore--I have been
+carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to
+get back again. Since we last met, which you remember was in Sawtell's
+room, where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the class,--ever
+since that time I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never
+meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead.
+I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon, and now I
+cannot find the key to let myself out,--and if the door were open, I
+should be almost afraid to come out. You tell me that 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 this 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 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 can hardly fail to 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. As to my literary efforts, I do not think much of them,
+neither is it worth while to be ashamed of them. They would have been
+better, I trust, if written under more favorable circumstances. I have
+had no external excitement,--no consciousness that the public would like
+what I wrote, nor much hope nor a passionate desire that they should do
+so. Nevertheless, having nothing else to be ambitious of, I have been
+considerably interested in literature; and if my writings had made any
+decided impression, I should have been stimulated to greater exertions;
+but there has been no warmth of approbation, so that I have always
+written with benumbed fingers. 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 lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes through a
+peep-hole 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.
+
+"I have now, or shall soon have, a sharper spur to exertion, which I
+lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I shall
+have to scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you
+would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as
+children's books, etc., and by and by I shall get some editorship that
+will answer my purpose. Frank Pierce, who was with us at college,
+offered me his influence to obtain an office in the Exploring
+Expedition; but I believe that he was mistaken in supposing that a
+vacancy existed. If such a post were attainable, I should certainly
+accept it; for, though fixed so long to one spot, I have always had a
+desire to run round the world.... I intend in a week or two to come out
+of my owl's nest, and not return till late in the summer,--employing the
+interval in making a tour somewhere in New England. You who have the
+dust of distant countries on your 'sandal-shoon' cannot imagine how much
+enjoyment I shall have in this little excursion."
+
+Longfellow's notice of "Twice-Told Tales" appeared in the July number of
+"The North American Review," and gave perhaps more pleasure to Hawthorne
+than he had hoped for; and in acknowledging it he mentions, with a
+home-touch that carries more gratitude than a score of golden phrases,
+the happiness that "my mother, my two sisters, and my old maiden aunt"
+have had in it. The notice itself is elegant, kindly, warm even, with
+the old-fashioned academic distinction of manner, through which the
+young poet's picturesque fancy keeps playing, like a flutter of light;
+it gives one a strange sense of old-world youthfulness to read it now.
+Its characteristic passages, apart from this glamour, are its praise of
+the lucid style and of the home-bred quality, "the nationality" of the
+Tales: "The author has chosen his themes among the traditions of New
+England, the dusty legends of 'the good old colony times when we lived
+under a king.' This is the right material for story." But,
+notwithstanding the good-will of Hawthorne's few friends, and this
+handsome treatment by that one of them who had the greatest opportunity
+to applaud him, his place was not yet won.
+
+Meanwhile, his political friends had not been idle. The problem of a
+livelihood, of an active share in the world's business, which Hawthorne
+now sincerely desired, was not likely to be much advanced by the
+publication of this volume. In any case, it would seem that Hawthorne's
+friends were agreed that what he needed was to be got into an entirely
+different set of surroundings, to have a change of scene. It was,
+perhaps, with some such idea that Pierce suggested to him to join the
+South Sea Exploring Expedition, then being planned by Reynolds, as
+historian. There is something humorous, unconscious though it was, in
+sending Hawthorne from the monotony and loneliness of Salem to seek
+society in the polar regions, though no hint of it appears in the
+correspondence. The scheme appealed to Hawthorne, however, and he was
+desirous to go; but though his friends were active in his interest, and
+brought the Maine and New Hampshire delegations to support his
+candidacy, success was doubtful, and, the expedition being temporarily
+abandoned, the plan came to nothing. On its failure Hawthorne went to
+visit Bridge at his home in Augusta, Maine, and passed the month of July
+with him very happily, as he tells at large in his Note-Books of that
+period.
+
+On his return to Salem at midsummer he could hardly have flattered
+himself on any perceptible change in his position. He fell into the old
+life of rambling about the country and writing new tales; and, except
+that he was in communication with his old friends, Bridge, Pierce, and
+Cilley, and occasionally saw them in Boston, he was as much isolated and
+without prospects as ever. The connection he had established with "The
+Knickerbocker Magazine" he had kept up by contributing to it "A Bell's
+Biography" as by the author of "Twice-Told Tales," in March, and he now
+published, in the September issue, "Edward Fane's Rosebud" anonymously.
+The publication of the book had attracted to him the notice of the new
+"Democratic Review," edited by John O'Sullivan, a young fellow of
+enterprise, spirits, and an Irish charm, who had solicited Hawthorne to
+contribute to it, early in April. In reply to this application,
+presumably, "A Toll Gatherer's Day," as by the author of "Twice-Told
+Tales," appeared in the October number. The stories which Hawthorne had
+prepared in the spring for "The Token" of 1838 now came out in the fall
+of 1837, five in number: two of them, "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure" and
+"The Shaker Bridal" as by the author of the "Twice-Told Tales," and
+three anonymously, "Night Scenes under an Umbrella," "Endicott and the
+Red Cross," and "Sylph Etheredge." He still persistently neglected to
+put his own name to his work. There was a reason for his anonymity in
+"The Token," but elsewhere he continued his old custom, and was to be
+known habitually only under the style "The Author of 'Twice-Told
+Tales,'" which he adopted henceforth. To this time belong some further
+traces of a more varied mixing with society in Salem than he had
+hitherto shown. He attended the meetings of a club at Miss Burley's,
+where the transcendental group appears to have gathered, and among them
+Jones Very. The most singular episode of the time, however, is one that
+would hardly be credited, had it not been mentioned by those who should
+have known the truth. It is said that Hawthorne's sympathies were so
+engaged by a lady who confided to him the injurious treatment she
+alleged she had suffered from an acquaintance that he challenged the man
+to a duel; he went to Washington for the purpose, and was only withdrawn
+from the affair, under the advice of Cilley and Pierce, by the discovery
+that he had been practiced upon by the lady, who had been led on by a
+spirit of mischief or malice to deceive him, there being no basis for
+the affair. A dark turn is given to the incident by the suggestion that
+it was the citing of this example of Hawthorne's to his friend Cilley
+which persuaded the latter to enter on the duel with Graves, in which he
+lost his life not long after these events. Bridge, however, denies that
+this was the case, and he should have known. Just when this incident
+occurred is not stated; but Hawthorne's solitude in Salem must have been
+less complete than has been represented in order for it to occur at all;
+and it must be believed that he had at all times associates, whom he met
+in one way and another, both men and women, however small the circle.
+
+The period of twelve years which he used to refer to as the time of his
+isolation in Salem had now come to an end; but he remained in the old
+house for some time longer, though with a difference in his mood and
+life. The habit of seclusion and the sense of separation from the world
+had been somewhat broken up by the rally that his college friends, led
+by Bridge, had made for him and the feeling of renewed companionship
+with them, as well as by his appearance before the public in his own
+right as the author of "Twice-Told Tales;" the old state of affairs,
+however, was not ended by these things, but by a more vital matter.
+There can be no doubt that in his own mind the acquaintance and growing
+intimacy which now sprang up between himself and Sophia Peabody
+coincided with the disappearance of the solitary depression of these
+years,--for him the twelve years ended when he first saw this small,
+graceful, intensely alive invalid, dressed in a simple white wrapper,
+who had come down from her room to meet him in the family parlor. She
+might seem, indeed, like himself, rather a "visitant" than an inhabitant
+of this planet, and their courtship not unlike one of his own stories of
+half immaterial lovers who go hand in hand, with sentiments for
+sentences and great heedlessness of mortal matters, to an idyllic union
+of hearts. He rose, on her entrance, to greet her, and looked at her
+with great intentness; and it immediately occurred to her sister that he
+would fall in love with her.
+
+The narrative of this love-making has been very fully told, and in the
+most lifelike way, since the characters have been allowed to speak for
+themselves in their diaries and letters. It is a story so touched with
+delicacies, and with such shades of humor, too, as to defy any
+re-telling; even to outline it seems crude, because the effect lies all
+in the details of trifles, phrases, and spontaneous things. The Peabody
+family was of a type that flourished in that period, as good as was ever
+produced on this soil, with the most sterling qualities, and blending an
+intellectual culture of transcendental kinship with practical and
+hospitable duties. The home, which was one of very moderate means, was
+characterized by a moral high-mindedness pervading its life, and by
+those literary and artistic tastes then spreading in the community,
+which, though it is easy to smile at them in a vein of latter-day
+superiority, were everywhere the signs of a nascent intellectual life
+among our people. In this case, the fruits are the best comment on the
+home, for of the three daughters, the eldest, Elizabeth, passed a much
+honored and long life as a teacher in Boston, the friend of every good
+cause; the second, Mary, became the wife of Horace Mann; and the third,
+Sophia, the wife of Hawthorne. The Peabodys had been neighbors of the
+Hawthornes in much earlier years, and the elder children had been little
+playmates together; but the family had removed from Salem, and came back
+again in 1828. It was not, however, till 1837, on the publication of
+"Twice-Told Tales," that Elizabeth Peabody recognized in the author the
+same person she had known as a child. She took steps to renew the
+acquaintance with his sisters, and so to meet him again, till by many
+little attentions, notes, books, walks, flowers, and whatever she could
+invent, she succeeded in establishing an interchange of social civility
+between the two houses. She affords, in her recollections, the best
+glimpse of Hawthorne's mother. "Madame Hawthorne," she says, "always
+looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique
+costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness--for she
+did not _seem_ at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding
+her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She
+was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she
+had very sensitive nerves." Elizabeth, Hawthorne's sister, was
+strong-minded but abnormally retired, jealous of her brother, and not
+much disposed to have him stolen out of the house. Louisa was more
+companionable, and with his mother would sit with Hawthorne after tea;
+and there was an old maiden aunt flitting about in the little garden,
+apparently as recluse as the rest. With these feminine members of the
+household Elizabeth Peabody made friends, and though a year elapsed in
+the process, she then had her reward in receiving Hawthorne and his
+sisters, who one evening came to call. She ran upstairs to her sister,
+exclaiming, "Oh, Sophia, you must get up and dress and come down! The
+Hawthornes are here, and you never saw anything so splendid as he
+is,--he is handsomer than Lord Byron!" But Sophia did not come down, and
+it was only on the second call that the two met as has been described.
+
+Sophia Peabody was at this time twenty-six years old, having been born
+in 1811, and had been an invalid through her girlhood; she was afflicted
+with an acute nervous headache which lasted uninterruptedly, says her
+son, from her twelfth to her thirty-first year, though the pain was not
+so severe, her sister remarks, but that she could sometimes read. She
+had received her education at home, mainly from her sister, who kept a
+school in the house, and in spite of her ill-health had many and varied
+acquisitions. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was somewhat
+familiar with history. Passages in her journal show the character and
+range of her reading, which was of that strangely mixed sort that
+belonged to the notion of culture in those days; thus, for instance, in
+her twentieth year, she records having read on one day De Gérando,
+Fénelon, St. Luke and Isaiah, Young, Addison, and four comedies of
+Shakspere, besides doing some sewing. She was a good French and Italian
+scholar. Filled with intellectual enthusiasm and ambition as she was,
+her sensibilities seem rather to have been roused by natural beauty,
+effects of sky and weather and color, and her active powers took the
+direction of art; she sketched, painted, and modeled in clay. In 1832
+she had gone to Cuba with her mother for three years, and received some
+benefit from the climate. She had especially practiced horseback-riding
+there, of which she was fond. No permanent improvement, however, had
+followed, on her return to Salem in 1835. When Hawthorne came to know
+her, she was living a half-invalid life, taking her meals in her own
+room, which she had fitted up with artistic prettiness, and yet
+suffering the full transcendental tide of culture and emotion. Perhaps
+no single passage can better illustrate her mind and feelings than a
+description of Emerson's call in the spring of 1838, which she writes to
+her sister, whom, at an earlier time, he had taught Greek:--
+
+"We had an exquisite visit from Waldo. It was the warbling of the Attic
+bird. The gleam of his _diffused_ smile; the musical thunder of his
+voice; his repose, so full of the essence of life; his simplicity--just
+think of all these, and of my privilege in seeing and hearing him. He
+enjoyed everything we showed him so much! He talked so divinely to
+Raphael's Madonna del Pesce! I vainly imagined I was very quiet all the
+while, preserving a very demure exterior, and supposed I was sharing his
+oceanic calm. But the next day I was aware that I had been in a very
+intense state. I told Mary, that night after he had gone, that I felt
+like a _gem_; that was the only way I could express it. I don't
+know what Mary hoped to get from him, but _I_ was sure of drinking
+in that which would make me paint Cuban skies better than even my
+recollections could have made me, were they as vivid as the rays of the
+sun in that sunniest of climates. He made me feel as Eliza Dwight did
+once, when she looked uncommonly beautiful and animated. I felt as if
+her beauty was all about the room, and that I was in it, and therefore
+beautiful too. It seemed just so with Waldo's soul-beauty."
+
+She had been in communication with others of the leading spirits of that
+day besides Emerson. Dr. Channing and Allston sent her messages, kindly
+and flattering, about her drawings and painting. She had copied some of
+Allston's pictures. Her studio was the centre of her life; and there her
+friends "glided in," to use her phrase, with roses and columbines,
+little girls came to take peeps at its wonders, and from it came the
+sunshine of the house. Here, to give some further trifling indications,
+she described herself, after a visit of Hawthorne, as feeling "quite
+lark-like, or like John of Bologna's Mercury;" or she indulged one of
+her "dearest visions," which was "to get well enough to go into prisons
+and tell felons I have sympathy for them, especially women;" or, when
+Hawthorne called, lamented that she should have to smooth her hair, and
+dress, "while he was being wasted downstairs." She felt his attractive
+power from the first, and was happy in his attentions, in the walks they
+took, in their visits to Miss Burley's weekly meetings, in the picture
+of Ilbrahim, "The Gentle Boy," which she made for him, in her story,
+"Edward Randolph's Portrait," which he wrote for her, in the columbines
+and tulips that strewed the way of love-making, and, in brief, in the
+thousand trifles of the old story. Hawthorne, on his part, was equally
+attracted in his different ways, and responded to the vivacity and
+ebullience of this intense feminine nature disclosed to him in the live
+woman who had met him, as if coming out of a vision, on life's road. The
+spring budded and flowered into summer, and when he took his habitual
+journey into the world,--this time into Berkshire and Vermont, from July
+23 to September 24,--meaning, as he told her, to cut himself wholly away
+from every one, so that even his mother should not know his whereabouts,
+it is not unlikely that he was desirous of this solitude to think it all
+over.
+
+They became engaged at the close of the year, though the matter was kept
+a profound secret, there being apparently some apprehension that his
+mother would not approve of it. His sister Elizabeth, was, perhaps, not
+very cordial about it, also, but there was, as it proved, no occasion
+for anxiety. It might well have seemed imprudent for Hawthorne, whose
+worldly success had been slight, to marry an invalid wife. Fortune,
+however, was not wholly unkind, and George Bancroft, whose attention had
+been called to Hawthorne's needs, gave him an appointment at the Boston
+Custom House as weigher and gauger, at a salary of twelve hundred
+dollars. It was this opportunity, possibly, which emboldened Hawthorne
+to take the final step; and marriage would be hoped for, should this
+experiment of entering on a fixed employment prove successful.
+
+During the progress of this courtship, to complete the chronicle of
+Hawthorne's literary publications, he had written the carrier's address,
+"Time's Portraiture," for "The Salem Gazette," January 2, 1838, the home
+paper which had made him known to his fellow-townsmen by reprinting "The
+Fountain of Youth," in the preceding March; and for the same paper he
+wrote the address for the following year, January 1, 1839, "The Sister
+Years." He had also contributed to "The American Monthly Magazine," for
+January, 1838. an article under his own name on his friend, Thomas Green
+Fessenden, a Maine politician who had recently died; and to the same
+periodical, for March, "The Three-fold Destiny" under the old pseudonym
+of Ashley Allen Royce. It was, however, "The Democratic Review" which
+served as the principal channel of publication. It contained
+successively "Footprints on the Beach," January; "Snowflakes," February;
+"Howe's Masquerade," May; "Edward Randolph's Portrait," July; "Lady
+Eleanore's Mantle," "Chippings with a Chisel," and a sketch of Jonathan
+Cilley, his friend who had just been shot by Graves in a duel, all in
+September; and these tales he signed as by The Author of "Twice-Told
+Tales." The Province House series was concluded by "Old Esther Dudley,"
+in this same periodical, April, 1839, and to this he affixed his own
+name for the first time. "The Lily's Quest" had appeared, January 19,
+1839. in "The Southern Rose," published at Charleston, South Carolina.
+Here the first stage of his literary career ended.
+
+He was now to leave that chamber under the eaves, in which these years,
+lengthened to fourteen now, had been spent, but not without a farewell.
+Here he had written, in 1835, "In this dismal chamber fame was won." A
+dismal sort of fame he thought it then. It was on returning to it in
+1840 that he penned the well-known 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 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 seemed 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 that I thought preferable to my old 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 fullness of time was come,
+I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I
+used to think 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."
+
+This sentiment always continued to play about this room, and whenever he
+returned to it he was apt to set down some word of memory. In one
+passage he even describes it as a shrine of literary pilgrimage, and
+mentions, with that well-known touch, half fantastic, half grotesque,
+its various articles of furniture,--the washstand, the mahogany-framed
+glass, the pine table, the flag-bottomed chair, the old chest of
+drawers, the closet, the worn-out shoe-brush, imagining the thoughts of
+the pilgrim on beholding these relics. It was the type for him of the
+old life of loneliness, of disappointment, of household gloom; but it
+was also the place where he had spent those "tranquil and not unhappy
+years," of which he afterwards said these early tales were the
+memorials; and, however the room might darken in comparison with the
+happiness of his married life, his last thought in regard to it was that
+contained in a letter written 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."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER.
+
+
+Early in January, 1839, Hawthorne took up his new duties as weigher and
+gauger in the Boston Custom House. He wrote very cheerfully to
+Longfellow that he had no reason to doubt his capacity to fulfill his
+duties, since he had not yet learned what they were, and he indulges his
+humor in fancying imaginary little essays which he will write in the
+unoccupied time he pleasantly anticipates will be his lot. He was glad
+to have a material task to do, something with the stubbornness of fact
+in its resistance, a practical duty such as belongs in the ordinary
+lives of men. This desire to come out of his old way of existence, with
+its preoccupation with the imaginary world, had become a strong and
+rooted feeling, a fixed idea. "If I could only make tables," he said, "I
+should feel myself more of a man." In the bustle of the wharves he felt
+himself in touch with the world's business, and he took hold of his work
+with interest and vigor as well as with that conscientious fidelity
+which belonged to his character. Bancroft, a few months later, told
+Emerson that he was "the most efficient and best of the Custom House
+officers," and Mr. Lathrop says that he "used to make it a point in all
+weathers to get to the wharf at the earliest possible hour," so that the
+laborers, who were employed by the hour, might not lose their time. The
+life he led is fully described in his own journals, with all its details
+of shipping business, of the sailors and laborers and their tasks, of
+the salt, salt fish, oil, iron, molasses, and other inelegant
+merchandise, and the day's work in its various aspects of character,
+things, and weather. Hawthorne's powers of observation, which he had
+previously exercised in the taverns of New England and along his native
+roadside and beaches, were now fully occupied and newly animated with
+the novelty of the scene and his part in it. He made these careful notes
+almost by instinct, but after all, they were of curiously little use to
+him; it would seem rather that they gave his mind occupation in the
+intervals of his imaginative creation; they were a resource to him like
+the recreation of a walk; they represent the vacant and idle times of
+his genius; and for this reason his observations, which are in the main
+a kind of admirable reporting, afford a well-nigh complete setting for
+his life, and constitute an external autobiography. He is hardly to be
+truly seen apart from them.
+
+At the end of six months he had begun to feel the wearisome drag upon
+his spirits which was to be expected from toilsome days. Practical life
+as a sort of vacation was welcome, but as it became the continuing
+business of his time, and that other world of the artistic faculty was
+now, in turn, known only by visiting glimpses, the look of the facts
+changed. "I do not mean to imply," he writes, "that I am unhappy or
+discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the
+same way that it is to every toilsome man; and mine is a healthy
+weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from
+henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my
+brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I
+likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun,
+nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." At first, no
+doubt, the outdoor occupation and the having to do with sea and harbor
+life, for which he had an hereditary affection, were important elements
+in his happiness; and the association with rough and hardy men, whose
+contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and health of
+such occupations, was the kind of human companionship which he felt most
+naturally and pleasurably. But the wearing in of the facts upon him is
+seen in the way in which the blackness of coal and the whiteness of salt
+begin to color the page, until it would seem as if he handled and saw no
+other objects, and also in the comfort that the cold sea-wind, and
+freshening waves, and the horizon of cloud and green are to him. At the
+end of a year the signs of weariness come out clear in a well-known
+passage of the "Note-Books," as a condensed picture of these two years
+of life:--
+
+"I have been measuring coal all day, 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 (northeast, 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 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 by the odor 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."
+
+He soon began to "pray that in one year more I may find some way of
+escaping from this unblest Custom House; for it is a very grievous
+thralldom;" and beginning now to write again, he feels as if "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." Yet he tries to
+be just to his experience, and adds what he thought the good of it had
+been:--
+
+"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 fit 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 portion 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 earthly cavern, where I
+am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind."
+
+The rebellion, nevertheless, continued, and as the spring came on the
+Custom House is a "darksome dungeon," where he "murders the joyful young
+day," quenching the sunshine; when he shall be free again, he thinks, he
+will enjoy all things anew like a child of five, and "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." He goes to the Common, to the
+highest point, where he could "see miles and miles into the country.
+Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords,
+whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all his
+earth is not composed of blocks of brick houses, and of stone or wooden
+pavements. Blessed be God for the sky, too, though the smoke of the city
+may somewhat change its aspect,--but still it is better than if each
+street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people
+walking the mall,--mechanics apparently, and shopkeepers' clerks, with
+their wives; and boys were rolling on the grass, and I would have liked
+to lie down and roll too."
+
+He looks out over the waters. "The footsteps of May can be traced upon
+the islands in the harbor, and I have been watching the tints of green
+upon them gradually deepening, till now they are almost as beautiful as
+they ever can be." He is convinced that "Christian's burden consisted of
+coal," and he takes comfort in salt: "Salt is white and pure--there is
+something holy in salt." Yet this tone was not constant, and from time
+to time he shows something of his first appreciation and enjoyment of
+the element of labor and reality in the experience. Almost at the end of
+his life on the wharf, after more than two years of it, he exemplifies
+his later feeling perhaps most justly:--
+
+"I have been busy all day, from early breakfast-time till late in the
+afternoon; and old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily
+than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom
+House. It has been a brisk, breezy day, an effervescent atmosphere, and
+I have enjoyed it in all its freshness,--breathing air which had not
+been breathed in advance by the hundred thousand pairs of lungs which
+have common and invisible property in the atmosphere of this great city.
+My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the
+wilderness of ocean.... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they
+bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I
+found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for
+several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is
+this,--'disgorge,' quotha, as if the vessel were sick) on the wharf, and
+everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased me to
+think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible
+business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not
+have gone on without my presence. Nevertheless, I must not pride myself
+too much on my activity and utilitarianism. I shall, doubtless, soon
+bewail myself at being compelled to earn my bread by taking some little
+share in the toils of mortal men."
+
+The truth was that Hawthorne led a life apart in his own genius, and
+this life of the spirit rose out of his daily and habitual existence, or
+flowed through it like a hidden stream, and did not mingle with the tide
+of the hours as they passed. He felt the need of a fuller, earthly,
+practical life, a real life, as he would have called it by contrast with
+the impalpable things of his genius, and sought it in outward
+employments; but in these, when his spirit awoke, he felt himself a
+captive, and defrauded of that higher life of the soul; and after the
+day's work or the year's labor was over, he could not be content with
+the fact that it had been, and had served its purpose, and was gone, but
+he still was compelled to ask how it had served this higher life, in
+what ways it had fed the spirit which should be master of all the days
+of one's life, and he found no satisfactory answer except the crude one
+that possibly his experience and observation might be useful, though
+doubtfully, as material for the books that were to be. After all he was
+not content with practical life as an end; it was a means only, such was
+the necessity of his constitution; he felt its interference with his
+creative faculty and he was far from being convinced that he had gained
+anything from it which would be fruitful when he should find time and
+strength to write again. The leisure he had fondly anticipated was only
+a dream. He had to work too hard.
+
+During these two years, from January, 1839, to April, 1841, the other
+part of Hawthorne's life lay in his companionship with Sophia Peabody.
+At first, communication was mostly by letters; but the Peabodys removed
+from Salem to Boston in 1840, and after that the two lovers--for they
+were lovers in the most simple sense--met constantly. The memorials of
+the time, touching as they are in their intimacy of feeling, have that
+essential privacy which best bespeaks a noble nature. The exchanges of
+confidences, the little gifts, such as the two pictures which she sent
+him and which he always held so preciously in his affection, the trifles
+of lovers' talk, like his confession that he always washed his hands
+before reading her letters, the quiet, firm advice, the consolations,
+the happy praise he renders her,--all these belong to the love-story, if
+it must needs be told. But, besides this, Hawthorne felt toward this
+love of his married life in a peculiar way not often so purely
+disclosed; there were touches of solemnity in it, something not of this
+world; there was that sense of what can be described only as sacredness,
+which he intimates and in part reveals as a thing never absent from his
+heart, whether with her or away from her. Love had come to him, not in
+his youth, but after the years of solitude had ripened both heart and
+imagination,--a man's love; it filled his whole nature, and with it went
+a feeling of glad release from the past, of the coming of a freeing
+power bringing new life, which gave something of heavenly gratitude to
+his bosom. How deep, serious, truly sacred, his love was, can be read in
+all the lines of his writing that even remotely allude to it; and at
+this time he gave expression to it with a sincerity so unconscious that
+in reading his letters--and there are many of them, though happily he
+destroyed his wife's--one looks straight into his heart. It is strange,
+he thinks, that "such a flower as our affection should have blossomed
+amid snow and wintry winds;" and in all ways this love had the
+singularity that deep natures feel in their own experiences. "I never
+till now," writes Hawthorne, "had a friend who could give me repose; all
+have disturbed me, and whether for pleasure or pain, it was still
+disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine." So one
+might weave the chain of lovers' phrases, linking the old words over;
+but here, at least, it will be enough to let one or two separate
+passages stand for his abiding mood. In June, 1840, he writes to her
+when she is at Concord:--
+
+"My heart thirsts and languishes to be there, away from the hot sun, and
+the coal-dust, and the steaming docks, and the thick-pated, stubborn,
+contentious men, with whom I brawl from morning till night, and all the
+weary toil that quite engrosses me, and yet occupies only a small part
+of my being, which I did not know existed before I became a measurer. I
+do think I should sink down quite disheartened and inanimate if you were
+not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us;
+but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all
+these unlovely circumstances, and that it has not ceased to exist, as I
+might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through you.
+You know not what comfort I have in thinking of you amid those beautiful
+scenes and amid those sympathizing hearts. If you are well and happy, if
+your step is light and joyous there, and your cheek is becoming rosier,
+and if your heart makes pleasant music, then is it not better for you to
+stay there a little longer? And if better for you, is it not so for me
+likewise? Now, I do not press you to stay, but leave it all to your
+wisdom; and if you feel it is now time to come home, then let it be so."
+
+Similarly, in the fall of the same year, from Boston, and again from
+Salem, he sums in memory what this new life had been to him now for
+nearly two years:--
+
+"Sometimes, during my solitary life in our old Salem house, it seemed to
+me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive; for I had
+no wife then to keep my heart warm. But, at length, you were revealed to
+me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and
+nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will
+remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your
+own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,--you only have thrown
+a light, deep downward and upward, into my soul. You only have revealed
+me to myself; for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would
+have been merely to know my own shadow,--to watch it flickering on the
+wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions....
+
+"Whenever I return to Salem, I feel how dark my life would be without
+the light that you shed upon it,--how cold, without the warmth of your
+love. Sitting in this chamber, where my youth wasted itself in vain, I
+can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as if the
+better part of me had been born since then. I had walked those many
+years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with only a
+dreamy notion that there was any light in the universe, if you had not
+kissed my eyelids and given me to see. You, dearest, have always been
+positively happy. Not so I,--I have only not been miserable."
+
+To turn to other matters, the preoccupation of Hawthorne's mind with his
+business, together with the distraction of his courtship, proved
+unfavorable to imaginative work. It may be, too, that the impulse to
+create had been somewhat exhausted by the rapid production of his later
+tales in the year or two preceding. Only one original story appeared in
+this period of labor and love, "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," which
+was published in the "Democratic Review" for March, 1840, as by the Rev.
+A. A. Royce. An interesting edition of "The Gentle Boy," [Footnote:
+_The Gentle Boy._ A Thrice Told Tale. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. With
+an Original Illustration. Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 121 Washington
+Street. New York & London: Wiley & Putnam. 1839. 4to. Pp. 20.] under
+Hawthorne's name, had been issued in 1839 at his own expense; it
+contained the original sketch of Ibrahim, by Sophia Peabody, engraved by
+J. Andrews, and was evidently intended only as a kind of lover's gift to
+her, to whom it was dedicated. He gave his attention now to writing some
+children's books, partly under the influence of his old "Peter Parley"
+instruction and experience, and partly, no doubt, under the
+encouragement and advice of Elizabeth Peabody, who was interested in
+such literature. The Peabodys, on removing to Boston, had opened a shop,
+a library and book-store and homoeopathic drug-store, all in one, of
+which she was the head, and with her name Hawthorne associated his new
+ventures. He had contemplated writing children's books, as a probable
+means of profit, before he received his appointment in the Custom House,
+as he said in his letter to Longfellow; and he merely stuck to the plan
+under the new conditions. The result was three volumes of historical
+tales for young people, drawn from New England in the colonial and
+revolutionary times, under different titles, but making one series:
+"Grandfather's Chair," [Footnote: _Grandfather's Chair._ A History
+for Youth. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston:
+E. P. Peabody. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 140. The
+preface is dated Boston, November, 1840.] "Famous Old People,"
+[Footnote: _Famous Old People._ Being the Second Epoch of
+Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales.
+Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 158. The preface
+is dated December 30, 1840.] and "Liberty Tree." [Footnote: _Liberty
+Tree._ With the Last Words of Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel
+Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West
+St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 160. The preface is dated Boston, February 27,
+1841.] They appeared in rapid succession in 1841, and were successful.
+But notwithstanding the high character of these little books as
+entertainment for children, it will hardly be thought that literature
+had profited much by the devotion of genius to coal and salt and the
+oversight of day laborers.
+
+In the spring of 1841, immediately after the change of administration in
+March, Hawthorne lost his place in the Custom House, and he at once
+betook himself to Brook Farm, in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, or, to
+give its full name, "The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and
+Education." The place, the celebrities who gathered there in their
+youth, and their way of life, have all been many times described, so
+that there is no occasion to renew a detailed account, especially as
+Hawthorne's interest in the scheme was purely incidental. He must have
+had his plans already made in preparation for a change in his life. The
+shop of the Peabodys in Boston was a centre of transcendentalism, "The
+Dial" being published there; and Hawthorne's attention may have been
+drawn to the movement for a practical application of the new social
+ideas by this circumstance, and he may well have made the acquaintance
+of Ripley, the chief projector, through these family friends. It is to
+be remembered, too, that he had been interested previously in the
+community idea, in the case of the Shakers, and had twice written tales
+on motives suggested by their life. But an experiment in the
+regeneration of society by a group of radicals would hardly have given
+him much practical concern, had it not fallen in with some peculiarities
+of his private position. Something, it is true, is to be allowed for the
+infection of the time, which would touch a morally speculative mind such
+as Hawthorne's to some degree; he would have observed these dreamers,
+breaking out new paths in the hardened old world of custom and
+inheritance, and would have followed the fortunes of the dream in its
+effects on individual lives, for it would appeal to the moral
+imagination and to his general sentiment about human life; but to become
+one of the promoters would require, in a man so wary, so hard-headed and
+cool as he naturally was in one half of his brain at least, a certain
+pressure of fact upon him. No man was less of a reformer than Hawthorne;
+he was constitutionally phlegmatic about society, a party man in
+politics, and an ironical critic of all "come-outers," as these people
+were then popularly named; and, in this instance, which is the only
+apparently freakish action of his life, he was certainly swayed by what
+he supposed to be his own interest. He was merely prospecting for a home
+in which to settle. He was anxious to be married; he was thirty-seven
+years old, and Sophia was thirty, and the engagement had already lasted
+two years and more. In this new community hopes were held out that there
+would be cottages for families, and the whole business of supporting a
+family was to be simplified and made easier by the joint arrangements of
+the community, in an economical sense; moreover, that blessed union of
+manual toil with intellectual labor was a prime part of the enterprise,
+and something akin to this Hawthorne still very much desired in his own
+mind. To have some material work to do, to sustain a practical relation
+with men and their general life, to have daily contact with matter of
+fact as a means of escape from the old life of shadows, were still very
+definite and prized ends with him. He was fairly possessed with this
+idea for some years. It may fairly be believed that he had no ulterior
+purpose or belief in the affair, but merely for his personal convenience
+desired on the one hand to solve the old problem of living in the world
+while not of it, and to provide a house for his wife to come to. He was
+willing to try the new scheme, nothing else seeming so feasible at the
+time to accomplish his immediate purpose; and he put into it all his
+savings, one thousand dollars, but with the idea of withdrawing this
+capital in case he was dissatisfied with the results, and should return
+to the ordinary ways of the world.
+
+Hawthorne arrived at the farm among the first of the new settlers, in an
+April snowstorm, on the twelfth of the month, and began at once to make
+the acquaintance of the barnyard. He was entirely destitute of
+agricultural talents, original or acquired, a green hand in every sense
+of the word, with that muscular willingness to learn which exhibits
+itself by unusual destructive capacity upon implements of toil and the
+docility of patient farm animals. He had physical strength, and after
+attempting to chop, hay, and milk, he was given a dung-fork and set to
+work at a pile of manure. He writes about these details with a softening
+of the raw facts by elegancies of language, and much gentle fun, but
+from the start he shows a playfulness of disposition in regard to the
+whole affair, like a great boy on a vacation, as if the sense of it all
+being, so far as he was concerned, a surprising joke on a novel scale
+were in his mind and attitude all the time; and it is this humor,
+interlacing on the page like sunshine, that makes the life of his
+narrative. Occasionally there is the touch of true enjoyment out of
+doors, as when, under the clear blue sky on the hillside, it seemed as
+if he "were at work in the sky itself," and he notices the wild flowers
+coming into the chill world; but, as before at the wharf, so now at his
+farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a
+satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the
+world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if
+there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even
+more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to
+enthusiastic thankfulness that it was near done:--
+
+"That abominable gold-mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its
+treasures in the course of two or three days! Of all hateful places that
+is the worst, and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many
+days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion that a man's soul may
+be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field,
+just as well as under a pile of money."
+
+Ten weeks more finished the matter. "Joyful thought! in a little more
+than a fortnight I shall be free from my bondage, ... free to enjoy
+Nature,--free to think and feel!... Even my Custom House experience was
+not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh,
+labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without
+becoming proportionably brutified! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I
+have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It
+is not so."
+
+Shortly after this outburst he made a visit to his home at Salem, where
+he had been much missed. The few letters that his sister Louisa wrote to
+him after he first went to the farm afford the pleasantest, and almost
+the only glimpse of his place in the family. His experiment was plainly
+not welcome to them; his mother "groaned over it;" but, apart from that,
+in which there may have been some family pride, though there was also
+real personal solicitude, it is noticeable how his sister counts the
+weeks he has been gone, and expresses their vehement desires for his
+return, and shows the thoughtfulness of the family for him in many ways.
+"Mother apostrophizes your picture because you do not come home," she
+writes, after "nine weeks" of absence,--"a great deal too long." In that
+secluded home he must indeed have been missed, and doubtless it seemed
+to them day by day more certain that he had really gone out from them
+into another world of his own. When he was in Salem in September,
+however, he no sooner crossed the threshold than he felt the old
+deserted life fall on him again like an evil spirit. "How immediately
+and irrecoverably," he writes to Sophia, "should I relapse into the way
+of life in which I spent my youth! If it were not for you, this present
+world would see no more of me forever. The sunshine would never fall on
+me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a while people might discern my
+figure gliding stealthily through the dim evening,--that would be all. I
+should be only a shadow of the night; it is you that give me reality,
+and make all things real for me. If, in the interval since I quitted
+this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and you were the only
+possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have
+come back hither ere now, with a feeling that all was a dream and a
+mockery."
+
+Brook Farm seems to him now only another dream, and he gives his final
+judgment on that matter:--
+
+"Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm;
+and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and
+unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream
+behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there
+has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and
+milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the
+sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not
+myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that my hands have,
+during the past summer, grown very brown and rough, insomuch that many
+people persist in believing that I, after all, was the aforesaid
+spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer, and hay-raker. But such
+people do not know a reality from a shadow. Enough of nonsense."
+
+Nevertheless he went back for a while, not now as a farmhand, but
+apparently as a boarder, though he was made a trustee of the association
+and chairman of the committee on finance. He took, from this time,
+little part in the working life of the community. He had made up his
+mind that there was to be no home for him there, though "weary, weary,
+thrice weary of waiting so many ages." He turns his mind to other plans
+of book-making, but does not have the seclusion he had found necessary
+for composition, and rather mournfully writes that he "must observe, and
+think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things
+which may be wrought out hereafter." He did observe with his habitual
+closeness the people who came and went, and the life of the inmates,
+sitting himself apart a good deal with a book before his face. He made
+friends with a few, a very few, of whom George Bradford and Frank Farley
+remained to him in later times; but he was, as always, averse to
+literary society, and came nearer to men of a different type in his
+human intercourse. Sophia, who had seen him there amid the fraternity,
+described his relationship to the others accurately, one of "courtesy
+and conformableness and geniality;" but, she tells him, the expression
+of his countenance was "that of a witness and hearer rather than of
+comradeship." In the fall weather he spent much of his time rambling
+about, and the scarlet color of the pastures, the warmth of the autumn
+woods, and the fading of the blue-fringed gentian, last blossom of the
+year, made up the texture of his notable life, just as similar things
+had earlier done by the Salem shore. In the spring he left the
+community, and made ready to go to Concord, where a place had been found
+for him to settle.
+
+In the production of literature, life at Brook Farm had proved as barren
+as the years on Long Wharf. He had contributed one story, "A Virtuoso's
+Collection," to "The Boston Miscellany" for May, 1842, and had added one
+more to his little books, "Biographical Stories [Footnote:
+_Biographical Stories for Children._ Benjamin West, Sir Isaac
+Newton, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Cromwell, Benjamin Franklin, Queen
+Christina. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Author of Historical Tales for Youth,
+Twice-Told Tales, etc. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 114 Washington St.
+1842. 18mo. Pp. v, 161. "Historical Tales for Youth" was made up by
+binding the three Grandfather's Chair books in the 18mo second edition,
+1842, together with this volume, and issued as four volumes in two, so
+labeled on the back.] for Children." The volume was added to the
+"Grandfather's Chair" series, which was brought out in a new edition in
+1842. To the same year belongs the enlarged edition of "Twice-Told
+Tales," [Footnote: _Twice-Told Tales._ By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
+Boston: James Munroe and Company. 1842. 2 vols. 12mo. Pp. 331, 356. The
+first volume contained the same tales as the former edition, with The
+Toll-Gatherer's Day added. The second volume contained the following:
+Howe's Masquerade, Edward Randolph's Portrait, Lady Eleanore's Mantle,
+Old Esther Dudley, The Haunted Mind, The Village Uncle, The Ambitious
+Guest, The Sister Years, Snowflakes, The Seven Vagabonds, The White Old
+Maid, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, Chippings with a Chisel, The Shaker
+Bridal, Night Sketches, Endicott and the Red Cross, The Lily's Quest,
+Footprints on the Sea-Shore, Edward Fane's Rosebud, The Threefold
+Destiny.] in two volumes, in which the number of stories was doubled,
+but the collection still left out many titles which were afterwards
+gathered.
+
+Hawthorne had now been practically idle, so far as his genius was
+concerned, for three years, and had experimented to his heart's content
+in other modes of life. He had decided on immediate marriage. Sophia had
+recovered from her invalidism, and the lifelong headache she had
+experienced disappeared. It remained only to inform Madam Hawthorne of
+the engagement which had been so long concealed. He felt some
+trepidation, since, he says, "almost every agitating circumstance of her
+life had cost her a fit of illness." But his fears were groundless; she
+came out of her chamber to meet him as soon as he arrived, looking
+better and more cheerful than usual, and full of kindness. "Foolish me,"
+he writes happily to Sophia, "to doubt that my mother's love could be
+wise, like all other genuine love!... It seems that our mother had seen
+how things were a long time ago; at first her heart was troubled,
+because she knew that much of outward as well as inward fitness was
+requisite to secure our peace; but gradually and quietly God has taught
+her that all is good, and so we shall have her fullest blessing and
+concurrence. My sisters, too, begin to sympathize as they ought, and all
+is well. God be praised! I thank Him on my knees, and pray Him to make
+me worthy of the happiness you bring me." The quiet marriage took place
+on July 9, 1842, at the home of the Peabodys in Boston, and Hawthorne
+and his wife went to Concord to reside at the Old Manse.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE OLD MANSE.
+
+
+The life upon which the Hawthornes now entered for a period of three
+years and more was one of village quiet and country happiness. Concord
+was a characteristic town of eastern Massachusetts, with woodland,
+pasture, and hill lying unevenly in a diversified landscape, and in the
+midst the little river winding its slow way along by the famous bridge.
+The neighbors were few, and for the most part were members of the
+literary group of residents or visitors which gave Concord its later
+distinction. Yet even here, amid this rural peace and in so restricted a
+society, life at the Old Manse had a still deeper seclusion, as of a
+place of retreat and inviolable privacy; there was an atmosphere of
+solitude about it, wrapping it round, a sense of life with nature, and
+only slight and distant contact with the world, the privacy of a house
+that is snow-bound, lasting on as if by enchantment through July heats
+as well as February drifts. Hawthorne enjoyed this freedom in the place
+that first seemed to him like real home; and he and his wife pleased
+their fancy with thinking of it as a native paradise, with themselves as
+the new Adam and Eve, a thought which he had held in prospect before
+marriage and now clung to with a curious tenacity, pursuing it through
+many changes of idea; and, on the level of fact, he used to write that
+he had never lived so like a boy since he really was a boy in the old
+days in Maine.
+
+The situation of the house lent itself to his tastes and inclinations.
+It was set back from the street, toward which an avenue of trees led
+out, and in the rear was the apple orchard with the river on its edge.
+He could look from his windows on the life of the road, with its
+occasional passers-by, for it was seldom that any one turned up the
+avenue to call; and he could go down to the stream to bathe and fish in
+summer, and to skate in winter on the black ice. He would wander out
+over the fields and into the woods with Ellery Channing, and go boating
+with Thoreau, both of whom were companions he liked to be with; or if he
+met Margaret Fuller in the paths of Sleepy Hollow, he could spend an
+hour or two in such half transcendental, half-sentimental talk as he
+records from such a chance encounter. Emerson came, also, to talk and
+walk with a man who was so firm-set in his own ways, being attracted to
+him by the subtleties of personality, for he never could read
+Hawthorne's tales then or afterwards, so profound was the opposition of
+their genius. If visitors stayed at the manse, it would be George
+Bradford, whom Hawthorne respected in the highest degree which his
+appreciation of others ever reached, or Frank Farley, the half-crazy
+Brook Farmer, whom he gave himself to in a more self-sacrificing way to
+aid and comfort in his bewildered and imperfect state; or else Hillard
+would arrive, with much cheerfulness and news from Longfellow or others
+of the Cambridge men. But Hawthorne still kept the social world at a
+distance from his private and intimate self; these men, though he
+maintained kindly intercourse with them, never penetrated the shell of
+his true reserve; the contact was but superficial; and though they were
+good for company, he was often glad when they were gone and he was again
+alone with nature and his dreams, and the ways and things of household
+life.
+
+In doors, and out doors, too, the new life was full of happiness. The
+gentle felicity of the literary recluse breathes through the description
+he gave of the place and time and habits of existence in the Manse,
+which he wrote out for his readers in the pleasantest of his
+autobiographical papers; and as for details to supply a more complete
+picture,--are they not written at large in the family letters? His wife
+worshiped him, and named him all the names of classic mythology and
+history,--Endymion, Epaminondas, Apollo,--glorying in his physical
+kinghood, as she saw it, when he glided skating in the rose-colored air
+of twilight, and also in the divine qualities of his spirit in doors,
+where he, on occasion--and the occasion grew more and more
+frequent--would wash the dishes, do the chores, cook the meals even,
+relieving her of every care of this kind in servant matters. He read to
+her in the evenings Macaulay, all of Shakspere, the Sermon on the Mount
+for Sunday, and generally the old books over, Thomson's "Castle,"
+Spenser's faeryland, and the rest. She rejoiced in him and all that was
+his; and she painted and modeled a good deal and worked out her artistic
+instincts very happily for herself, and much to her husband's
+sympathetic pleasure. Una, the first child, was born March 3, 1844, and
+with this new revelation life went on in deeper and sweeter ways of
+feeling, thought, and service. The home is easily to be seen now, though
+it was then so private a place,--a home essentially not of an uncommon
+New England type, where refined qualities and noble behavior flourished
+close to the soil of homely duties and the daily happiness of natural
+lives under whatever hardships; a home of friendly ties, of high
+thoughts within, and of poverty bravely borne.
+
+There is no other word for it. Into this paradise of the Manse at
+Concord, set in the very heart of outer and inward peace so complete,
+poverty had come. Hawthorne had never had any superfluity in the things
+that give comfort and ease to life even on a small scale. The years at
+Salem had been marked by strict economies always, it is plain; there was
+no more than enough in that house, and thence arose in part its proud
+instinct of isolation; and Bridge, it may be recalled, had cheered up
+Hawthorne's doubting spirits on one occasion by telling him that the
+three hundred dollars he earned, at the age of thirty, was sufficient to
+support him. On such a scale, he would not have called himself poor. But
+he was poor now, with that frank meaning that the word has to a man
+willing to do without, who cannot pay his small debts; in fact the
+smallness of the debt gives its edge to the misery. Hawthorne's whole
+New England nature rebelled against it; for there is nothing so
+deep-grained in the old New England character as the dislike to be
+"dependent," as the word is used. Hawthorne had gone through his
+training, too, in boyhood; he had never contracted debts till he had the
+money to pay them; and now he had miscalculated the "honesty"--as he
+doubtless named it in his thoughts--of other men. He had expected to
+draw out the thousand dollars invested at Brook Farm, and he supposed he
+would get it, especially if he really needed it, so unbusiness-like were
+his ideas; but as a matter of fact, he had lost that money in the
+speculation as much as if he had risked it in any other way. There was
+more to justify his irritation in the fact that "The Democratic Review,"
+which had begun by paying five dollars a page, and had dropped to twenty
+dollars an article independent of length, had practically failed. He
+could not get paid for his work, and so he could not pay the small bills
+of household expenses. They were insignificant, in one sense, but the
+fact that they were not paid was independent of the amount. Emerson told
+him, so his wife writes, "to whistle for it, ... everybody was in debt,
+... all worse than he was." There had been hardship almost from the
+first, as appears from Hawthorne's anger at Mr. Upham for telling tales
+in Salem of their "poverty and misery," on which his most significant
+comment, perhaps, is, "We never have been quite paupers." This was in
+March, 1843, and it is not unlikely that the modest ways of the house,
+and possibly that disregard for regular meals in which Hawthorne had
+long been experienced, may have given an impression of greater economy
+than there was need of; but, for all Hawthorne's natural disclaimer, the
+family plainly spent as little as possible, and he found the kitchen
+garden, whose fortunes he follows with such interest, gave him food as
+well as exercise. The "Paradisaical dinner," on Christmas Day, 1843, "of
+preserved quince and apple, dates, and bread and cheese, and milk,"
+though of course its simplicity was only due to the cook's absence in
+Boston, indicates other difficulties of housekeeping, as also do a
+hundred half-amusing details of the household life. But the time of
+trouble came in dead earnest in the course of 1845, and in the fall of
+that year extremity is seen nigh at hand when Mrs. Hawthorne writes to
+her mother: "He and Una are my perpetual Paradise, and I besieged heaven
+with prayers that we might not find it our duty to separate, whatever
+privations we must outwardly suffer in consequence of remaining
+together."
+
+The way out of all this trouble was found for Hawthorne by the same
+friends who had formerly rescued him in the time of his bitter
+discouragement before his engagement. In the spring of 1845, Bridge and
+Frank Pierce appeared on the scene, and finding Hawthorne at his daily
+task of chopping wood in the shed, they had a meeting of the old
+college-boy sort that brightens the page with one of those human scenes
+that, occurring seldom in Hawthorne's life, have such realistic effect.
+
+"Mr. Bridge caught a glimpse of him, and began a sort of waltz towards
+him. Mr. Pierce followed; and when they reappeared, Mr. Pierce's arm was
+encircling my husband's old blue frock. How his friends do love him! Mr.
+Bridge was perfectly wild with spirits. He danced and gesticulated and
+opened his round eyes like an owl.... My husband says Mr. Pierce's
+affection for and reliance upon him are perhaps greater than any other
+person's. He called him 'Nathaniel,' and spoke to him and looked at him
+with peculiar tenderness."
+
+The friends agreed that something should be done for Hawthorne through
+political influence, and in the course of the succeeding months there
+was much discussion of one and another office without immediate result;
+and meanwhile Hawthorne prepared to remove to Salem again, where he
+would so arrange matters that his mother and sisters should live in the
+same house with him. He had occasionally visited them during his married
+life, and on one of these short stays at home an incident occurred that
+should be recorded, not only for its singularity, but for its glimpse of
+his mother in a new light.
+
+"For the first time since my husband can remember, he dined with his
+mother! This is only one of the miracles which the baby is to perform.
+Her grandmother held her on her lap till one of us should finish dining,
+and then ate her own meal. She thinks Una is a beauty, and, I believe,
+is not at all disappointed in her. Her grandmother also says she has the
+most perfect form she ever saw in a baby."
+
+It was a year later than this anecdote that the family was reunited in
+Salem, but before following Hawthorne in his return to his native,
+though never very well loved town, his literary work in these years at
+Concord should be looked at.
+
+When Hawthorne came to live at the Old Manse it was some time since he
+had produced any imaginative work, or, indeed, written anything except
+the stories for children in "Grandfather's Chair," which hardly rise
+above the class of hack work. Since leaving Salem in January, 1840, he
+had published but one paper that is remembered in his better writings,
+and that, "A Virtuoso's Collection," was of a peculiar character, being
+no more than a play of fancy, a curiosity of literary invention. After
+the lapse of two years and a half, during which his imagination was
+uncreative, it might have been anticipated that, under the new
+conditions of tranquillity and private happiness, in the favorable
+surroundings of the Manse, he would have shown unusual fruitfulness; but
+such was not the case. In the additional three years and a half that had
+now passed since he settled at Concord, he gave to the world only
+eighteen papers. They did not begin until 1843, and were distributed,
+for the most part, evenly over the next two years. "Little
+Daffydowndilly" appeared in "The Boys' and Girls' Magazine" in 1843.
+Lowell's periodical, "The Pioneer," which lived only through the first
+three months of that year, contained "The Hall of Fantasy," in the
+February, and "The Birthmark," in the March number. "The Democratic
+Review," which was still edited by O'Sullivan, a warm friend though
+editorially impecunious, received the remaining tales and sketches with
+a few exceptions. It published them as follows: in 1843, "The New Adam
+and Eve," February; "Egotism, or The Bosom Serpent," March; "The
+Procession of Life," April; "The Celestial Railroad," May; "Buds and
+Bird Voices," June; "Fire Worship," December; in 1844, "The Christmas
+Banquet," January; "The Intelligence Office," March; "The Artist of the
+Beautiful," June; "A Select Party," July; "Rappaccini's Daughter,"
+December; in 1845, "P.'s Correspondence," April. "Earth's Holocaust" had
+appeared in "Graham's Magazine," March, 1844, apparently on Griswold's
+invitation; and two tales, "Drowne's Wooden Image," and "The Old Apple
+Dealer," were published, if at all, in some unknown place. All of these
+appeared under the author's own name, except that he once relapsed into
+his old habit by sending forth "Rappaccini's Daughter" as a part of the
+writings of Aubépine, a former pseudonym. "The Celestial Railroad"
+[Footnote: _The Celestial Railroad._ By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
+Boston: published by Wilder & Co., No. 46 Washington Street. 1843. 82mo,
+paper. Pp. 32.] was published separately as a pamphlet. He had edited
+for "The Democratic Review" also the "Papers of an old Dartmoor
+Prisoner;" and, in 1845, he assisted his friend Bridge to appear as an
+author by arranging and revising his "Journal of an African Cruiser."
+[Footnote: _Journal of an African Cruiser._ Comprising Sketches of
+the Canaries, The Cape de Verdes, Liberia, Madeira, Sierra Leone, and
+Other Places of Interest on the West Coast of Africa. By an Officer of
+the U. S. Navy. Edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York & London: Wiley
+and Putnam. 1845. 12mo. Pp. 179.] This amount of literary work, taken
+altogether, is not considerable, and it is noticeable that in the last
+year, 1845, he seems to have practically ceased writing. He may have
+been a slow, and possibly an infrequent writer; such, in fact, is the
+inference to be drawn also from his earlier years, when he does not seem
+to have been a rapid producer except at the time of the issue of
+"Twice-Told Tales," when he had the strongest spur of ambition and most
+felt the need of succeeding. He had written, in all, about ninety tales
+and sketches in twenty years, so far as is known, of which thirty-nine
+had been collected in the "Twice-Told Tales." He now took all his new
+tales and, adding to them five others from his earlier uncollected
+stock, wrote the introductory sketch of his Concord life, and issued
+them as "Mosses from an Old Manse" [Footnote: _Mosses from an Old
+Manse_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. In two parts. New York: Wiley and
+Putnam. 1846. 12mo. Pp. 211. The volume, the two parts bound as one,
+contained The Old Manse, The Birthmark, A Select Party, Young Goodman
+Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter, Mrs. Bullfrog, Fire Worship, Buds and Bird
+Voices, Monsieur du Miroir, The Hall of Fantasy, The Celestial Railroad,
+The Procession of Life.] in Wiley and Putnam's Library of American
+Books, New York. The work appeared in the earlier part of 1846. Later he
+was to gather up the yet uncollected papers of the first period, and add
+the very few tales afterwards written; but, in fact, Hawthorne's
+activity as a writer of tales practically ended with his leaving
+Concord. His work of that kind was done; and some idea of what he had
+accomplished, some analysis of his temperament and art as disclosed in
+these tales that were the only enduring fruits of the score of years
+since he left college and began the literary life, may now fairly be
+built on the total result.
+
+These hundred tales and sketches of Hawthorne, broadly speaking, embody
+the literary results of his life, especially from his thirtieth to his
+fortieth year, and represent all its activities. In comparison with his
+later romances on the larger scale of life, they are studies, the
+'prentice work of his learning hand, and they disclose successively the
+varieties and modes of his growth, which was one of slow and almost
+imperceptible gradations, until his method was fully formed, perhaps
+unconsciously, and became the artistic mould of his genius. In his first
+attempts there was little, if anything, more than in the instinctive
+motions of a bird's wings,--the disposition for flight. He had the
+faculty of literary expression, which had been nourished within and
+outwardly shaped in manner by constant contact with the English classic
+authors, and especially with good prose, clear, simple, and direct, from
+which melodious cadence had not yet been eliminated. He was touched,
+also, by some vague literary ambition, not well defined, but predisposed
+to fiction; and he had a physically indolent habit, which kept him
+disengaged from practical affairs and led him more and more into
+meditative ways. He did not have any inspiration from within, any
+enthusiasm of sympathy or purpose, any life of his own, seeking
+expression; nor did he find easily a definite subject outside himself to
+observe, describe, and animate. He turned, in his early tales, to the
+local traditions and memories of his native place, and his stories were
+no more than sketched history, provincial in atmosphere; nor did his
+genius show even faintly in them any of its characteristic lines. Scott,
+undoubtedly, was the author who had most affected his mental habit, and
+with this exception, notwithstanding what some critics have alleged of
+his so-called "American predecessors," Charles Brockden Brown and the
+author of "Peter Rugg," there is no trace of any other literary
+influence upon him either in this preparatory time or later in life; but
+something of Scott is to be found permanently in his creative work,--in
+the figure-grouping, the high speeches, the oddities of character
+humorously treated, and especially in the use of set scenes individually
+elaborated to give the high lights and to advance the story. But Scott's
+method was at first inadequately applied, nor is there any sign that the
+young author yet appreciated the artistic capabilities of the material
+he was using.
+
+Hawthorne's instinct was always right in the preferences he showed among
+his works, of which he was an excellent critic. It was not merely by
+accident that he was first known as the author of "Sights from a
+Steeple," though accident may have had its share in the matter; and he
+long continued to use this signature. This little essay is very
+carefully written, and displays in remarkable perfection one quality
+that became so characteristic of his work that he has no rival in it
+except Poe; it has that harmony of tone which is known as keeping a
+unity of design and development so pervasive that the heavens above and
+the earth below are seen from the little steeple as from a centre, and
+nature and life seem to revolve around the eye at that altitude with
+complete breadth as well as smallness of proportion. It is the simplest
+of trifles, as a composition; and, like much of Hawthorne's writing, has
+a curious accent of the school reader, as if it were meant for that, so
+well is it adjusted to ready comprehension, so mild is its interest, so
+matter-of-fact yet playful in fancy is its substance, and so immediate
+is its village charm. He was proud of it as a piece of writing, and
+justly enough, for though it may seem like one of the books of Lilliput,
+it perfectly accomplishes its little life. The type once struck out in
+this clear way, Hawthorne returned to it again and again, and always
+with the same happiness in execution and the same delight in the thing
+itself. In such a frame he would set the miniature of a day, as in "The
+Toll-Gatherer's Day," or "Footprints on the Sea-Shore," or "Sunday at
+Home;" or he would enclose a portrait, of Dutch faithfulness in detail,
+and suggestive also of the school in other ways, as in "The Old Apple
+Dealer," or with greater breadth of life, in "The Village Uncle." "A
+Rill from the Town Pump" and "Main Street" belong to the same kind of
+writing; and most akin to it, at least, are such mingled nature and home
+pieces as "Snowflakes," "Buds and Bird Voices," and "Fire Worship."
+These titles cover the whole period of the tales, but there is no change
+in the manner or quality,--they are all of one kind.
+
+To make sketches so slight as these interesting, much more to embalm
+them in literature, requires some magical touch either in the hand of
+the author or the heart of the reader. They are the thistledown of
+literature, creatures of a contemplative idleness as pure as childhood's
+own, the sun's impartial photography on the film of a rambler's eye; yet
+in these few pages are condensed some thousands, probably, of
+Hawthorne's days. The life they depict has been called barren, and the
+literary product has been described as thin. "What triviality, what
+monotony, what emptiness!" the critics exclaim. It is, indeed,
+provincial; rusticity is its element. Hawthorne, however, did not choose
+it, as a topic, for that reason, with a conscious intention to exploit
+it. He could not have been aware, he could not have half known even, how
+provincial it was, for he had never gone out of this countryside in
+which he was bred, or become acquainted with a different world; even on
+his journeys in stage-coaches he had not got free of it. The sketches
+made no artificial appeal; they have the true flavor of the soil, and
+are written for those who sprang from it and dwelt upon it and would be
+buried in it. This is the charm that still clings to them, and indeed
+pervades them like an aromatic odor in East Indian wood. They are true
+transcripts of life, though vanished now from its place at least in that
+region, which then enjoyed the seclusion of a nest of villages uninvaded
+by railroads, and was nearer perhaps to Calcutta and Sumatra and the
+Gold Coast than to New York. He was not so solitary and alone in this
+life, after all. That part of New England was not far from being a
+Forest of Arden, when Emerson might be met any day with a pail berrying
+in the pastures, or Margaret Fuller reclining by a brook, or Hawthorne
+on a high rock throwing stones at his own shadow in the water. There was
+a Thoreau--there still is--in every New England village, usually
+inglorious. The lone fisherman of the Isaak Walton type had become, in
+the New World, the wood-walker, the flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the
+berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist. Hawthorne
+might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits
+and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to
+be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like
+himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type, on the nature side; and
+Hawthorne was to the village what Thoreau was to the wild wood.
+
+The truth of these sketches is their prime quality, for Hawthorne wrote
+them with the familiar affection and home-attachment of one who had
+fleeted the golden time of his youth amid these scenes of common day,
+and prolonged it far into manhood, and should never quite lose its glow
+of mere existence, its kindliness for humble things, its generous
+leisure for the perishable beauty of nature dotted here and there with
+human life. It is a countrified scene that is disclosed, but this truth
+which characterizes it, this fidelity of fact and sentiment and mood,
+suggests new and deeper values,--a charm, a health, even a power comes
+to the surface as one gazes, the power of peace in quiet places; and
+even a cultivated man, if he be not callous with culture, may feel its
+attractiveness, a sense that the tide of life grows full in the still
+coves as well as on all the sounding beaches of the world; and an
+existence in which the smell of peat-smoke is an event, and the sight of
+some children paddling in the water is a day's memory, and the mere
+drawing in of the salt sea wind is life itself, may seem as important in
+its simplicity as the varied impressions of a day in the season. This
+was Hawthorne's life; was it after all so valueless? He was well aware
+that even the native moralist, though unenlightened, would call him to
+account for wasting his time; and he made his apology after having
+obeyed his mood:--
+
+"Setting forth at my last ramble on a September morning, I bound myself
+with a hermit's vow to interchange no thoughts with man or woman, to
+share no social pleasure, but to derive all that day's enjoyment from
+shore and sea and sky,--from my soul's communion with these, and from
+fantasies and recollections, or anticipated realities. Surely here is
+enough to feed a human spirit for a single day. Farewell, then, busy
+world! Till your evening lights shall shine along the street,--till they
+gleam upon my sea-flushed face as I tread homeward,--free me from your
+ties, and let me be a peaceful outlaw.
+
+"... But grudge me not the day that has been spent in seclusion, which
+yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion, and the
+little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has told me his secrets, and
+airy shapes have flitted around me in my hermitage. Such companionship
+works an effect upon a man's character, as if he had been admitted to
+the society of creatures that are not mortal. And when, at noontide, I
+tread the crowded streets, the influence of this day will still be felt;
+so that I shall walk among men kindly and as a brother, with affection
+and sympathy, but yet shall not melt into the indistinguishable mass of
+humankind. I shall think my own thoughts, and feel my own emotions, and
+possess my individuality unviolated."
+
+The apology seems adapted to the comprehension of the native moralist,
+it must be confessed, and is only an afterthought; for Hawthorne enjoyed
+his out-door life for its own sake, with little reference to its
+ameliorating influence on his social behavior. It is his own life,
+nothing more or less, that he thus describes, in the surroundings that
+heaven vouchsafed to him for better or worse in the Salem streets, in
+the Danvers lanes, by the coves of Marblehead, and along the western
+river uplands or the winding seashore of Beverly beside the islands. If
+he went far afield to Nantucket, he returned with "Chippings with a
+Chisel;" if he took an umbrella for a walk in the rain at home, he
+brought back "Night Sketches." Such was his place. His own delight in
+this existence is noticeable, for it fitted his nature; in none of his
+works is the pleasure of the author in writing them so marked a trait,
+and in none does one come nearer to his natural self. They are complete
+and intimate revelations of the life of his senses, the sounds and
+sights and happenings of daily life. They pleased the readers he had at
+that time in New England, because they were a faithful reproduction of
+the commonplace, played upon by sentiment and slightly moralized, but
+quite in the tone of the community; and all men like to see themselves
+and their ways reflected in the mirror of words. They continue to yield
+the same mild pleasure now, perhaps rather by virtue of a reminiscent
+charm, for this life still exists on the horizons of memory as a part of
+the days gone by. They belong with the literature of the old red
+schoolhouse, the moss-covered bucket, and the barefoot boy,--they are of
+a past that was countrified and old-fashioned, and are its best record;
+and even in the style, the mode of conception, they have the look of
+antiquated things. Their nearness to the school has been adverted to;
+the cognate piece, "A Bell's Biography," has the completeness of a boy's
+composition; there is a touch of nonage in them all, intellectually. In
+this, too, they are true to the time. Things provincial seen by a
+provincial mind and set forth by a provincial art,--such are these
+delicately minute sketches; and unless one takes them so, he misses
+their excellence, their virtue, the vitality they have. Life in the
+provinces, however, is also a divine gift, and its values have seldom
+been better portrayed, its breadth, its narrowness, its shadings through
+sunshine and nightfall, its sentiment, its miscellaneousness, its
+weariness; but its controlling characteristic is its rural peace, such
+as one likes to see in a painting on the wall for year-long
+contemplation, and if this be broken, it is with real tragedy, disasters
+of the sea, or such an inland story as the drowning of the young woman
+at Concord so accurately told in the "Note-Books." Hawthorne's
+personality counts for much, too, in these pieces, as Irving's also does
+in his sketches. The sense of a kindly temperament, hospitable to all
+that lives and is in the dusty world, is felt like a touch of nature
+making us akin to the writer; the classic quality of the prose itself
+gilds all with sunshine; and one only needs love of the soil to complete
+the charm.
+
+These records of memory and sentiment, however, belong to Hawthorne's
+ocular observation, in the main, and to the exterior sphere of his art.
+It is in the historical tales that his imagination first acts with
+seeing power; and here, too, the story by which he preferred to be
+known, "The Gentle Boy," stands out, though its prominence is rather a
+matter of priority than of distinction, for it is the fruit of his
+sympathies more than of his imagination. The remembrance of his
+ancestor's share in the persecution of the Quakers may have suggested
+the theme, and specially drawn out his own gentleness in the treatment.
+The singularity of the tale is partly due to the fascination of the
+child's name, Ilbrahim, which brings before the mind an eastern
+background, emphasizes his loneliness, and gives a suggestion of
+Scriptural charm to the narrative. One almost expects to see palm-trees
+growing up over him. He is, however, not individualized,--he is the
+universal orphan child; nor does it require any stretch of fancy to see
+in him the Christchild that St. Christopher bore over the river, for so
+might that Child have come into this wilderness preaching the eternal
+lesson. The pathetic story is a fable of piety, in fact, and is somewhat
+nervelessly handled for reality; the figures seem to glide in their
+motions, they are not quite set on the earth, they are impalpable except
+in their emotions. The facts lack firmness, though the feeling is
+wrought out with truth and refinement and makes an irresistible appeal
+of pity. It is, however, rather in the second historical tale which
+Hawthorne chose to stand as his pseudonym of authorship, "The Gray
+Champion," that he finds the type whose method he afterward repeats
+while developing it more richly. This tale is a picture, a scene, ending
+in a tableau; the surrounding stir of life, excitement, and atmosphere
+is first prepared, then the procession comes down the street, and is
+arrested, challenged, and thrown back by the venerable figure of the old
+Puritan who stands alone, like a prophet come back from the dead to
+deliver the people. The composition, the development, the focusing are
+in Scott's manner; it is from him that this dramatic presentation of
+history in a single scene, as here, or by a succession of scenes
+carrying on a story, is derived; partly pictorial, partly theatrical,
+always dramatic, this is the method which Hawthorne applied, the art of
+"The Author of Waverley," who was its great master in English fiction.
+"Endicott and the Red Cross" is a small study of the same sort; and in
+that sketch, and elsewhere, it is noticeable that in bearing and
+language the characters resemble the Covenanters, as Scott fixed the
+type in literature, more than they recall the real New England Puritans.
+Hawthorne's interest in colonial history found its most complete early
+expression in the "Tales of the Province House," in which he for once
+succeeded in grouping a series in a natural and effective way so as to
+make a larger whole. "Sir William Howe's Masquerade" is told by a
+succession of scenes, quite in the manner described, and the suggestion
+of mystery, the supernatural intention felt in the incident though not
+explicitly present in the fact, which in this story attends the last
+descending figure of the line of royal governors, as it also attended
+the figure of the Gray Champion, is also in Scott's manner, though more
+subtly effected. In "Edward Randolph's Portrait" the appearance of the
+picture on the faded canvas is mechanically accounted for, but at the
+moment of its discovery this same supernatural expectancy, as it were,
+is aroused in the beholders; the incident itself recalls the appearance
+of the portrait of old Lord Ravenswood at the marriage ball of "The
+Bride of Lammermoor," though the analogy may very likely never have
+occurred to Hawthorne. "Old Esther Dudley" is hardly more than a
+character portrait,--the memory of the Province House and all it stood
+for preserved in the devotion of the old servant into whose life it had
+passed and whose spirit it occupied like a reliquary of old time. The
+best of these four tales is "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," and it is so
+because in it Hawthorne's genius passed out of the sphere of history and
+touched on that universal moral world where his most original creation
+was to lie. It is necessary here only to observe that in this tale he
+has fully seized the power of the physical object, plainly sensible to
+all as matter of fact, to serve as the medium for moral suggestion often
+difficult to put into words, of that sort whose effect is rather in the
+feelings than in thought; and this, without turning the object into an
+express symbol. The mantle of Lady Eleanore is a garment of pride, and
+also a garment of death in its dread form of pestilence; the story
+continually returns to it, as its physical theme, and the imagination
+fixes upon it by a kind of fascination, as through it the double aspect
+of Lady Eleanore's isolation is sensibly clothed, her haughtiness and
+her contagion, whose fatal bond is in this mantle, which finally seems
+not only to express her life but to rule her tragedy. Here one feels a
+new power, because while Hawthorne still retains the method of narration
+he had adopted, he has enriched it with an art and genius distinctly his
+own. In another tale,--which is provincial if not historical, and which
+was one of his earlier pieces,--"Roger Malvin's Burial," there is also a
+noticeable beginning in his art, for in this he uses undesigned
+coincidence to give that impression of a guided accomplishment of fate,
+which is so dramatically effective to the moral sense. From these few
+instances it will be observed that Hawthorne reached artistic
+consciousness, and a mastery of aim and method, slowly and along no one
+line of development; rather his genius seemingly put forth many
+tendrils, seeking direction and support and growth, and gradually in
+these hundred tales he found himself and his art.
+
+History assisted Hawthorne's imagination in its operation by affording
+that firmness and distinctness of outline which was most needed in his
+work; it gave body to his creations, but in his most characteristic and
+original tales this body was not to be one of external fact, but of
+moral thought. His genius contained a primary element of reflection, of
+meditation on life, of the abstract; and while his imagination might
+take its start and find an initial impulse, an occasion, in some
+concrete object on which it fastened, its course in working itself out
+was governed by this abstract moral intention. In dealing with life
+directly, and not through history, the tales which are at the least
+remove from mere observation are those that were immediately suggested
+by his journeys and embody these experiences in their background if not
+in the whole; such are "The Seven Vagabonds" and the two Shaker
+episodes, "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and "A Shaker Bridal." His
+experiments in the grotesque style, "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and
+"Mrs. Bullfrog," can be left one side, for they never passed the stage
+of amateurish weakness, and led to nothing. His meditation on life
+sometimes centres about an individual, but this is only seeming; his
+real interest was always in collective life or in the atmosphere round
+about all lives. To take a simple case, but one typical of his point of
+view and method, "The Haunted Mind" is a study in the night-atmosphere
+of the human soul, in a certain state, and is rendered with the
+vividness of personal experience. "Fancy's Show-Box" is a more
+individualized variant of the same motive, and yet its substance is the
+frankly abstract question of responsibility for guilt which is not acted
+but only entertained; and as in this tale the story is of the sins that
+hover round the soul waiting to be born, so in "David Swan" the story is
+of the events that might happen to an unsuspecting man, but pass by
+innocuous after merely shadowing his sleep like a threat. To this
+atmosphere of life also belongs the elaborate shadow sketch, "Monsieur
+de Miroir," a motive often treated in literature and here more lightly
+handled than one would have anticipated, and hence more ineffectively,
+for Hawthorne's power did not lie in his playfulness of fancy so much as
+in its darker workings. Hawthorne let his mind brood over these
+possibilities of life, these half-vital acts, thoughts, and beings, like
+fears in an anxious mind, things that have only partial being, but are
+real enough at times to trouble the mind's eye. A touch of this
+atmosphere of unreality is found, also, in such a tale as "Wakefield,"
+the story of the man who disappeared from his place in life though he
+remained in the neighborhood unknown; the main theme is rather the man
+cut off from life, which Hawthorne so often recurred to, but the element
+of life's contingency, the nearness of an event that might happen but
+never does, is what makes the strangeness of this curious study.
+
+In approaching life itself in its individual forms, the slightness of
+Hawthorne's attempt in the earlier pieces is very marked. A good example
+of it is "The Wives of the Dead." Two wives, who suppose their husbands
+have been lost at sea, are told separately at different hours of the
+night, in the house they occupy together, that the lost has been saved;
+each believing the other a widow leaves her to sleep. Here are merely
+two dramatic moments described and opposed, a perfect example of
+likeness in difference on a small scale, done with great truth to
+nature; the sketch is finely wrought, and gains by its intense
+condensation of situation and its brief single mood. Two such moments,
+in his simpler tales, Hawthorne was accustomed to take, and treat by
+opposition; the power lies in the contrast. Such, to give examples, are
+"The White Old Maid," "Edward Fane's Rosebud," and with less
+distinctness, "The Wedding Knell," where the contrast goes back to lost
+youth for effect. In the very artificial fable, which has elements of
+the fairy story in it, "The Three-fold Destiny," there is this simple
+construction, and it is found also in "The Prophetic Pictures," though
+that tale is primarily a study in the idea of fate, a subject seldom
+touched by Hawthorne, the notion of an inevitable destiny foreseen by
+the painter's intuition and forecast on the canvas, but implicit from
+the beginning in character. In all these tales scene, situation, and
+character, as well as the dialogue, are handled with little variation;
+pictorial and dramatic effects are sought, and the slight plot is
+developed, by the means usual to Hawthorne's hand. The allegorizing
+method, it should be observed, though it appears with greater or less
+influence, is not employed with any exclusiveness, but takes its place
+with other resources of his art. In "The Great Carbuncle," however, and
+in "The Man of Adamant," the allegory is predominant and absorbs the
+tale. Perhaps it is as an offshoot of this allegorizing mood that the
+tales of pure fancy should be regarded, those masque-like inventions, "A
+Select Party" and "The Hall of Fantasy," together with "The Intelligence
+Office" and "A Virtuoso's Collection," also remnants of old-fashioned
+ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that
+play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque;
+oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as
+far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive rather than
+sympathetic.
+
+Of collective life, frankly so treated, Hawthorne wrote frequently,--the
+group is an important one. The crowd attracted him by its polarity to
+his own solitude, and it is curious to observe how fond he was of the
+processional in his work. The simple illustration of this sort is "The
+Procession of Life;" here he marshals mankind, as with the power of a
+magician's rod, in hordes. In "The New Adam and Eve" he reviews society
+in its institutions and its garniture of civilization; and the
+conception is a happy device by which to obtain the requisite distance
+and wholeness for a single point of view. "Earth's Holocaust," though
+superficially different, is a variant of the same theme, presenting the
+product of life in masses; its inclusion of the indestructibility of the
+good is noticeable as a philosophical idea such as he rarely introduced
+in an explicit way. The felicitous allegory of "The Celestial Railroad"
+satirizes human nature without bitterness; but, while the universality
+of Bunyan's emblems is strikingly shown by the ease with which they are
+adapted to the new age of steam, the tale is, as it were, music
+transposed; the cleverness is Hawthorne's, but Bunyan wrote the piece.
+These four tales, admirable as they are in breadth, are nevertheless
+essentially reflective. The imaginative group of the same scope is of a
+higher rank. In it the general life is set forth with more
+individuality, though life in the abstract still occupies the
+foreground. To set aside such a moral parable as "The Lily's Quest," or
+such an illustration of the power of love to raise a man above himself
+temporarily as "Drowne's Wooden Image," or such a study of isolation as
+"The Man of Adamant," in all of which the didacticism is rather nakedly
+felt, there are two tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr.
+Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the
+ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the
+guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of
+our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily
+death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and
+so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from
+which we had parted in thought. "The Christmas Banquet" is one of the
+most artistically conceived of all the tales, though its subject repels
+us; the wretchedness of life is shown in the persons of numerous guests
+through a succession of years, with the effect of a multiplicity of
+instances; yet at the end it is found that the worst wretch of all is
+the constant guest with the cold, unfeeling heart,--the climax of misery
+is not to have lived at all. The tale is carefully composed, especially
+in those points of keeping, balance, and contrast in which Hawthorne was
+expert, yet by some misadventure it fails to interpret itself clearly.
+In proportion, however, as imagination enters into these stories under
+the impulse of the artistic faculty, it will be seen that they lend
+themselves less readily to such definite classification as has thus far
+been attempted; the various elements of Hawthorne's genius and art draw
+together and combine, and in the group that remains to be noticed his
+originality is most conspicuous, and this requires a more flexible
+treatment, though without exception these tales fall under the head of
+the general life set forth reflectively in the forms of concrete
+imagination.
+
+Probably in no one point is Hawthorne's peculiarity so obviously marked
+as in the persistency with which he clings to a physical image, vividly
+impressing it upon the mind, like a text which gathers atmosphere and
+discloses significance under the special treatment of the preacher. It
+is said that he had, artistically, the allegorizing temperament, and he
+in fact did use all those forms of imagery--the fable, apologue,
+parable--which belong to this mode of presentation; but in his most
+effective work the allegory is more subtly embodied,--it exists in
+suggestion, and its appeal is as much emotional as didactic. The nucleus
+of this new mystery is the physical object that he seizes upon and in
+which his imagination works as if it were clay, recreating it so that it
+becomes more than pure symbol, as has been illustrated in "Lady
+Eleanore's Mantle;" and sometimes it is almost vitalized into a life of
+its own. This power of such an object to become the medium of thought
+and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually
+discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by
+its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the
+vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in
+his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole,
+might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in
+which he dreaded to dwell altogether.
+
+Such an object is, at all events, a necessity for him in his greater
+work. A crude form of it is the snake, in the tale of "The Bosom
+Serpent," one of those "allegories of the heart" which he apparently
+meant to write in a series of which he never found the key. The idea is
+an old one; the man with a snake in his bosom is a hypochondriac, who by
+centring his thoughts on himself has developed this fancy and is
+tortured by it. The cure is wrought when he forgets himself in returning
+to the love of his wife. The almost physical dismissal of the serpent
+into the fountain, which is neither averred nor denied, like a devil
+cast out as in old times, is puerile; but Hawthorne was, in other tales,
+not averse to a naturalistic explanation of his mysteries, as if a basis
+of matter of fact, however irrelevant essentially, gave more
+plausibility to their truth. If the snake is "egotism," if it is the
+torture of self in a man, if its cure is the loss of self in love, then
+making the snake real and physical is absurdity; medicine and morals are
+confounded; the scientific fact has nothing to do with the artistic
+meaning and is a concession to the gross senses of the reader. The story
+illustrates the method, rather than its successful application; for the
+physical horror is really greater here than the moral revulsion. In "The
+Minister's Black Veil" the object is more happily dealt with. It is to
+be noticed that Hawthorne did not invent these objects, he found them;
+and, in this case, he has used the tradition of an old Puritan minister
+of the past age. He uses the veil to typify man's concealment of himself
+from others, even the nearest; and while it visibly isolates the
+minister among his fellow-men, it finally unites him with them in a
+single lot; for to the mind's eye, educated by this image to a new power
+of seeing, all men wear this veil; humanity is clothed with it in life,
+and moulders away beneath it in the grave, whither its secrets are
+carried. The seeming exception is found to be the rule; the horror
+attaching to the one unseen face is now felt in all faces; the race is
+veiled, and the bit of crape has fallen like the blackness of night upon
+all life, for life has become a thing of darkness, a concealment. Here
+the moral idea is predominant, and in it the symbol issues into its full
+life.
+
+Hawthorne's art became always, not only more vividly symbolized, but
+more deeply moralized. The secrecy of men's bosoms was a matter that
+interested him very much; the idea had a fascination for him. It is the
+substance of the tale of "Young Goodman Brown," who goes to the witches'
+Sabbath in the Essex woods and there sees those who have taught him
+religion, the righteous and the good, men and women, and his own
+wife,--sees them or their devil-brewed phantasms; he calls on heaven,
+and finds himself suddenly alone; but when he returns to the village,
+and looks again on the venerable fathers and mothers of his childhood
+and his own tender and loving wife, he cannot free his mind from the
+doubt,--were they what they seemed or had he indeed beheld them there in
+the woods at their orgy? It is as if for him the veil were lifted, and
+he alone saw, like omniscience, into the bosoms of all. Suspicion,
+arising from his own contact with evil, though he escaped, has imparted
+the look of hypocrisy to all life; this is his bedevilment. Here the
+place of the physical object is taken by the incident of the woods, and
+the moral idea is less clearly stated; the story is one of those whose
+significance is felt to contain mystery which Hawthorne meant to remain
+in its dark state.
+
+In "The Birthmark" the physical object is again found as the initial
+point of the tale and the guiding clue of the imagination in working it
+out. The situation presents the opposition of the love of science to
+human love, but no conflict is described, because the first is the
+master passion from the beginning, and, being indulged, leads to the
+loss of the second in the death of the wife, who perishes in having the
+birthmark removed. The moral idea, as not unfrequently happens, seems to
+flake off from the tale, like the moral of the old fable, and is to the
+effect that imperfection belongs to mortal life, and if it is removed
+wholly mortality must go with it; and the lesson is of the acceptance of
+imperfection in what men love, as a permanent condition, and indeed
+almost as the humanizing feature, of earthly life. It is noticeable that
+the clergyman, the physician, and the artist are the only specific types
+that attracted Hawthorne; he held them all romantically, and science he
+conceived as alchemy. This same predisposition appears in "Rappaccini's
+Daughter;" she was the experiment of her father in creating a live
+poison-woman, a vitalized flower, the Dryad as it were of the
+poison-tree humanized in mortal shape; the physical object is here the
+flowering tree, with its heavy fragrance; and the plot lies only in the
+gradual transformation of the young man by continuous and unconscious
+inoculation until he is drawn into the circle of death to share the
+woman's isolation as a lover, both being shut off from their kind by the
+poison atmosphere that exhales from them; the catastrophe lies in the
+moral idea that for such poison there is no antidote but death, and the
+lady dies in drinking the draught that should free her. The fact that
+Hawthorne, when writing the story, said he did not know how it would
+end, is interesting as indicating that his literary habit was to let the
+story tell itself from within according to its impulses, and not to
+shape it from without by his own predetermined purpose; a pure
+allegorist, it may be observed, would have followed naturally the latter
+method. This may account for the indefiniteness and mystery of effect
+often felt, as well as for the inartistic didacticism in the concluding
+sentences, frequently to be observed, where it appears as one or more
+afterthoughts possibly to be drawn from the story, but not exhausting
+its moral significance. In this case, powerful as the tale is, the moral
+intention is left vague, though except as a parable the invention is
+meaningless.
+
+In the last story to be instanced, "The Artist of the Beautiful," the
+lucidity of the parable is complete. The physical object is the
+butterfly; on its wings the tale moves, and perishes in its destruction.
+The moral idea lies in the exposition of achievement as a freeing of the
+artist's soul so that his work has become a thing of indifference to
+him, let its fortunes be what they will,--it is the dead chrysalis from
+which he has escaped; and the isolation of the artist's life is set
+forth pathetically but with no suggestion of evil in it, for though the
+world has rejected him he lives in his own world in the calm of victory.
+No tale is so delicately wrought as this; in it the symbolism, which is
+carried out in minute and precise detail, the moral significance, which
+is as clear as it is deep, and the presence of a spiritual world in life
+for which a visible language is found, are all present, in harmonious
+blending; and it has the added and rare charm of happiness without loss
+of truth. It is unique; and if one were to choose a single tale, best
+representing Hawthorne's powers, methods, and successes, technically and
+temperamentally as well as in imaginative reach and spiritual appeal, it
+is by this he should be known.
+
+In these six tales in which Hawthorne's originality is most
+characteristically expressed, the idea of isolation is common to all;
+like the secrecy of men's bosoms, this solitude in life is a fixed idea
+in his imagination, an integral part of life as it was viewed by him,
+and he seldom freed his attention from it even temporarily. On the other
+hand, sin, conscience, evil, though their realm is felt to be a
+neighboring province, are not here directly dealt with. His probings in
+that sphere belong to a later time. These tales, like the others, are
+studies of life, not of the evil principle by itself as a thing of
+special interest; they view life as lying under a shadow, it is true,
+but this shadow is their atmosphere, not their world. The point should
+be defined, perhaps more explicitly: the Calvinism of New England, its
+interest in the perversion of man's will, his sinful state, and the
+mysterious modes of salvation, is not the region of Hawthorne's
+imagination, as here disclosed. It is enough to note this, here, as
+bearing on his representative character. The most surprising thing,
+however, is that his genius is found to be so purely objective; he
+himself emphasized the objectivity of his art. From the beginning, as
+has been said, he had no message, no inspiration welling up within him,
+no inward life of his own that sought expression. He was not even
+introspective. He was primarily a moralist, an observer of life, which
+he saw as a thing of the outside, and he was keen in observation, cool,
+interested. If there was any mystery in his tales, it was in the object,
+not in the author's breast; he makes no confessions either direct or
+indirect,--he describes the thing he sees. He maintained that his tales
+were perfectly intelligible, and he meant this to apply not only to
+style but to theme. It is best to cite his own testimony. His personal
+temper is indicated in the fragmentary phrase in the "Note-Books;" "not
+that I have any love of mystery, but because I abhor it," he writes; and
+again in the oft-quoted passage, he describes perfectly the way in which
+his nature cooperated with his art to give the common ground of human
+sympathy, but without anything peculiar to himself being called into
+play:--
+
+"A cloudy veil stretches over 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 is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given
+the objectivity to my writings; and when people think that I am pouring
+myself out in a tale or an essay, I am merely telling what is common to
+human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them,
+not they with me."
+
+In the preface to "Twice-Told Tales," which however was prefixed to a
+late edition and may be fairly held to cover his view of his tales in
+general, he directs attention to their objectivity in another form:--
+
+"The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound; but it
+is rather more remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design
+on the writer's part to make them so. They have none of the abstruseness
+of idea or obscurity of expression which mark the written communications
+of a solitary mind with itself. They never need translation. It is, in
+fact, the style of a man of society. Every sentence, so far as it
+embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody
+who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book
+in a proper mood."
+
+A little further on he adds his statement of what the sketches both are
+and are not:--
+
+"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."
+
+To Hawthorne himself these tales seemed so external; and his analysis,
+however much may be allowed for modesty in the statement, appears to be
+true.
+
+Hawthorne left himself out of his work, so far as a man can. Indeed, his
+own life was neither vigorous nor one of much variety of faculty,
+outside of his art. He had the indolence of the meditative habit, or of
+the artistic nature, if one chooses to call it so. He clearly spent a
+great deal of time doing nothing in particular; he read, observed the
+world of the passing seasons, made long memoranda of nature and human
+nature and short notes of ideas for tales and sketches, and had in fact
+large leisure, except in the years when he was in the Boston Custom
+House, and he was not without leisure even then. He shows no inclination
+toward scholarship, but was a desultory reader of English, with some
+French; he had no intellectual interests, apparently, of a philosophical
+kind; the aloofness in which he stood from Longfellow and Emerson, for
+example, was not shyness of nature wholly, but stood for the real
+aloofness of his mind from their ways of life, from the things that
+absorbed them in their poetic and speculative activity; it is but
+another example, if it is added that he took no interest in public
+affairs, truly speaking. He was a Democrat, but that does not fully
+account for his indifference to those philanthropies which his literary
+friends shared; for, as a party man, he was not zealous. His nature was
+torpid in all these ways; there was dullness of temperament,
+indifference to all except the one thing in which he truly lived, his
+artistic nature; and here he was an observer, using an objective method
+with as little indebtedness to personal experience as ever artist had.
+His reserve amounted to suppression; and, in fact, his personal life was
+not of the sort that must find a voice. He seemed to feel that the
+"Twice-Told Tales," at least, which he described as "memorials of
+tranquil and not unhappy years," had contracted some faintness of life
+from their author's mind, as if a low vital tone characterized them,
+owing to his incapacity to yield himself with fullness of power even to
+this reflective or creative art:--
+
+"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a
+shade,--the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself
+through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion
+there is sentiment; and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual
+life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments
+of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a
+shiver. Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the
+Author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can
+hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humor; the tenderest woman, one
+would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. The
+book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear,
+brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the
+sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages."
+
+This is, of course, the natural overstatement of an author whose work
+has gone from him and seems less vital because he has outlived it; but
+nevertheless it contains sound judgment as to the limitations of his
+art.
+
+But notwithstanding Hawthorne's objectivity and reserve, of which he
+justly makes so much, and the low vital tone of his work, resulting from
+whatever cause, he did not altogether escape from himself in his art;
+his shadow followed him into that world. The "clear brown twilight
+atmosphere" of which he speaks was an affair of temperament; it exhaled
+from his personality. That recurring idea of isolation, the sense of the
+secrecy of men's bosoms, the perception of life as always lying in the
+shadow that falls on it, proceeded from predilections of his own,
+differentiating him from other men; there may have been no very perilous
+stuff in his breast, nothing to confess or record peculiar to himself in
+act or experience, no intensity of self-life, but there was this
+temperament of the solitary brooder upon life. In that common fund of
+human nature which he said was the basis of sympathy between himself and
+the world, there was also some specialization, which is rightly ascribed
+to his race qualities. He took practically no interest in life except as
+seen under its moral aspects as a life of the soul; and this absorption
+in the moral sphere was due to his being a child of New England. It was
+his inheritance from Puritanism. What distinguished Puritan life and the
+people who grew up under its influences was an intense self-
+consciousness of life in the soul,--in a word, spirituality of life;
+and Hawthorne, as he came to find himself in his growth, disclosed
+one form of this spirituality both reflectively and imaginatively in his
+writings, the form that lived in him. The moral world, the supremacy of
+the soul's interests, how life fared in the soul, was his region; he
+thought about nothing else. He desired to present what he saw through
+the medium of romantic art, but he was never able to be wholly content
+with this medium; he desired to make assurance doubly sure by expressing
+it in its abstract moral terms also, either explicitly in an idea which
+shows through the story, or else imperfectly in an allegory or symbol
+where the moral element should be definitely felt in its intellectual,
+its unartistic form. The fact that this abstract element really
+outvalues the tale and its characters is shown, for example, by the lack
+of interest one feels in the future of his characters, in what becomes
+of them at the end of the story; they are lost from the mind, because
+their function is fulfilled in illustrating an idea; and, that once
+conveyed, the characters cease to have life,--they disappear, like the
+man of science or the artist of the beautiful, into the background of
+the general world; they fade out. It is by this abstract moral element
+that Hawthorne's art is universalized.
+
+His manner, it must be acknowledged, retains provinciality; in the best
+of the tales, just as in those sketches of observation in Salem, there
+is something countrified in the mode of handling, something archaic and
+stiff in the literary mould, something awkward, cramped, and bare in the
+way his art works in its main motions, however felicitous in word and
+fall is the garment of prose as language. There is a lack of urban ease,
+certainty, and perfection of manner. The limitation, however, stops
+there. The world in which the artist works is the universal world of
+man's nature, just as much as is Shakespeare's. He escapes from
+provincialism here, in the substance, because he was a New Englander,
+not in spite of that fact; for the spirituality which is the central
+fact of New England life itself escapes from provincialism, being a pure
+expression of that Christianity in which alone true cosmopolitanism is
+found, of that faith which presents mankind as one and indivisible.
+Hence arises in Hawthorne a second distinctly Puritan trait, his
+democracy. He looks only at the soul; all outward distinctions of rank
+and place, fortune, pride, poverty, disappear as unconcerning things; he
+sees all men as in the light of the judgment day. He does this
+naturally, too, almost without knowing it, so inbred in him is that
+preconception of the Christian soul, whose moral fortune constitutes
+alone the significance of life. In these ways the race element, the New
+England element, is shown; from it springs the moral prepossession of
+his art, its universal quality, and its democratic substance. This was
+the nucleus of inheritance and breeding, which together with his
+temperament governs his art from within, even amid all its personal
+reserve and its objectivity. The gradually increasing power of these
+elements gave his tales greater intensity and reach, and was to lift his
+romances to another level; for what was inchoate and experimental in the
+tales, in many ways, was to receive a new and greater development in his
+later work, on which his world-wide fame rests. The tales had not
+brought him fame; as yet, his audience was small, and confined to New
+England. He had advanced so far as to seem like one talking to his
+friends, instead of, as at first, one talking to himself in a dark
+place, as he said; but recognition, such as he desired, he had not
+obtained. There is certainly some irritation in his repeated references
+to the early neglect he felt from the public, at the time when, as he
+says, he "was for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in
+America." He thought this lack of appreciation palsied his efforts, so
+that he did not do what he might have done, and it may have been the
+case; but before the days when he wrote "The Artist of the Beautiful" he
+must have learned that one must serve the Muses for themselves alone.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+THE SCARLET LETTER.
+
+
+Amid the hard conditions of his life at Concord Hawthorne had decided to
+place himself again under the aegis of his political friends to earn his
+living as a public officer. He had no confidence in his literary
+capacity as a means of livelihood. He found himself, he says, unable to
+write more than a third of the time, and he composed slowly and with
+difficulty; he refers more than once to that hatred of the pen which
+belongs to a tired writer, and he was frequently indisposed to
+composition for long periods; and, in any event, he thought that what he
+wrote must appeal necessarily to so small an audience that, should he
+continue to devote himself exclusively to a literary career, he must do
+so as a professional hack-writer of children's books, translations,
+newspaper essays, and such miscellaneous drudgery. His habits, formed in
+his years at Salem, included an element of large leisure, an indulgence
+of one's self in times and seasons of mental activity, a certain
+lethargy of life; and he had not shown any power of sustained production
+in the monotony of daily work for bread. He felt a dread of such
+necessity. "God keep me," he writes to Hillard before this time, "from
+ever being really a writer for bread!" The only alternative for him was
+office-holding.
+
+The election of Polk to the Presidency gave his friends the opening, and
+the campaign to secure an appointment was begun. Bridge, then living in
+bachelor quarters at Portsmouth Navy Yard, conceived the rather daring
+idea of a sailor house-party with Hawthorne as its centre, for the
+purpose of making him acquainted with the political group in whose hands
+influence lay; and, if it be remembered that the Hawthornes had not
+spent an evening out for years, and still continued their seclusive
+life, the proposition may well seem a bold stroke. The party, however,
+gathered in the summer of 1845; Franklin Pierce and his wife, Senator
+Atherton and his wife, of New Hampshire, and Senator Fairfield of Maine,
+to mention the notables, were the principal guests, and there were
+several others, making a greater company than Hawthorne had been thrown
+with since he lodged at Brook Farm. It was an informal naval picnic,
+apparently, of two or three weeks, and Bridge thought that its main
+object of popularizing Hawthorne with the Senators was attained. The
+point of attack was the Salem Post Office, but this proved
+impracticable, and attention was turned to the Custom House, where
+either the surveyorship or the naval office might be got. Meanwhile
+Bancroft offered him a clerkship in the Charlestown Navy Yard, which he
+declined. He was sufficiently sure of success to make him remove from
+Concord to Salem to reside, and early in October he was established
+again in the old chamber of his youth, having decided to share his
+mother's house for the present. He spent his time in writing the
+introductory sketch of the Old Manse, and in seeing the "Mosses" through
+the press. The appointment lagged, owing to local complications in the
+party, but an arrangement was finally made which was agreeable to all
+concerned, so that Hawthorne took office without enmity from
+disappointed candidates who would have benefited if he had not appeared
+upon the scene backed by what must have been locally regarded as outside
+interference. He received notice of his nomination as surveyor on March
+23, 1846, and it was described "as decidedly popular with the party," as
+well as with men of letters and the community; he soon took charge of
+the office, those who had made way for him were appointed inspectors
+under him, and he entered on the enjoyment of a salary of twelve hundred
+dollars.
+
+It was indeed a singular chance of life that had transformed the recluse
+romancer of the silent Herbert Street house, where for all the years of
+early manhood he had lived unnoticed and almost unknown, into the high
+business official of the Custom House, the lofty neighbor of that humble
+dwelling, on whose wide granite steps, columned portico, and emblematic
+eagle, with the flag over all, he must have looked so often with never a
+thought that there was to be his distinguished place in the world of
+men; and yet Hawthorne, on coming into this office, seems to have been
+pleased with a sense of making a part of Salem as his ancestors had done
+in the old days. He did not love Salem, but genuine truth gives body to
+those passages of autobiography in which he claims his parentage and
+kinship and seems writing the obituary of his race there, in connection
+with his memories of the Custom House. He knew himself a story-teller
+whom these ancestors would little approve, for all his mask as the
+surveyor, but in his official place he felt himself a Salemite with some
+peculiar thoroughness; and, familiar as the passage is, no other words
+can take the place of his own expression of this sense of rootedness in
+the soil, which is so close to the secret of his genius:--
+
+"This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away
+from it, both in boyhood and 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 its 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 checkerboard. And yet, though invariably
+happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which,
+in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The
+sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my
+family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a
+quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name,
+made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which
+has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and
+died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no
+small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame
+wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore,
+the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust
+for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent
+transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it
+desirable to know.
+
+"But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. 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 trode
+the unworn street with such a stately port, and made 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 record of his better deeds,
+although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting
+spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches,
+that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So
+deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street
+burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly
+to dust!... Let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their
+nature have intertwined themselves with mine.
+
+"Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these
+two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here,--
+always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced
+by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand,
+after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so
+much as putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have
+sunk almost out of sight, as old houses, here and there about the
+streets, get covered halfway to the eaves by the accumulation of new
+soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
+sea; a gray-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. This long
+connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial,
+creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite
+independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that
+surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came
+himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has
+little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the
+oysterlike tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third
+century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations
+have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him;
+that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead
+level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the dullest 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. So has it been
+in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that
+the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been
+familiar here--ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his
+grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
+street--might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old
+town.... On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
+indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill
+a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better,
+have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me."
+
+Long as this extract is, it dispenses with pages of critical analysis,
+and the hundred details requisite to build up such an impression of
+ancestry from the soil, of the way in which the New England past had
+entered into the fibre of Hawthorne's nature, of the sort of historic
+consciousness that was latent, like clairvoyance, in his imagination.
+Here, too, it serves to give Hawthorne a natural right in his new public
+place in the community. He did not feel himself a stranger there; the
+floor of the Custom House was as much home to his feet as a ship's deck.
+He made, it is said, a good surveyor, as in Boston previously he had
+been an excellent under officer. His duties were not arduous; they
+consumed about three hours and a half of his day, leaving him ample
+leisure. He has himself made of his stay at the Custom House a half
+humorous story by drawing the characters of his associates and setting
+forth the general atmosphere of the place with such lifelike drollery as
+only genius can achieve. He does it with no kindly hand. He was capable
+of great irritation, at times; and, as was shown on rare occasions, he
+had outbursts of anger. Dr. Loring describes him as "tempestuous and
+irresistible when aroused," and tells the anecdote of one dismayed
+captain who "fled up the wharf and took refuge in the office, inquiring,
+'What in God's name have you sent on board my ship as an inspector?'" In
+writing of his old associates satirically, he was not indulging in any
+rage of anger, but he would hardly have felt the impulse to give his pen
+such liberty unless grievances had still rankled in his memory. The
+scene he sets forth is one of burlesque, done like fiction. "On
+ascending the steps you would discern," he says, "a row of venerable
+figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their
+hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but
+occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech
+and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the
+occupants of almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for
+subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else but their
+own independent exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew, at
+the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like
+him, for apostolic errands--were Custom House officers." When he comes
+to the details, in this style, the portrait approaches--if it does not
+realize--caricature. There was another side, we may be sure, to the
+lives and characters of these men whom Hawthorne has portrayed as if
+human nature existed to be the pigment of an artist's brush and should
+laugh or weep, look silly or solemn, at the whim of his temperament and
+will. All the time he got on with them very amiably, and if he found
+some of them in his own silent thoughts rather foolish and superfluous,
+doubtless it would have been the same in any other group among whom his
+lot might have been thrown. With others of his associates, whatever he
+thought of them and their ways, he was friendly and tolerant, if not
+sociable; it was in connection with these that the gossip circulated of
+his "loafing about with hard drinkers." Dr. Loring describes them to the
+life as "a group of men all of whom had remarkable characteristics, not
+of the best many times, but original, strong, highly-flavored, defiant
+democrats, with whom he was officially connected, who made no appeal to
+him, but responded to the uncultivated side of his nature, and to whose
+defects he was blind on account of their originality." This picture must
+be added to that which Hawthorne gave, and between the two, if some
+allowance, also, be made for the unfavorable temper in which he wrote,
+it will appear, perhaps, that in the Custom House he found human nature
+about as it is always in an office having to do with sea business, in
+which naturally a rough, racy, unpolished, original, sturdy stock took a
+leading part, and a place was found for the retired old hulks of the
+profession to enjoy a comfortable anchorage.
+
+Hawthorne, in fact, repeated in the Custom House the experience he had
+formerly had on the Boston wharf and at Brook Farm. At first, the change
+was a pleasure and a relief to him. He had once more escaped, if not
+from the dreamland of his own solitary fancy, at least from the
+unreality which the literary life seems always to have had for him, and
+which he now associated particularly with the character of his
+friendships. The tone of relief is unmistakable:--
+
+"After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy
+brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile
+influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on
+the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
+fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
+pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing
+fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture;
+after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's
+hearth-stone,--it was time, at length, that I should exercise other
+faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had
+hitherto had little appetite. Even the old inspector was desirable, as a
+change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an
+evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
+lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
+associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether
+different qualities, and never murmur at the change."
+
+So he mixed in the new scene, laughed with the others at the old
+sea-yarns and jokes, joined in with his associates on more even terms
+than was his habit with the literary friends of Concord, and was once
+more a part of this material world. But it was not long before the old
+disgust and restlessness came over him; he felt his imaginative nature
+deadened; this after all was not his own life, and the figures that
+moved in it, the business they were concerned with, the existence they
+led round about him took on the same shabby color of fact that had
+formerly spread over the coal and salt of the wharf, and the manure of
+Brook Farm; and that feeling of repulsion from it all, which came to
+involve also a half-contempt for the people and their affairs, grew in
+him. He describes the torpor that fell upon his faculties; he ceased to
+write, just as in the earlier time; he could not create, and though he
+had time enough, and the sea and the woods and the winter moonlight were
+all there, they did not unlock his magical power as of old. He laments
+over it, but confesses it; he had temporarily ceased to be a man of
+letters.
+
+Domestic affairs contributed to withhold him from his pen. The old
+Herbert Street house had proved an inconvenient domicile for the two
+families, and they had removed to a dwelling in Chestnut Street. For a
+while Mrs. Hawthorne had been absent in Boston, and there a boy, Julian,
+had been born, so that there were two children in the nursery. It was in
+this room that Hawthorne spent his afternoons, for he had no study, and
+there for a year his desk stood, says his wife, without having been once
+opened. They moved again to another house, more easily adapted to the
+needs of both households, in Mall Street, and here Hawthorne again had a
+study "high from all noise," and Madame Hawthorne was provided for with
+a suite wholly separate. She and her two daughters still maintained the
+lifelong habit of isolation. "Elizabeth," says Mrs. Hawthorne, "is an
+invisible entity. I have seen her but once in two years; and Louisa
+never intrudes;" and she adds her satisfaction in knowing that Madame
+Hawthorne would have the pleasure of her son's and the children's
+company for the rest of her life. "I am so glad to win her out of that
+Castle Dismal, and from the mysterious chamber into which no mortal ever
+peeped till Una was born, and Julian,--for they alone have entered the
+_penetralia_. Into that chamber the sun never shines. Into these
+rooms in Mall Street it blazes without stint." Mrs. Hawthorne was very
+happy in this life with her husband, though they were still retired in
+their habits. He had, however, become an officer of the Lyceum, and they
+attended the lectures. They went out very seldom, only on such an
+occasion as when Emerson was visiting a neighbor, for example. The
+happiness was all indoors and in their hearts. "No art nor beauty," the
+wife writes, "can excel my daily life, with such a husband and such
+children, the exponents of all art and beauty. I really have not even
+the temptation to go out of my house to find anything better." The
+husband expresses the same felicity, in his turn, repeatedly, as on one
+occasion during a visit of Mrs. Hawthorne in Boston. "Oh, Phoebe," he
+writes to her, "I want thee much. Thou art the only person in the world
+that ever was necessary to me. Other people have occasionally been more
+or less agreeable; but I think I was always more at ease alone than in
+anybody's company, till I knew thee. And now I am only myself when thou
+art within my reach. Thou art an unspeakably beloved woman."
+
+They still spent their evenings together, mostly in reading. He never
+wrote at night, and for a year and a half seems not to have written at
+all, except some slight unremembered article, it might be, for a Salem
+newspaper. In November, 1847, he began to compose regularly every
+afternoon. In the year following he produced "The Snow Image," "The
+Great Stone Face," "Main Street," and possibly "Ethan Brand," but these,
+with the exception of the third, which appeared in Elizabeth Peabody's
+"Aesthetic Papers," 1849, remained unpublished. He had exhausted himself
+as a writer of short tales and sketches; the kind no longer appealed to
+him, and he wrote with much difficulty and against the grain. "At
+length," he writes in a letter of literary business, December 14, 1848,
+"by main strength I have wrenched and torn an idea out of my miserable
+brain; or rather, the fragment of an idea, like a tooth ill-drawn, and
+leaving the roots to torture me." His imagination had, in fact, begun to
+work upon a larger scale and in a higher world of art, though he
+apparently did not know the change in scope that he was undergoing, and
+thought of his new story only as a longer tale; the idea of "The Scarlet
+Letter," after lying for some years in his brain, was unfolding in the
+form of a great romance. It was to be his resource when the Custom House
+failed.
+
+It was on June 8, 1849, that the news of his dismissal from office came.
+Tyler's Whig administration had come in, and Democratic heads would
+naturally fall; but Hawthorne, having obtained office, as he conceived
+it, as a literary man provided for by government, had not expected to be
+turned out on the change of parties, especially as he was not a partisan
+or in fact a politician at all. He resented the action, even when it was
+only threatened, as unjust, and took some steps to secure himself in
+place by suggesting an appeal to men in Boston, among whom he mentions
+Rufus Choate, "whose favorable influence," he says, "would make it
+impossible to remove me, and whose support and sympathy might fairly be
+obtained on my behalf,--not on the ground that I am a very good writer,
+but because I gained my position, such as it is, by my literary
+character, and have done nothing to forfeit that tenure." When he found,
+however, that he had been removed, ostensibly at least, on the ground of
+a paper forwarded from Salem and charging him with political
+partisanship, both as a writer for the newspaper press and in his
+official capacity, his resentment became a much warmer feeling. The
+story of a removal from office is usually unedifying, and there is no
+occasion to go into all the details. It appears that one man, Charles W.
+Upham, was especially singled out by Hawthorne as the principal mover,
+and on him he deliberately avenged himself at a later time. The charges
+Hawthorne met very fully and specifically, and showed that he had indeed
+rather incurred the reproach of his party for not taking a partisan
+course than deserved the criticism of his enemies. He was, however, very
+angry; his wife writes to her father, "The lion was roused in him;" and
+the numerous letters to his friends show that he was much disturbed, but
+much more by what he regarded as the attack made secretly upon his
+character than by the loss of the office. There was a small tempest in
+the town, in which his friends male and female bore their part, and
+plans of one kind and another were discussed to secure his retention;
+but, as usually happens in such cases, the affair soon blew over. In a
+political scuffle, Hawthorne was a man out of his element.
+
+The most unfortunate thing in the whole incident was the effect it had
+on Hawthorne's attachment to his native place. It turned his cold love
+to a bitter feeling that he never overcame; and it also threw upon Salem
+the reproach of having injured as well as neglected her most famous son.
+Citizens of both parties joined in the movement by which he was ousted,
+and no one of influence withstood them; but there was probably no enmity
+in the matter, and the simple explanation, perhaps, was that the new
+candidate had more cordial friends in the community on both sides, for
+Hawthorne was not personally popular with the merchants as a class. He
+kept them at a distance just as he did men of letters, and could not mix
+with them on even and frank terms. Dr. Loring, in discussing the subject
+of Hawthorne's treatment by his fellow townsmen, very justly says that
+"Salem did not treat its illustrious son, at all, because he gave it no
+opportunity." He was, so far as then appeared, an author, forty-five
+years old, who had written two or three books of short tales and
+sketches, not yet famous, and he held a not very lucrative public
+office, which he had secured, not in the usual way, by party service,
+but by the political influence of his old college mates, who were
+strangers to the town. He was inoffensive, but he was not liked, and
+took no pains to make himself one of the community; he was ignored by
+the citizens of the place because he ignored them, and when his
+Washington friends lost power, there was no one else interested in
+keeping him in office, and he had no influence of his own on the spot.
+In private life he was uncommonly solitary, and he was in no sense a
+public man. What happened was perfectly natural, and might fairly have
+been foreseen; for the notion of providing a government post for a man
+because he was an author, and retaining him in it by a literary tenure,
+must have seemed very novel to the gentlemen of the Essex district in
+those days, as it would seem now. But Hawthorne had the sense of
+superiority, the silent, suppressed pride, the susceptibility of a
+solitary nature; and whatever might be the public side of the matter, of
+which he was no very good judge, privately he felt aggrieved and
+outraged; that irritability toward the general public which has already
+been remarked upon, just because he was "for some years the most obscure
+man of letters in America," was condensed, as it were, and discharged
+upon Salem, which stood as the deaf and blind and hateful embodiment of
+the unappreciative world that would have none of him, but rather took
+away the little bread and salt he had contrived to earn for himself, and
+would not give him room even in a paltry office among the old sea-dogs
+he has described. "I mean as soon as possible," he writes two months
+later, "to bid farewell forever to this abominable city."
+
+Apart from the disagreeable circumstances of his removal and the
+penniless condition in which it left him, there is no reason to think
+that Hawthorne was anything but happy to leave office. His first thought
+was of his poverty; before he had laid down the telegram he heard the
+wolf at the door. He at once wrote the news to Hillard, and after saying
+that he had paid his old debts but had saved nothing, requests his
+friendly aid in words through which, brief and straight as they are, one
+feels the stern grip of the fact as it immediately took hold on him, the
+poor man's need:--
+
+"If you could do anything in the way of procuring me some stated
+literary employment, in connection with a newspaper, or as corrector of
+the press to some printing establishment, etc., it could not come at a
+better time. Perhaps Epes Sargent, who is a friend of mine, would know
+of something. I shall not stand upon my dignity; that must take care of
+itself. Perhaps there may be some subordinate office connected with the
+Boston Athenaeum. Do not think anything too humble to be mentioned to
+me.... The intelligence has just reached me, and Sophia has not yet
+heard it. She will bear it like a woman,--that is to say, better than a
+man."
+
+He went home at once to tell his wife, and as his son tells the story,
+on his meeting her expression of pleasure at seeing him so soon with the
+remark that "he had left his head behind him," she exclaimed, "Oh, then
+you can write your book!" and when he smiled and answered that it "would
+be agreeable to know where their bread and rice were to come from while
+the story was writing," she brought forth from a hiding-place "a pile of
+gold"--it appears to have been one hundred and fifty dollars--that she
+had saved from the household weekly expenses. So for the time being
+anxiety was lessened.
+
+The fact that Hawthorne was glad at heart to be free again comes out in
+many ways. Something may be due to his wife's bearing the news "better
+than a man," perhaps, but on the same day it came she is found writing
+to her mother, "I have not seen my husband happier than since this
+turning out. He has felt in chains for a long time, and being a man he
+is not alarmed at being set on his own feet again,--or on his
+_head_ I might say, for that contains the available gold of a mine
+scarcely yet worked at all." He himself, a few days later, writes to
+Hillard, "I have come to feel that it is not good for me to be here. I
+am in a lower moral state than I have been--a duller intellectual one.
+So let me go; and, under God's providence, I shall arrive at something
+better." It would not be long before he would be looking back to the
+last three years, and saying, "The life of the Custom House lies like a
+dream behind me," in almost the identical words that he used of Boston
+wharfs and the Brook Farmers. The pendulum of temperament had swung
+again to the other extreme, and he was now all for the imaginative world
+once more.
+
+There was, however, to be one sad experience before his new life began.
+In the midst of these troubles, while he was still writing his vain
+letters and receiving the vain sympathy of his friends in the injury he
+had felt, his mother fell into serious illness, and it was plain that
+the end of her long vigil was near. With that strange impulse which led
+Hawthorne, out of his sensitive reserve and almost morbid seclusion, to
+make an open book of his private life, writing it all at large in his
+journals, he spent the hours of her last days in describing the scenes
+and incidents of the house in its shadow of death. His wife had the main
+care of the invalid, and to him was left the charge of the children, Una
+and Julian, who played in the yard in the warm July weather and were
+seized with the singular fancy of acting over in their play the scenes
+of the sick chamber above, while their father watched them from the
+window of his room and wrote down their prattle. Hawthorne was attached
+to his mother, and had been a good son, but there was something now that
+startled his nature, perhaps in the unusual nearness in which he found
+himself to her life, and he was hardly prepared for the distress of the
+circumstances. His wife wrote, "My husband came near a brain fever after
+seeing her for an hour;" and the hour is the one which Hawthorne himself
+recorded, in a passage vividly recalling the tone and character of those
+scenes in which Carlyle painted the darker moments of his own
+shadow-haunted life:--
+
+"About five o'clock I went to my mother's chamber, and was shocked to
+see such an alteration since my last visit. I love my mother; but there
+has been, ever since boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between
+us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings if they
+are not managed rightly. I did not expect to be much moved at the
+time,--that is to say, not to feel any overpowering emotion struggling
+just then,--though I knew that I should deeply remember and regret her.
+Mrs. Dike was in the chamber; Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed,
+but I was moved to kneel down close by my mother, and take her hand. She
+knew me, but could only murmur a few indistinct words; among which I
+understood an injunction to take care of my sisters. Mrs. Dike left the
+chamber, and then I found the tears slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried
+to keep them down, but it would not be; I kept filling up, till, for a
+few moments, I shook with sobs. For a long time I knelt there, holding
+her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived. Afterwards I
+stood by the open window and looked through the crevice of the curtain.
+The shouts, laughter, and cries of the two children had come up into the
+chamber from the open air, making a strange contrast with the death-bed
+scene. And now, through the crevice of the curtain, I saw my little Una
+of the golden locks, looking very beautiful, and so full of spirit and
+life that she was life itself. And then I looked at my poor dying
+mother, and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing
+in the dusty midst of it."
+
+The next day the children continued the play--they have never left it
+off--of their grandmother's death-bed, and Hawthorne writes it all down
+in his journal with minute realism. His genius felt some appeal in it
+that let him go on unchecked in the transcript of baby-life mocking
+death in all innocence and unwitting:--
+
+"Now Una is transformed into grandmamma, and Julian is mamma taking care
+of her. She groans, and speaks with difficulty, and moves herself feebly
+and wearisomely; then lies perfectly still, as if in an insensible
+state; then rouses herself and calls for wine; then lies down on her
+back with clasped hands; then puts them to her head. It recalls the
+scene of yesterday to me with frightful distinctness; and out of the
+midst of it little Una looks at me with a smile of glee. Again, Julian
+assumes the character. 'You're dying now,' says Una; 'so you must lie
+still,'"--and so the journal goes on through the slow quarter-hours,
+till it stops when Madame Hawthorne's heart ceased to beat.
+
+The death of his mother removed the last and only reason for Hawthorne's
+continuing to reside in Salem, but he remained there through the summer
+and winter. He was hard at work on "The Scarlet Letter," perhaps being
+more absorbed in it than he ever was in any other of his compositions.
+It was a time of much trouble in every way. There was sickness in the
+family, he was himself afflicted with pain, and his wife's sister
+Elizabeth Peabody seems to have come to the rescue of domestic comfort
+for the household. O'Sullivan, the kind-hearted editor of the defunct
+"Democratic Review," bethought himself of his old debt to Hawthorne and
+sent him a hundred dollars; so the purse was replenished. It was in
+early winter that the cheerful personality of James T. Fields, the
+publisher, appeared on the scene, and it was a fortunate hour for
+Hawthorne that brought such an appreciative, enthusiastic, and faithful
+friend to his door. Fields was just the man to warm Hawthorne's genius
+into action,--cordial, whole-souled, and happily not so much a man of
+letters as to repel him with that alienation which he certainly felt in
+his contact with authors by profession like Emerson and his other
+contemporaries. Fields was, too, in a very real sense, the messenger and
+herald of fame standing at last in the humble doorway of the Mall Street
+house that had latterly been the scene of such a tangle of human events.
+The anecdote of what he found there is finely told in his own words:--
+
+"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. 'Now,' said I, 'is the time for you to
+publish, for I know during these years in Salem you must have got
+something ready for the press.' 'Nonsense,' said he, 'what heart had I
+to write anything, when my publishers have been so many years trying to
+sell a small edition of the "Twice-Told Tales"?' I still pressed upon
+him the good chances he would have now with something new. 'Who would
+risk publishing a book for _me_, the most unpopular writer in
+America?' 'I would,' said I, 'and would start with an edition of two
+thousand copies of anything you write.' 'What madness!' he exclaimed;
+'Your friendship for me gets the better of your judgment. No, no,' he
+continued; 'I have no money to indemnify a publisher's losses on my
+account.' I looked at my watch, and found that the train would soon be
+starting for Boston, and I knew there was not much time to lose in
+trying to discover what had been his literary work during these last few
+years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me what he
+had been writing. He shook his head, and gave me to understand that he
+had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a bureau or set
+of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it occurred to me
+that hidden away somewhere in that article of furniture was a story or
+stories by the author of the 'Twice-Told Tales,' and I became so
+positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed
+surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my
+leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would come
+back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the stairs
+when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment.
+Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript in his
+hands, he said: 'How, in Heaven's name, did you know this thing was
+there? As you found me out, take what I have written, and tell me, after
+you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is
+either very good or very bad,--I don't know which.' On my way up to
+Boston I read the germ of 'The Scarlet Letter.'"
+
+The romance that was thus captured was not yet in the form which it
+finally took. Hawthorne had conceived it as a rather longer tale of the
+same sort that he had previously written, and designed to make it one
+story in a new collection such as his former volumes had been. He
+thought it was too gloomy to stand alone, and in fact did not suspect
+that here was a new kind of work, such that it would put an end forever
+to his old manner of writing. He intended to call the new volume
+"Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal,"--a
+title that is fairly ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his
+genius, pale, abstract, ineffectual, with oblivion lurking in every
+syllable. Fields knew better than that. But he gave him something more
+than advice; he cheered him with his extravagant appreciation, as it
+seemed to Hawthorne, and invigorated him by a true sympathy with his
+success. Fields urged that the story be elaborated, filled out, and made
+into a single volume; and, under this wise suggestion, Hawthorne went to
+work upon it with renewed interest and with something probably of the
+power of a new ambition.
+
+His friends, too, had come to his aid with material assistance, and
+apart from the fact that he was thus enabled to go on with the labor of
+composition, free from the immediate pressure of poverty and its trials
+of the spirit, he was stimulated by their confidence and kindness to do
+all he could for himself. Hillard was the medium of this friendliness,
+and accompanied the considerable sum of money with a letter, January 17,
+1850:--
+
+"It occurred to me and some other of your friends that, in consideration
+of the events of the last year, you might at this time be in need of a
+little pecuniary aid. I have therefore collected, from some of those who
+admire your genius and respect your character, the enclosed sum of
+money, which I send you with my warmest wishes for your health and
+happiness. I know the sensitive edge of your temperament; but do not
+speak or think of obligation. It is only paying, in a very imperfect
+measure, the debt we owe you for what you have done for American
+Literature. Could you know the readiness with which every one to whom I
+applied contributed to this little offering, and could you have heard
+the warm expressions with which some accompanied their gift, you would
+have felt that the bread you had cast upon the waters had indeed come
+back to you. Let no shadow of despondency, my dear friend, steal over
+you. Your friends do not and will not forget you. You shall be protected
+against 'eating cares,' which, I take it, mean cares lest we should not
+have enough to eat."
+
+Kindly as this letter was, it could only temper what was for Hawthorne a
+rough and bitter experience; for he had, in intense form, that proud
+independence in such matters which characterizes the old New England
+stock. The words he wrote in reply came from the depths of his nature:--
+
+"I read your letter in the vestibule of the Post Office; and it
+drew--what my troubles never have--the water to my eyes; so that I was
+glad of the sharply cold west wind that blew into them as I came
+homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared.
+
+"There was much that was very sweet--and something, too, that was very
+bitter--mingled with that same moisture. It is sweet to be remembered
+and cared for by one's friends--some of whom know me for what I am,
+while others, perhaps, know me only through a generous faith--sweet to
+think that they deem me worth upholding in my poor work through life.
+And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something
+else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really
+and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The
+fault of a failure is attributable--in a great degree at least--to the
+man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it
+behooves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home to my
+_own_ heart. Nobody has a right to live in the world unless he be
+strong and able, and applies his ability to good purpose.
+
+"The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come.
+The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing
+himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement
+to his utmost exertion, so that he may not need their help again. I
+shall look upon it so--nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall
+find to do, if thereby I may win bread."
+
+Four days after this, on February 3, 1850, he finished "The Scarlet
+Letter." He read the last scene to his wife, just after writing it, on
+that evening,--"tried to read it, rather," he wrote to Bridge the next
+day, "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." He had, indeed, put his whole energy into
+the book, writing "immensely," says his wife in the previous autumn, as
+much as nine hours a day. He now felt the reaction, and besides he had a
+less healthy regimen of life than hitherto, and had fallen into
+middle-age habits of lowered physical tone, less active now in his
+out-door life these last three or four years. He continues in the letter
+to Bridge, just quoted: "I long to get into the country, for my health
+latterly is not quite what it has been for many years past. I should not
+long stand such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion as I
+have lived for the last few months. An hour or two of daily labor in a
+garden, and a daily ramble in country air, or on the sea-shore, would
+keep all right. Here, I hardly go out once a week. Do not allude to this
+matter in your letters to me, as my wife already sermonizes me quite
+sufficiently on my habits; and I never own up to not feeling perfectly
+well. Neither do I feel anywise ill; but only a lack of physical vigor
+and energy, which reacts upon the mind." "The Scarlet Letter" [Footnote:
+_The Scarlet Letter_. A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston:
+Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1850. 12mo. Pp. iv, 322.] was already in the
+publisher's hands, before the last scene was written, and was rapidly
+put through the press. It was issued early in April in an edition of
+five thousand copies, which was soon exhausted; a new edition followed
+at once, and Hawthorne's fame was at last established.
+
+"The Scarlet Letter" is a great and unique romance, standing apart by
+itself in fiction; there is nothing else quite like it. Of all
+Hawthorne's works it is most identified with his genius in popular
+regard, and it has the peculiar power that is apt to invest the first
+work of an author in which his originality finds complete artistic
+expression. It is seldom that one can observe so plainly the different
+elements that are primary in a writer's endowment coalesce in the fully
+developed work of genius; yet in this romance there is nothing either in
+method or perception which is not to be found in the earlier tales; what
+distinguishes it is the union of art and intuition as they had grown up
+in Hawthorne's practice and had developed a power to penetrate more
+deeply into life. Obviously at the start there is the physical object in
+which his imagination habitually found its spring, the fantastically
+embroidered scarlet letter on a woman's bosom which he had seen in the
+Puritan group described in "Endicott and the Red Cross." It had been in
+his mind for years, and his thoughts had centred on it and wandered out
+from it, tracking its mystery. It has in itself that decorative quality,
+which he sought in the physical object,--the brilliant and rich effect,
+startling to the eye and yet more to the imagination as it blazes forth
+with a secret symbolism and almost intelligence of its own. It
+multiplies itself, as the tale unfolds, with greater intensity and
+mysterious significance and dread suggestion, as if in mirrors set round
+about it,--in the slowly disclosed and fearful stigma on the minister's
+hidden heart over which he ever holds his hand, where it has become
+flesh of his flesh; in the growing elf-like figure of the child, who,
+with her eyes always fastened on the open shame of the letter on her
+mother's bosom or the hidden secret of the hand on her father's breast,
+has become herself the symbol, half revealed and half concealed, is
+dressed in it, as every reader remembers, and fantastically embodies it
+as if the thing had taken life in her; and, as if this were not enough,
+the scarlet letter, at a climax of the dark story, lightens forth over
+the whole heavens as a symbol of what cannot be hid even in the
+intensest blackness of night. The continual presence of the letter seems
+to have burnt into Hawthorne's own mind, till at the end of the
+narrative he says he would gladly erase its deep print from the brain
+where long meditation had fixed it. In no other work is the physical
+symbol so absorbingly present, so reduplicated, so much alive in itself.
+It is the brand of sin on life. Its concrete vividness leads the author
+also by a natural compulsion as well as an artistic instinct to display
+his story in that succession of high-wrought scenes, tableaux, in fact,
+which was his characteristic method of narrative, picturesque,
+pictorial, almost to be described as theatrical in spectacle. The
+background, also, as in the early tales, is of the slightest, no more
+than will suffice for the acting of the drama as a stage setting
+sympathetic with the central scene,--a town, with a prison, a
+meeting-house, a pillory, a governor's house, other habitations on a
+street, a lonely cottage by the shore, the forest round about all; and
+for occasion and accessories, only a woman's sentence, the incidental
+death of Winthrop unmarked in itself, a buccaneering ship in the harbor,
+Indians, Spanish sailors, rough matrons, clergy; this will serve, for
+such was Hawthorne's fine economy, knowing that this story was one in
+which every materialistic element must be used at its lowest tone.
+Though the scene lay in this world, it was but transitory scaffolding;
+the drama was one of the eternal life.
+
+The characteristic markings of Hawthorne's genius are also to be found
+in other points. He does not present the scene of life, the crowd of the
+world with its rich and varied fullness of interest, complexity of
+condition and movement, and its interwoven texture of character, event,
+and fate, such as the great novelists use; he has only a few individual
+figures, and these are simplified by being exhibited, not in their
+complete lives, but only in that single aspect of their experience which
+was absorbing to themselves and constituted the life they lived in the
+soul itself. There are three characters, Hester, the minister, and the
+physician; and a fourth, the child, who fulfills the function of the
+chorus in the old drama, in part a living comment, in part a spectator
+and medium of sympathy with the main actors. In all four of these that
+trait of profound isolation in life, so often used before in the earlier
+tales, is strongly brought out; about each is struck a circle which
+separates not only one from another, but from all the world, and in the
+midst of it, as in a separate orb, each lives an unshared life. It is
+inherent, too, in such a situation that the mystery that had fascinated
+Hawthorne in so many forms, the secrecy of men's bosoms, should be a
+main theme in the treatment. He has also had recourse to that method of
+violent contrast which has been previously illustrated; on the one hand
+the publicity of detected wrongdoing, on the other the hidden and
+unsuspected fact; here the open shame and there the secret sin, whose
+sameness in a double life is expressed by the identity of the
+embroidered letter and the flesh-wrought stigma. But it is superfluous
+to illustrate further the genesis of this romance out of Hawthorne's art
+and matter in his earlier work, showing how naturally it rose by a
+concentration of his powers on a single theme that afforded them scope,
+intensity, and harmony at once. The new thing here is the power of his
+genius to penetrate, as was said above, deep into life.
+
+The romance begins where common tales end. The crime has been committed;
+in it, in its motives, circumstances, explanation, its course of passion
+and human tide of life, Hawthorne takes no interest. All that is past,
+and, whatever it was, now exists only as sin; it has passed from the
+region of earthly fact into that of the soul, out of all that was
+temporal into the world where eternal things only are. Not crime, not
+passion, not the temptation and the fall, but only sin now staining the
+soul in consequence is the theme; and the course of the story concerns
+man's dealing with sin, in his own breast or the breasts of others. It
+is a study of punishment, of vengeance if one will; this is the secret
+of its gloom, for the idea of salvation, of healing, is but little
+present and is not felt; there is no forgiveness in the end, in any
+sense to dispel the darkness of evil or promise the dawn of new life in
+any one of these tortured souls. The sin of the lovers is not the centre
+of the story, but only its initial source; that sin breeds sin is the
+real principle of its being; the minister is not punished as a lover,
+but as the hypocrite that he becomes, and the physician is punished as
+the revenger that he becomes. Hester's punishment is visibly from the
+law, and illustrates the law's brutality, the coarse hand of man for
+justice, the mere physical blow meant to hurt and crush; it is man's
+social way of dealing with sin, and fails because it makes no connection
+with the soul; the victim rises above it, is emancipated from its ideas,
+transforms the symbol of disgrace into a message of mercy to all who
+suffer, and annuls the gross sentence by her own higher soul-power. The
+minister's punishment, also, is visibly from the physician, who
+illustrates man's individual way of dealing with sin in another; but it
+is not the minister's suffering under the hand of revenge working subtly
+in secret that arrests our attention; it is the physician's own
+degeneracy into a devil of hate through enjoyment of the sight and
+presence of this punishment, that stamps him into the reader's mind as a
+type of the failure of such a revenge. "Vengeance is mine, saith the
+Lord" is the text here blazed forth. In the sphere of the soul human law
+and private revenge have no place. It is in that sphere that Hester is
+seen suffering in the touch of the child, being unable to adjust the
+broken harmonies of life; her incapacity to do that is the ever-present
+problem that keeps her wound open, not to be stanched, but rather
+breaking with a more intimate pain with the unfolding of little Pearl's
+wide-eyed soul. In that sphere, too, the minister is seen suffering--not
+for the original sin, for that is overlaid, whelmed, forgotten, by the
+second and heavier transgression of hypocrisy, cowardice,
+desertion,--but merely from self-knowledge, the knowledge that he is a
+living lie. The characters, so treated, become hardly more than types,
+humanly outlined in figure, costume, and event, symbolic pictures of
+states of the soul, so simplified, so intense, so elementary as to
+belong to a phantasmagoric rather than a realistic world, to that mirror
+of the soul which is not found in nature but in spiritual
+self-consciousness, where the soul is given back to itself in its
+nakedness, as in a secret place.
+
+Yet it is in the sense of reality that this romance is most intense. It
+is a truthful story, above all; and only its truth could make it
+tolerable to the imagination and heart, if indeed it be tolerable to the
+heart at all. A part of this reality is due to the fact that there is a
+story here that lies outside of the moral scheme in which Hawthorne's
+conscious thought would confine it; the human element in it threatens
+from time to time to break the mould of thought and escape from bondage,
+because, simple as the moral scheme is, human life is too complex to be
+solved by it even in this small world of the three guilty ones and the
+child. This weakness of the moral scheme, this rude strength of human
+nature, this sense of a larger solution, are most felt when Hawthorne
+approaches the love element, and throughout in the character of Hester,
+in whom alone human nature retains a self-assertive power. The same
+thing is felt vaguely, but certainly, in the lack of sympathy between
+Hawthorne and the Puritan environment he depicts. He presents the
+community itself, its common people, its magistrates and clergy, its
+customs, temper, and atmosphere, as forbidding, and he has no good word
+for it; harshness characterizes it, and that trait discredits its
+ideals, its judgments, and its entire interpretation of life. Hester,
+outcast from it, is represented as thereby enfranchised from its
+narrowness, enlightened, escaped into a world of larger truth:--
+
+"The world's law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the
+human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider
+range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown
+nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and
+rearranged--not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was
+their most real abode--the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith
+was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit.
+She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other
+side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it,
+would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the
+scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts
+visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England;
+shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their
+entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door."
+
+This is the foregleam of the next age, felt in her mind, the coming of a
+larger day. Hawthorne does not develop this or justify it; he only
+states it as a fact of life. And in the motive of the story, the love of
+Hester and Arthur, much is left dim; but what is discerned threatens to
+be unmanageable within the limits of the scheme. Did Hester love her
+lover, and he love her, through those seven years in silence? Did either
+of them ever repent their passion for its own sake? And when Hester's
+womanhood came back in its bloom and her hair fell shining in the forest
+sunlight, and she took her lover, hand and head and form, in all his
+broken suffering to her affectionate care and caress, and planned the
+bold step that they go out together across the seas and live in each
+other's lives like lovers in truth and reality,--was this only the
+resurrection of a moment or the firm vital force of a seven years'
+silent passion? Had either of them ever repented, though one was a
+coward and the other a condemned and public criminal before the law, and
+both had suffered? Was not the true sin, as is suggested, the source of
+all this error, the act of the physician who had first violated Hester's
+womanhood in a loveless marriage as he had now in Arthur's breast
+"violated in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart"? "Thou and I,"
+says Arthur, "never did so." The strange words follow, strange for
+Hawthorne to have written, but better attesting his truth to human
+nature than all his morality:--
+
+"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its
+own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?"
+
+"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I
+have not forgotten!"
+
+That confession is the stroke of genius in the romance that humanizes it
+with a thrill that is felt through every page of the stubborn, dark,
+harsh narrative of misery. It was not a sin against love that had been
+committed; it was a sin against the soul; and the sin against the soul
+lay in the lack of confession, which becomes the cardinal situation of
+the romance solved in the minister's dying acknowledgment. But the love
+problem is never solved, just as the hate problem in the physician is
+never solved; both Hester and Roger Chillingworth, one with her mystery
+of enduring love, the other with his mystery of insatiable hatred, are
+left with the issue, the meaning of their lives inexplicable, untold.
+Yet it is from the presence of these elements in the story that
+something of its intense reality comes.
+
+It remains true, however, that the essential reality lies in the vivid
+sense of sin, and its experience in conscience. Hawthorne has not given
+a historical view of New England life; such a village, with such a
+tragedy, never existed, in that environing forest of the lone seacoast;
+but he has symbolized historical New England by an environment that he
+created round a tragedy that he read in the human heart, and in this
+tragedy itself he was able also to symbolize New England life in its
+internal features. One thing stood plainly out in our home
+Puritanism,--spirituality; the transcendent sense of the reality of the
+soul's life with God, its conscience, its perils, and its eternal issue.
+Spirituality remained the inheritance of the New England blood; and
+Hawthorne, who was no Puritan in doctrine or sympathy even, was Puritan
+in temperament, and hence to him, too, spirituality in life was its main
+element. He took that sin of passion which has ever been held typical of
+sin against the purity of the soul's nature, and transformed it into the
+symbol of all sin, and in its manifestation revolved the aspects of sin
+as a presence in the soul after the act,--the broken law disturbing
+life's external harmonies but working a worse havoc within, mining all
+with corruption there, while it infects with disease whatever approaches
+it from without. It is by its moral universality that the romance takes
+hold of the imagination; the scarlet letter becomes only a pictorial
+incident, but while conscience, repentance, confession, the modes of
+punishment, and the modes of absolution remain instant and permanent
+facts in the life of the soul, many a human heart will read in this book
+as in a manual of its own intimate hours.
+
+The romance is thus essentially a parable of the soul's life in sin; in
+its narrower scope it is the work of the moral intellect allegorizing
+its view of life; and where creative genius enters into it, in the
+Shakespearean sense of life in its own right, it tends to be a larger
+and truer story breaking the bonds of its religious scheme. It has its
+roots in Puritanism, but it is only incidentally a New England tale; its
+substance is the most universal experience of human nature in religious
+life, taking its forms only, its local habitation and name, from the
+Puritan colony in America, and these in a merely allegorical, not
+historical manner. Certain traits, however, ally it more closely to New
+England Puritanism. It is a relentless tale; the characters are
+singularly free from self-pity, and accept their fate as righteous; they
+never forgave themselves, they show no sign of having forgiven one
+another; even God's forgiveness is left under a shadow in futurity. They
+have sinned against the soul, and something implacable in evil remains.
+The minister's dying words drop a dark curtain over all.
+
+"Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we
+broke!--the sin here so awfully revealed!--let these alone be in thy
+thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be that, when we forgot our God,--when
+we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it was thenceforth
+vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure
+reunion."
+
+Mercy is but a hope. There is also a singular absence of prayer in the
+book. Evil is presented as a thing without remedy, that cannot change
+its nature. The child, even, being the fruit of sin, can bring, Hester
+and Arthur doubt, no good for others or herself. In the scheme of
+Puritan thought, however, the atonement of Christ is the perpetual
+miracle whereby salvation comes, not only hereafter but in the holier
+life led here by grace. There is no Christ in this book. Absolution, so
+far as it is hinted at, lies in the direction of public confession, the
+efficacy of which is directly stated, but lamely nevertheless; it
+restores truth, but it does not heal the past. Leave the dead past to
+bury its dead, says Hawthorne, and go on to what may remain; but life
+once ruined is ruined past recall. So Hester, desirous of serving in her
+place the larger truth she has come to know, is stayed, says Hawthorne,
+because she "recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and
+mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed
+down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow." That was
+never the Christian gospel nor the Puritan faith. Indeed, Hawthorne here
+and elsewhere anticipates those ethical views which are the burden of
+George Eliot's moral genius, and contain scientific pessimism. This
+stoicism, which was in Hawthorne, is a primary element in his moral
+nature, in him as well as in his work; it is visited with few touches of
+tenderness and pity; the pity one feels is not in him, it is in the
+pitiful thing, which he presents objectively, sternly, unrelentingly. It
+must be confessed that as an artist he appears unsympathetic with his
+characters; he is a moral dissector of their souls, minute, unflinching,
+thorough, a vivisector here; and he is cold because he has passed
+sentence on them, condemned them. There is no sympathy with human nature
+in the book; it is a fallen and ruined thing suffering just pain in its
+dying struggle. The romance is steeped in gloom. Is it too much to
+suggest that in ignoring prayer, the atonement of Christ, and the work
+of the Spirit in men's hearts, the better part of Puritanism has been
+left out, and the whole life of the soul distorted? Sin in the soul, the
+scarlet flower from the dark soil, we see; but, intent on that, has not
+the eye, and the heart, too, forgotten the large heavens that ensphere
+all--even this evil flower--and the infinite horizons that reach off to
+the eternal distance from every soul as from their centre? This romance
+is the record of a prison-cell, unvisited by any ray of light save that
+earthly one which gives both prisoners to public ignominy; they are
+seen, but they do not see. These traits of the book, here only
+suggested, have kinship with the repelling aspects of Puritanism, both
+as it was and as Hawthorne inherited it in his blood and breeding; so,
+in its transcendent spirituality, and in that democracy which is the
+twin-brother of spirituality in all lands and cultures, by virtue of
+which Hawthorne here humiliates and strips the minister who is the type
+of the spiritual aristocrat in the community, there is the essence of
+New England; but, for all that, the romance is a partial story, an
+imperfect fragment of the old life, distorting, not so much the Puritan
+ideal--which were a little matter--but the spiritual life itself. Its
+truth, intense, fascinating, terrible as it is, is a half-truth, and the
+darker half; it is the shadow of which the other half is light; it is
+the wrath of which the other half is love. A book from which light and
+love are absent may hold us by its truth to what is dark in life; but,
+in the highest sense, it is a false book. It is a chapter in the
+literature of moral despair, and is perhaps most tolerated as a
+condemnation of the creed which, through imperfect comprehension, it
+travesties.
+
+With this book Hawthorne came into fame; but his fellow townsmen were
+ill pleased to find some disrepute of their own accompanying his
+success. It is surely to be regretted that this was the case; and,
+effective as his sketch of the Custom House is, one feels that Hawthorne
+stooped in taking his literary revenge on his humble associates by
+holding them up to personal ridicule. The tone of pleasantry veils ill
+feeling, which is expressed without cover in a letter he wrote to Bridge
+a day or two before he left the town:--
+
+"As to the Salem people, I really thought that I had been exceedingly
+good-natured in my treatment of them. They certainly do not deserve good
+usage at my hands after permitting me to be deliberately lied down--not
+merely once, but at two several attacks, on two false indictments--
+without hardly a voice being raised on my behalf; and then sending one
+of the false witnesses to Congress, others to the Legislature, and
+choosing another as the mayor.
+
+"I feel an infinite contempt for them--and probably have expressed more
+of it than I intended--for my preliminary chapter has caused the
+greatest uproar that has happened here since witch-times. If I escape
+from town without being tarred and feathered, I shall consider it good
+luck. I wish they would tar and feather me; it would be such an entirely
+novel kind of distinction for a literary man. And, from such judges as
+my fellow-citizens, I should look upon it as a higher honor than a
+laurel crown."
+
+He had said his farewell in the too famous sketch, with an ill grace,
+shaking the dust of his native place from his feet, and frankly taking
+upon himself the character of the unappreciated genius, which is seldom
+a becoming one. The passage fitly closes this chapter in which his
+nativity, for better or worse, is most apparent.
+
+"Soon my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a
+mist brooding over and around it, as if it were no portion of the real
+earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary
+inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and
+the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to
+be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good
+townspeople will not much regret me; for--though it has been as dear an
+object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their
+eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place
+of so many of my forefathers--_there_ has never been, for me, the
+genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the
+best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and
+these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well
+without me."
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+LITERARY LABORS.
+
+
+In the late spring of 1850 Hawthorne removed his family and household
+goods to the little red cottage amid the Berkshire Hills which was to be
+a nature's hermitage to him for the next year and a half. It was a
+story-and-a-half building, rude and simple, on a great hillside,
+commanding a view of a small lake below and of beautiful low mountain
+horizons. Here began again that secluded happy family life which had
+belonged to the Old Manse, and he was perhaps happier than he had ever
+been. The home had the same internal look as of old, for he had brought
+with him the relics of family furniture, the oriental objects from over
+sea that were heirlooms from his father, and the Italian Madonnas, the
+casts and paintings with which his wife delighted to surround the
+home-life in an atmosphere of artistic adornment and suggestion; and, as
+the quarters were very small, the effect was one of mingled homeliness
+and refinement. Bridge soon joined them, and devoted himself in a
+practical way to making things shipshape, providing necessary closets
+and shelves out of packing boxes, and generally eking out the interior
+arrangements with a sailor's ready ingenuity. Outside there was a
+barnyard, and a two-story hencoop to be put to rights, with its brood of
+pet chickens each with its name,--Snowdrop, Crown Imperial, Queenie,
+Fawn, and the like decorative appellations. The two children, Una and
+Julian, were in a paradise. Other friends came, too, to visit or to
+call. Mrs. Hawthorne soon remarked that they seemed to see more society
+than ever before. Herman Melville lived near by, at Pittsfield, and
+became a welcome guest and companion, with his boisterous genuine
+intellectual spirits and animal strength. Fanny Kemble made an
+interesting figure on her great black horse at the gate. The Sedgwick
+neighbors were thoughtful and serviceable. O'Sullivan reappeared for a
+moment in all his Celtic vivacity, and Fields, Holmes, Duyckinck, and
+others of the profession came and went in the summer days. Hawthorne
+breathed the air of successful authorship at last, and knew its vanities
+and its pleasures. The mail brought him new acquaintances, and now and
+then a hero-worshiper lingered at the gate for a look. But as the warm
+days went by, and the frosts came, he found himself in his old
+sheltering nook, in a place removed from the world, living practically
+alone with his wife and children, though the increasing sense of
+friendliness in the world cheered and warmed him.
+
+He had, however, begun to age. He was forty-six years old, and the last
+year had told upon him, with its various anxieties, excitement, and hard
+labor with the pen. He was more easily fatigued, he was less robust and
+venturesome, less physically confident. He showed the changes of time.
+On his arrival, "weary and worn," says his wife, "with waiting for a
+place to be, to think, and to write in," he gave up with something like
+nervous fever; "his eyes looked like two immense spheres of troubled
+light; his face was wan and shadowy, and he was wholly uncomfortable."
+He soon recovered tone; but though he pleaded that his mind never worked
+well till the frosts brought out the landscape's autumnal colors and had
+some similar alchemy for his own brain, it was a needed rest that he
+enjoyed while giving and receiving these early hospitalities in a new
+country. He even found the broad mountain view, with the lake in its
+bosom, a distraction which made it hard for him to write in its
+presence. He had always been used to narrow outlooks from his windows;
+even at the Old Manse the scene was small though open. With the coming
+of the fall days, however, he again took up his writing, and showed how
+stimulating to his ambition and energies the first taste of popularity
+had been. Indeed from this time he was more productive than at any other
+period, and wrote regularly and successfully as he had never before
+done. The scale of the novel gave more volume to his work of itself, and
+its mere continuity sustained his effort; moreover the excitement of a
+new kind of work was a strong stimulus. He now began to write novels,
+differently studied and composed from his earlier stories, more akin to
+the usual narrative of fiction. "The Scarlet Letter," a work of pure
+imagination, was the climax of his tales, the furthest reach of his
+romantic allegorizing moral art in creation; but he now undertook to
+utilize his experience and observation in the attempt to delineate life
+in its commoner and more realistic aspects of character and scene. He
+began "The House of the Seven Gables" in September and finished it early
+in January. He wrote regularly, but the story went on more slowly than
+he had hoped, requiring more care and thought than "The Scarlet Letter,"
+because the latter was all in one tone, while here there was variety. He
+had to wait for the mood, at times; but the composition was really
+rapid, and seemed slow only because he was used to the smaller scale of
+effort. The book was at once sent to press and published in the spring.
+[Footnote: _The House of The Seven Gables_. A Romance. By Nathaniel
+Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1851. 12mo. Pp. vi, 344.]
+
+"The House of the Seven Gables" is a succession of stories bound
+together to set forth the history of a family through generations under
+the aspect of an inherited curse which inheres in the house itself. The
+origin of the curse and of the plot lies in the founder of the family,
+Colonel Pyncheon, whose character, wrong-doing, and death make the first
+act; the second, which is no more than an illustrative episode and
+serves to fill out the history of the house itself, is the tale of
+Alice, the mesmerized victim of a later generation, in which the
+witchcraft element of the first story is half rationalized; the third
+part, which these two lead up to and explain, is the body of the novel,
+and contains the working out of the curse and its dissipation in the
+marriage of the descendants of the Colonel and the old wizard Maule,
+from whose dying lips it had come. The curse itself, "God will give him
+blood to drink," is made physical by the fact that death comes to the
+successive heirs by apoplexy, an end which lends itself to an atmosphere
+of secrecy, mysteriousness, and judgments; but the permanence of those
+traits which made the Colonel's character harsh and harmful, his
+ambition, will-power, and cruelty, gives moral probability to the curse
+and secures its operation as a thing of nature. There is, nevertheless,
+a lax unity in the novel, owing to this dispersion of the action; and
+its somewhat thin material in the contemporary part needs the
+strengthening and enrichment that it derives from the historical
+elements. The series is united by the uncut thread of a vengeful
+punishment that must continue until the original wrong itself shall
+disappear; but when that happens, the Indian deed hidden behind the
+portrait is worthless, the male line is extinct, and the house itself a
+thing of the past. The presence of the past in life, both as inheritance
+and environment, is the moral theme, and here it is an evil past
+imparting misery to whomever it touches. The old house is its physical
+sign and habitation; the inhabitants are its victims, and in the later
+story they are innocent sufferers, as Alice had been in the intermediate
+time.
+
+Such a canvas is one which Hawthorne loved to fill up with the shadowed
+lights, the melodramatic coloring and fantastic decorativeness of his
+fancies. The characters are, as always, few. There are but five of them,
+Hepzibah, Clifford, Phoebe, the daguerreotypist, and the Judge, with the
+contributory figures of Uncle Venner and little Ned Higgins. They have
+also the constant Hawthorne trait of great isolation, and live entirely
+within the world of the story. In sketching them Hawthorne had recourse
+to real life, to observation, as also in all the contemporary background
+and atmosphere. The substance and attraction of the novel lie in this
+fidelity to the life he knew so minutely; for the plot, the crime, the
+curse, except in their own historical atmosphere, in the Colonel and in
+Alice's story, interest us but little and languidly. It is, perhaps, not
+refining too much to see in the novel a closer relationship to those
+earlier tales and sketches which drew their matter from observation,
+were less imaginative, more realistic, and belong to a less purely
+creative art. If "The Scarlet Letter" was the culmination of the finer
+tales, "The House of the Seven Gables" is the climax of this less
+powerful, but more every-day group of the familiar aspect of country
+life. It was, possibly, with some vague sense of this that Hawthorne
+preferred this novel as one "more characteristic of my mind, and more
+proper and natural for me to write;" it came from his more familiar
+self. He was able to introduce into it that realistic detail concerning
+trifles which he delighted to record in his journals; and the minute
+analysis which in the great romance he gave to the feelings and inner
+life of pain, he here gives rather to the elaboration of the scene, to
+external things, to the surface and texture of the physical elements. He
+has succeeded consequently in delineating and coloring a picture of New
+England conditions with Dutch faithfulness, and this is the charm of the
+work. It appeals, like life and memory themselves, to the people of that
+countryside, and goes to their hearts like the sight of home. To others
+it can be only a provincial study, with the attraction of such life in
+any land, and for them more dependent on its romantic setting, its moral
+suggestion, and general human truth. Those who have the secret and are
+of kin to New England, however, find in the mere description something
+that endears the book. The life of the little back street, as it revives
+in Clifford's childishly pleased senses, with its succession of morning
+carts, its scissor-grinder, and other incidents of the hour; the garden
+of flowers and vegetables, with the Sunday afternoon in the ruinous
+arbor, the loaf of bread and the china bowl of currants; the life of the
+immortal cent-shop, with its queer array, and its string of customers
+jingling the bell; the hens, evidently transported from the great coop
+of the Berkshire cottage, but with the value of an event in the
+novel,--all these things, with a hundred other features that are each
+but a trifle, make up a glamour of reality that grows over the whole
+book like the mosses on the house. In the characters themselves this
+local realism is carried to the highest degree of truth, especially in
+Hepzibah, who in her half-vital state, with her faded gentility and
+gentle, heroic heart of patient love, in all her outer queerness and
+grotesquely thwarted life, is the most wholly alive of all of
+Hawthorne's characters; in Phoebe, too, though in a different way, is
+the same truth, a life entirely real; and, on the smaller scale, Uncle
+Venner is also to be reckoned a character perfectly done. Clifford is
+necessarily faint, and does not interest one on his own account; he is
+pitiable, but his love of the beautiful is too much sentimentalized to
+engage sympathy in the special way that Hawthorne attempts, and one sees
+in him only the victim of life, the prisoner whom the law mistook and
+outraged and left ruined; and Holgrave is no more than a spectator,
+mechanically necessary to the action and useful in other ways, but he
+does not affect us as a character. There remains Judge Pyncheon, on whom
+Hawthorne evidently exhausted his skill in the effort to make him
+repellent. He is studied after the gentleman who was most active in the
+removal of Hawthorne from the Custom House, and was intended to be a
+recognizable portrait of him in the community. Perhaps the knowledge of
+this fact interferes with the proper effect of the character, since it
+makes one doubt the truth of it. The practice of introducing real
+persons into literature as a means of revenge by holding them up to
+detestation is one that seldom benefits either fiction or truth; it was
+the ugliest feature of Pope's character, and it always affects one as
+unhandsome treatment. In this instance it detracts from the sense of
+reality, inasmuch as one suspects caricature. But taken without
+reference to the original, Judge Pyncheon is somewhat of a stage
+villain, a puppet; his villainy is presented mainly in his physique, his
+dress and walk, his smile and scowl, and generally in his demeanor; it
+is not actively shown, though the reader is told many sad stories of his
+misbehaviour; even at the end, in the scene in which he comes nearest to
+acting, the plot never gets further than a threat to do a cruel thing.
+In other words it is a portrait that is drawn, not a character that is
+shown in its play of evil power actually embodying itself in life. He is
+the bogy of the house, the Pyncheon type incarnated in each generation;
+and when he sits dead in the old chair, he seems less an individual than
+the Pyncheon corpse. In the long chapter which serves as his requiem,
+and in which there is the suggestion of Dickens not in the best phase of
+his art, the jubilation is somewhat diabolic; it affects one as if
+Hawthorne's thoughts were executing a dance upon a grave. The character
+is too plainly hated by the author, and it fails to carry conviction of
+its veracity. Yet in certain external touches and aspects it suggests
+the hypocrite who everywhere walks the streets, placid, respectable,
+sympathetic in salutations, but bearing within a cold, gross, cruel,
+sensual, and selfish nature which causes a shudder at every casual
+glimpse that betrays its lurking hideousness. The character is
+thoroughly conceived, but being developed by description instead of
+action, seems overdone; prosperity has made him too flabby to act, and
+kills him with a fit as soon as he works himself up to play the role.
+
+After all, the story in its contemporary phase is but a small part of
+the novel, which does not much suffer even if the Judge in his youthful,
+hard-hearted, cowardly crime and the victim in his aesthetic delicacy
+are both ineffective in making the impression the author aimed at. The
+real scene is the singularly trivial and barren life of the old house,
+where nothing takes place but the purchase of a Jim Crow, a breakfast of
+mackerel, a talk about chickens, gossip with Uncle Venner, and the
+passing of a political procession in the street; and one too easily
+forgets the marvelous art which could make such a life interesting and
+stimulating and engaging to the affections, even with the aid of
+Hepzibah and Phoebe in their simpleness. What makes the happiness of the
+story is to be found in these details, and in the century-old atmosphere
+which Hawthorne has generated about them, compounding into one element
+the witchcraft memories, the foreign horizons, the curse in the house,
+the threadbare gentility, the decay material and spiritual, the odor of
+time, all of which he had absorbed from his Salem life; thence it came
+that he was able to give to New England its only imaginative work that
+has ancestral quality. All this, too, is distilled from the soil.
+Hawthorne felt in his own life the weight of this past; its elements
+were familiar and near to him, so that his own family legend imparts
+coloring to the tale and gives him sympathy with it; and in leaving
+Salem it was from such a past that he desired to be free. He expresses
+himself, in these matters, through Holgrave, in his democratic new life
+urging Hepzibah to abandon gentility and be proud of her cent shop as a
+genuine thing in a practical and real world,--she would begin to live
+now at sixty, such was his narrowness of youthful view; but the
+democratic sentiment is Hawthorne's. So, too, in his rhetorical
+impeachment of the past, though the passage is meant to summarize the
+point of view of reform, there is an emphasis such as sincerity gives:--
+
+"'Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?' cried he, keeping up the
+earnest tone of his preceding conversation. 'It lies upon the Present
+like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
+were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of
+the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
+needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
+you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give the
+matter the right word!'
+
+"'But I do not see it,' observed Phoebe.
+
+"'For example, then,' continued Holgrave, 'a dead man, if he happen to
+have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
+intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
+longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
+living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
+dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
+pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
+of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
+worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
+Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
+obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
+immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
+must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
+on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
+of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
+interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses;
+as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!'"
+
+This is in the form of dialogue; but Hawthorne's own attitude toward
+reform is clearly disclosed in the analytic passages in which he
+discusses Holgrave, though it is observable that he embodies no adverse
+criticism upon it in the character itself, as he was to do in his next
+novel. He appears to take the same view of reform that is sometimes
+found in respect to prayer, that it has great subjective advantages and
+is good for the soul, but is futile in the world of fact. It was well
+for Holgrave, he says, to think as he did; this enthusiasm "would serve
+to keep his youth pure and make his aspirations high," and he goes on
+with his own judgment on the matter:--
+
+"And when, with the years settling down more weightily upon him, his
+early faith should be modified by inevitable experience, it would be
+with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still
+have faith in man's brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the
+better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf; and
+the haughty faith, with which he began life, would be well bartered for
+a far humbler one at its close, in discerning that man's best directed
+effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of
+realities."
+
+This may be profound truth, as it is intended to be; but it needs no
+penetration to see here a man whose sympathies with all kinds of those
+"come-outers" who then multiplied exceedingly in his neighborhood, would
+be infinitesimal. He had not, however, yet engaged with this problem so
+closely as he was to do. So far one would discern only that fatalistic
+and pessimistic trait indicated by "The Scarlet Letter" and found in
+"The House of the Seven Gables" in the hard conclusion that there was no
+remedy for the harm that had been done in the long past. The curse was
+done with now, it is true, by the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave, but
+for Clifford and Hepzibah there was no amends for the lives the dead
+Judge had ruined by the aid of an imperfect and blundering human law;
+they were wrecks, so Hawthorne represents it,--they had missed life's
+happiness and were now in hospital, as it were, till they should die;
+but in their lives evil had been triumphant, had made them innocent
+victims, and for this there was neither help nor compensation. The
+irremediableness of the breach that sin makes in the soul had been
+preached in "The Scarlet Letter;" here is the other half of the truth,
+as Hawthorne saw it, the irremediableness of the injury done to others.
+So far as the book has ethical meaning it lies in the implacability of
+the uncanceled wrong lingering as a curse, destroying the bad and
+blasting the good descendants of the house, and presenting the mystery
+of evil as something positive, persisting, and unchecked in its career.
+The moral element, nevertheless, lies well in the background and is
+overlaid with romantic and legendary features; its hatefulness in the
+main story is not the principal theme; and the novel pleases and
+succeeds, not by these traits, but by its humble realism, its delicate
+character-drawing, and that ancestral power which makes it the story of
+a house long lived in.
+
+On finishing this work Hawthorne took that rest which he always required
+after any great intellectual exertion, and spent the time with his
+children and wife. His second daughter, Rose, was born in the spring. A
+happier childhood seldom gets into books than that which appears in the
+reminiscences of this small family, whether they were in Salem, or
+Berkshire, or Liverpool. Hawthorne lived much with his children, and he
+had the habit of observing them minutely and writing down the history of
+their little lives in his journals. All winter their play and
+recreation, their sayings and adventures and habits, diversified the
+Berkshire days; they thrived on "the blue nectared air," and had rosy
+cheeks and abounding spirits, and their heads were stuffed with fairy
+tales. The year was a glorious one in Julian's memory, and the page he
+makes of it may be taken as a leaf of his father's life at home,
+disclosing his daily life and home-nature, as it was through years of
+domestic happiness. Hawthorne, indeed, is never so attractive as when
+seen with the light of his children's eyes upon him:--
+
+"He made those spring days memorable to his children. He made them boats
+to sail on the lake, and kites to fly in the air; he took them fishing
+and flower-gathering, and tried (unsuccessfully for the present) to
+teach them swimming. Mr. Melville used to ride or drive up, in the
+evenings, with his great dog, and the children used to ride on the dog's
+back. In short, the place was made a paradise for the small people. In
+the previous autumn, and still more in the succeeding one, they all went
+nutting, and filled a certain disused oven in the house with such bags
+upon bags of nuts as not a hundred children could have devoured during
+the ensuing winter. The children's father displayed extraordinary
+activity and energy on these nutting expeditions; standing on the ground
+at the foot of a tall walnut-tree, he would bid them turn their backs
+and cover their eyes with their hands; then they would hear, for a few
+seconds, a sound of rustling and scrambling, and, immediately after, a
+shout, whereupon they would uncover their eyes and gaze upwards; and lo!
+there was their father--who but an instant before, as it seemed, had
+been beside them--swaying and soaring high aloft on the topmost
+branches, a delightful mystery and miracle. And then down would rattle
+showers of ripe nuts, which the children would diligently pick up, and
+stuff into their capacious bags. It was all a splendid holiday; and they
+cannot remember when their father was not their playmate, or when they
+ever desired or imagined any other playmate than he."
+
+The spirit of such a fatherhood, and all this delight in the children's
+world, was distilled for the great multitude of other children in "The
+Wonder-Book" and its sequel "Tanglewood Tales." From very early in his
+career he had written charming childhood sketches, of which "Little
+Annie's Ramble" and "Little Daffydown-dilly" are easily recalled; and
+his association with his wife's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, had directed
+his attention particularly to literature for children, and
+"Grandfather's Chair" had been the result. Whenever he fell into
+discouragement in respect to the earning capacity of his pen, his first
+thought was that he would write children's books for a living. For some
+time he had meditated a volume which should adapt the classical tales of
+mythology to the understanding and interests of such children as his
+own, and he now put the plan in execution. He began "The Wonder-Book"
+with the summer, and finished it at one effort in six weeks of June and
+July; the ease with which he accomplished the task indicates how
+pleasurable it was, and well adapted to his sympathies and powers; and
+the result was very successful, a book of sunshine from cover to cover.
+It [Footnote: _A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys_. By Nathaniel
+Hawthorne, with Engravings by Baker from designs by Billings. Boston:
+Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 16mo. Pp. vi. 256.] was published in the
+fall, and was followed after an interval by its second part, "Tanglewood
+Tales." [Footnote: _Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys_. Being a
+Second Wonder-Book. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Fine Illustrations.
+Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1853. 16mo. Pp. 336.]
+
+A multitude of children have loved these books, for whom their very
+names are a part of the golden haze of memory; and, in view of the
+association of Hawthorne's genius and temperament with quite other
+themes and the darker element in grown lives, this band of children make
+a kind of halo round his figure. Whether the thing done should have been
+so done, whether Greek should have been turned into Gothic, is a foolish
+matter. To please a child is warrant enough for any work; and here
+romantic fancy plays around the beautiful forms and noble suggestion of
+old heroic and divine life, and marries them to the hillside and
+fireside of New England childhood with the naturalness of a fairy
+enchantment; these tales are truly transplanted into the minds of the
+little ones with whose youngest tendrils of imagination they are
+intertwined. To tear apart such tender fibres were a poor mode of
+criticism, for the living fact better speaks for itself; and, in the
+case of the present writer, whose earliest recollection of the great
+world of literature, his first dawn-glimpse of it, lying in dreamy
+beauty, was Bellerophon's pool, the memory is potent and yields an
+appreciation not to be distilled in any other alembic. Few facts are
+more fixed in his memory than that he was the child who watched the pool
+for the tall boy with the shining bridle who was his strange friend from
+another world. If to wake and feed the imagination and charm it, and
+fill the budding mind with the true springtime of the soul's life in
+beautiful images, noble thoughts, and brooding moods that have in them
+the infinite suggestion, be success for a writer who would minister to
+the childish heart, few books can be thought to equal these; and the
+secret of it lies in the wondering sense which Hawthorne had of the
+mystical in childhood, of that element of purity in being which is felt
+also in his reverence for womanhood, and which, whether in child or
+woman, was typical of the purity of the soul itself,--in a word, the
+spiritual sense of life. His imagination, living in the child-sphere,
+pure, primitive, inexperienced, found only sunshine there, the freshness
+of the early world; nor are there any children's books so dipped in
+morning dews.
+
+On finishing "The Wonder-Book" Hawthorne devoted himself to life with
+Julian for three weeks, during the absence of the rest of the family on
+a visit, and wrote a daily account of it with such fullness that this
+history would fill a hundred pages of print. Some passages have been
+published, and they illustrate how this amusement had taken the place of
+the earlier note-books which recorded his observations of ordinary and
+even trivial life round about him. There may be some wonder that a mind
+of Hawthorne's powers should find its play in such literary
+journalizing, and the inference is ready that, when not at work in
+imagination, he was mentally unoccupied; his intellectual interests
+were, however, always limited in scope, and his readings in the evening
+to his wife were confined to pure literature; outside of such books he
+apparently had no intellectual life, and his thoughts and affections
+found their exercise in the domestic circle just as his eyes were
+engaged with the look of the landscape, the incidents of the road, and
+the changes of the weather. His capacity for idleness was great, and as
+his vigor had already somewhat waned his periods of repose were long. He
+undertook no new work during the summer, but prepared for the press a
+new volume of tales, "The Snow Image," [Footnote: _The Snow Image and
+other Twice-Told Tales_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor,
+Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo, brown cloth. Pp. 273. The contents and
+source of the tales were as follows: The Snow Image, _International
+Review_, November, 1850; The Great Stone Face, _National Era_,
+January 24, 1850; Main Street, _Ĉsthetic Papers_, 1849; Ethan
+Brand, _Dollar Magazine_, May, 1851; A Bell's Biography,
+_Knickerbocker Magazine_, March, 1837; Sylph Etherege, Boston
+_Token_, 1838; The Canterbury Pilgrims, Boston _Token_, 1833;
+No. I, Old News, _New England Magazine_, February, 1835; No. II,
+The Old French War, March, 1835; No. III, The Old Tory, May, 1835; The
+Man of Adamant, Boston _Token_, 1837; The Devil in Manuscript,
+_New England Magazine_, May, 1835; John Inglefield's Thanksgiving,
+_Democratic Review_, March, 1840; Old Ticonderoga, _Democratic
+Review_, February, 1836; The Wives of the Dead, Boston _Token_,
+1832; Little Daffydowndilly, _Boys' and Girls' Magazine_, Boston,
+1843; Major Molineux, Boston _Token_, 1832.] which was ready by the
+first of November and was soon afterwards issued. It is made up of
+stories and sketches out of old periodicals, which had not been gathered
+in the former collection, some of them dating from the beginning of his
+career. Three, however, were later in composition, and were perhaps
+among those which he had thought of binding up with "The Scarlet
+Letter," had that been issued according to his original plan as one of
+several new tales. These three were "The Great Stone Face," from "The
+National Era," January 24, 1850, "The Snow Image" from "The
+International Magazine," November, 1850, and "Ethan Brand; a Chapter
+from an Abortive Romance," from "Holden's Dollar Magazine," May, 1851;
+they were all published with the author's name. These stories require no
+comment, as the types to which they belong are well marked. They were,
+in reality, his last trials of his art as a teller of tales.
+
+Late in November, the family again removed to a new dwelling-place. The
+inland air had proved, it was thought, less favorable to health than was
+expected, and except in the bracing months of mid-winter Hawthorne found
+it enervating. He had been, however, very happy in Berkshire, as happy
+probably as it was in his nature to be, and the distant beauty and near
+wildness of the country had been attractive; the house, nevertheless,
+was very small, and he fretted at its inconveniences, not in a
+disagreeable way, but desiring to have a house and home of his own among
+more familiar scenes and within reach of the sea; he regarded the new
+move as a makeshift, and settled in West Newton, a suburb of Boston,
+where his wife's family lived, until he should purchase a place of his
+own. The change from the winter picturesqueness of Berkshire was marked,
+but the village was of the usual New England type and his surroundings
+were not essentially different from those he was accustomed to at
+Concord and Salem.
+
+West Newton was near to Roxbury and the scenes of his rural experience
+at Brook Farm; but he hardly needed to refresh his memory of the places
+and persons that had been so much a part of his life ten years before.
+Brook Farm, as an experiment in the regeneration of society, had run its
+course, and was gone; but much that was characteristic of it externally
+was now to be transferred to the novel Hawthorne had in hand as his next
+work. "The Blithedale Romance" [Footnote: The Blithedale Romance, By
+Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo,
+cloth. Pp. viii, 288.] was written during the winter, and was finished
+as early as May, 1852, when it was at once issued. It is the least
+substantial of any of his longer works. It lacks the intensity of power
+that distinguishes "The Scarlet Letter," and the accumulated richness of
+surface that belongs to "The House of the Seven Gables," due to the
+overlaying of story on story in that epitome of a New England family
+history. "The Blithedale Romance," on the contrary, has both less depth
+and less inclusiveness; and much of its vogue springs from the fact of
+its being a reflection of the life of Brook Farm, which possesses an
+interest in its own right. Hawthorne used his material in the direct way
+that was his custom, and transferred bodily to his novel, to make its
+background and atmosphere, what he had preserved in his note-books or
+memory from the period of his residence with the reformers. The April
+snowstorm in which he arrived at the farm, his illness there, the
+vine-hung tree that he made his autumnal arbor, the costume and habits,
+the fancy-dress party, the Dutch realism of the figure of Silas Foster,
+and many another detail occur at once to the mind as from this origin;
+his own attitude is sketched frankly in Miles Coverdale, and the germs
+of others of the characters, notably Priscilla, are to be found in the
+same experience. The life of the farmhouse, however, is not of
+sufficient interest in itself to hold attention very closely, and the
+socialistic experiment, after all, is not the theme of the story; these
+things merely afford a convenient and appropriate ground on which to
+develop a study of the typical reformer, as Hawthorne conceived him, the
+nature, trials, temptations, and indwelling fate of such a man; and to
+this task the author addressed himself. In the way in which he worked
+out the problem, he revealed his own judgment on the moral type brought
+so variously and persistently under his observation by the wave of
+reform that was so strongly characteristic of his times.
+
+The characters are, as usual, few, and they have that special trait of
+isolation which is the birthmark of Hawthorne's creations. Zenobia,
+Priscilla, and Hollingsworth are the trio, who, each in an environment
+of solitude, make the essence of the plot by their mutual relations.
+Zenobia is set apart by her secret history and physical nature, and
+Priscilla by her magnetic powers and enslavement to the mesmerist;
+Hollingsworth is absorbed in his mission. It is unlikely that Hawthorne
+intended any of these as a portrait of any real person, though as the
+seamstress of Brook Farm gave the external figure of Priscilla, it may
+well be that certain suggestions of temperament were found for the other
+two characters among his impressions of persons whom he met. Neither
+Zenobia nor Priscilla, notwithstanding the latter's name, are
+essentially New England characters; in each of them there is something
+alien to the soil, and they are represented as coming from a different
+stock. Hollingsworth, on the other hand, is meant as a native type. The
+unfolding of the story, and the treatment of the characters, are not
+managed with any great skill. Hawthorne harks back to his old habits,
+and does so in a feebler way than would have been anticipated. He
+interjects the short story of The Veiled Lady, for example, in the
+middle of the narrative, as he had placed the tale of Alice in "The
+House of the Seven Gables," but very ineffectively; it is a pale
+narrative and does not count visibly in the progress of the novel, but
+only inferentially. He uses also the exotic flower, which Zenobia wears,
+as a physical symbol, but it plays no part and is only a relic of his
+old manner. The description of the performance in the country hall seems
+like an extract from one of the old annuals of the same calibre as the
+Story-Teller's Exhibition. Mesmerism is the feebler substitute for the
+old witchcraft element. In a word, the work is not well knit together,
+and the various methods of old are weakly combined. One comes back to
+the moral situation as the centre of interest; and in it he exhibits the
+reformer as failing in the same ways in which other egotists fail, for
+he perceives in the enthusiasm of the humanitarian only selfishness,
+arrogance, intolerance in another form. Hollingsworth, with the best of
+motives apparently, since his cause is his motive, as he believes, is
+faithless to his associates and willing to wreck their enterprise
+because it stands in his way and he is out of sympathy with it; he is
+faithless to Priscilla in so far as he accepts Zenobia because she can
+aid him with her wealth, and on her losing her wealth he is faithless to
+her in returning to Priscilla; he has lost the power to be true, in the
+other relations of life, through his devotion to his cause. One feels
+that Hollingsworth is the victim of Hawthorne's moral theory about him.
+It is true that at the end Hawthorne has secured in the character that
+tragic reversal which is always effective, in the point that
+Hollingsworth, who set out to be the friend and uplifter and saviour of
+the criminal classes, sees at last in himself the murderer of Zenobia;
+but this is shown almost by a side-light, and not as the climax of the
+plot, perhaps because the reader does not hold him guilty in any true
+sense of the disaster which overtakes Zenobia. In its main situation,
+therefore, the plot, while it suggests and illustrates the temptations
+and failures of a nature such as Hollingsworth's, does not carry
+conviction. Description takes the place of action; much of Zenobia's
+life and of Hollingsworth's, also, is left untold in the time after
+Coverdale left them; as in the case of Judge Pyncheon, the wrong-doing
+is left much in the shadow, suggested, hinted at, narrated finally, but
+not shown in the life; and such wrong-doing loses the edge of villainy.
+It might be believed that Hollingsworth as a man failed; but as a
+typical man, as that reformer who is only another shape of the selfish
+and heartless egotist sacrificing everything wrongfully to his
+philanthropic end, it is not so easily believed that he must have
+failed; it is the absence of this logical necessity that discredits him
+as a type, and takes out of his character and career the universal
+quality. This, however, may be only a personal impression. The truth of
+the novel, on the ethical side, may be plainer to others; it presents
+some aspects of moral truth, carefully studied and probably observed,
+but they seem very partial aspects, and too incomplete to allow them,
+taken all together, to be called typical. The power of the story lies
+rather in its external realism, and especially in that last scene, which
+was taken from Hawthorne's experience at Concord on the night when he
+took part in rescuing the body of the young woman who had drowned
+herself; but with the exception of this last scene, and of some of the
+sketches that reproduce most faithfully the life and circumstances of
+Brook Farm, the novel does not equal its predecessors in the ethical or
+imaginative value of its material, in romantic vividness, or in the
+literary skill of its construction. The elements of the story are
+themselves inferior; and perhaps Hawthorne made the most of them that
+they were capable of; but his mind was antipathetic to his main theme.
+His representation of the New England reformer is as partial as that of
+the Puritan minister; both are depraved types, and in the former there
+is not that vivid truth to general human nature which makes the latter
+so powerful a revelation of the sinful heart.
+
+Hawthorne had purchased at some time during the winter, while at work
+upon this novel, the house at Concord that he named The Wayside. It had
+belonged to Mr. Alcott, and was an ordinary country residence with about
+twenty acres of ground, part of which was a wooded hillside rising up
+steeply back of the house, which itself stood close to the road. The
+family took possession of this new home early in June, and it soon took
+on the habitual look of their domicile, which, wherever it might be, had
+a character of its own. Mrs. Hawthorne, as usual, was much pleased with
+everything, and wrote an enthusiastic account of its prettiness and
+comfort, though no important changes were then made in the house itself.
+She describes the "Study," and the passage, which is in a letter to her
+mother, gives the very atmosphere of the place:--
+
+"The study is the pet room, the temple of the Muses and the Delphic
+shrine. The beautiful carpet lays the foundation of its charms, and the
+oak woodwork harmonizes with the tint in which Endymion is painted. At
+last I have Endymion where I always wanted it--in my husband's study,
+and it occupies one whole division of the wall. In the corner on that
+side stands the pedestal with Apollo on it, and there is a
+fountain-shaped vase of damask and yellow roses. Between the windows is
+the Transfiguration [given by Mr. Emerson]. (The drawing-room is to be
+redeemed with one picture only,--Correggio's Madonna and Christ.) On
+another side of the Study are the two Lake Comos. On another, that
+agreeable picture of Luther and his family around the Christmas-tree,
+which Mr. George Bradford gave to Mr. Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson took Julian
+to walk in the woods, the other afternoon. I have no time to think what
+to say, for there is a dear little mob around me. Baby looks fairest of
+fair to-day. She walks miles about the house."
+
+No words but her own do justice to the happiness of her married life.
+She worshiped her husband, who always remained to her that combination
+of adorable genius and tender lover and strong man that he had been ten
+years before when they were wedded. He had been on his part as devoted
+to her, and especially he had never allowed the burden of poverty to
+fall upon her in any physical hardship. In the absence of servants, for
+example, he himself did the work, and would not permit her to task
+herself with it. He was never a self-indulgent man, except toward his
+genius; he had early learned the lesson of "doing without," as the
+phrase is, and she describes him as being "as severe as a Stoic about
+all personal comforts" and says he "never in his life allowed himself a
+luxury." Her testimony to his household character is a remarkable
+tribute, nor does it detract from it to remember that it is an encomium
+of love:--
+
+"He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do
+the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any
+more than it is to a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and
+a baby is not more unconscious in its innocence. I never knew such
+loftiness, so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in
+the most trivial household matter, any more than in a larger or more
+public one. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere, their
+wings are very strong. But I have never thought of him as in time, and
+so the Hours have nothing to do with him. Happy, happiest is the wife
+who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight
+years' intimate union. Such a person can never lose the prestige which
+commands and fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness,
+but, in a blissful kind of confusion, live on. If I can only be so
+great, so high, so noble, so sweet, as he in any phase of my being, I
+shall be glad."
+
+This was written in the Berkshire days, but it represents her habitual
+feeling at all times; and now, in the pleasant society of Concord and
+among the scenes which were endeared to their memory as those of their
+early married life, this strain of happiness often overflows in her
+letters like a flood of sunshine. "All that ground," she writes of the
+neighborhood of the Old Manse, "is consecrated to me by unspeakable
+happiness; yet not nearly so great happiness as I now have, for I am ten
+years happier in time, and an uncounted degree happier in kind. I know
+my husband ten years better, and I have not arrived at the end; for he
+is still an enchanting mystery, beyond the region I have discovered and
+made my own. Also, I know partly how happy I am, which I did not well
+comprehend ten years ago."
+
+One scene, out of scores that are contained in her correspondence, is
+too pretty and characteristic to miss, and, besides, serves by a single
+glimpse to give the home life of this new Concord sojourn with great
+vividness, yielding--what is the hardest of all to obtain in such
+intimate views--its quality, like a tone of color. It describes
+Hawthorne's return from a three weeks' absence at the Isles of Shoals
+during which he had also attended his class reunion at Bowdoin:--
+
+"I put the vase of delicious rosebuds, and a beautiful China plate of
+peaches and grapes, and a basket of splendid golden Porter apples on his
+table; and we opened the western door and let in a flood of sunsetting.
+Apollo's 'beautiful disdain' seemed kindled anew. Endymion smiled richly
+in his dream of Diana. Lake Como was wrapped in golden mist. The divine
+form in the Transfiguration floated in light. I thought it would be a
+pity if Mr. Hawthorne did not come that moment. As I thought this, I
+heard the railroad-coach--and he was here. He looked, to be sure, as he
+wrote in one of his letters, 'twice the man he was.'"
+
+Earlier in the summer this happy home had been shadowed by the tragedy
+of the death of Hawthorne's sister, Louisa, who was lost in a steamship
+disaster on the Hudson. Like all such natures, Hawthorne took his griefs
+hard and in loneliness; but in such a home healing influences were all
+about him, and even such a sorrow, which he deeply felt, could only add
+another silence to his life. His summer work, to which he had turned
+with reluctance and had rapidly finished by the end of August, was the
+campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, his life-long friend, who was now
+a candidate for the Presidency. It is a brief but sufficient book,
+[Footnote: _Life of Franklin Pierce_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
+Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. Pp. 144. 12mo.] done well though
+without distinction, and it holds no real place among his works. Much
+adverse criticism has, however, been made upon him for writing it at
+all. It is thought that as a man of letters he lost dignity by using his
+skill for a political end, and also that as a Northerner he placed
+himself upon the wrong side in the important public questions then
+coming to a great national crisis. This is an unjust view. It has
+already become plain, in the course of the story of his life, that he
+was not a reformer nor in any real sympathy with reform. He was not only
+not an abolitionist, which in itself, in view of the closeness of his
+association with the friends of the cause, argues great immobility in
+his character; he was, on the contrary, a Democrat in national politics,
+and took the party view of the slavery question, not with any energy,
+but placidly and stolidly, so far as one can judge. In fact he took
+little or no interest in the matter. There was no objection in his mind
+to writing the biography because of Pierce's political position; he did
+not hesitate on that score. He did not hang back, on the other hand,
+because he felt that he could not tell the truth about his friend in a
+book pledged to see only the good in him. He was as honest as the
+granite, so far as that is concerned; and he respected as well as loved
+his friend, and was quite willing to serve him by showing his life and
+character as he knew them. He had no intention to deceive any one by a
+eulogy. He indulged in no illusions about Pierce, nor about any of his
+other friends. He was, in fact, an unsparing critic of men's characters,
+and he had a trait, not rare in New England,--a willingness to underrate
+men and minimize them. His fellow-citizens are not natural
+hero-worshipers; to them "a man is a man, for a' that," with an accent
+that levels down as well as up. Hawthorne had to the full this
+democratic, familiar, derogatory temper. Pierce was to him a politician,
+just as Cilley had been, and for politicians as a class he had a
+well-defined contempt. He believed Pierce to be a man of honor,
+sagacity, and tact, a true man, not great in any way, but quite the
+equal of other men in the country and fit in ability, experience, and
+character to be President, if his fellow-citizens desired him to serve
+in that office. The biography Hawthorne wrote contains no conscious
+untruth. It cannot be thought that Hawthorne compromised with himself
+either with regard to the national question involved or to the personal
+character of the candidate. His reluctance to write the book had no
+deeper root than a dislike to seem to be paid for doing it by an office.
+He knew that Pierce would provide him with a lucrative post in any case;
+and the public would say that office was his pay. The prospect of this
+situation was so irksome to him that he decided beforehand to refuse the
+office, since he preferred rather to do that than to decline the request
+of his friend to oblige him with his literary service at such a crisis
+of his career. It is unjust to Hawthorne to suppose that the act had any
+political complexion, or was anything else than a mere piece of
+friendliness, natural and proper in itself; his association with the
+political group, of which Pierce was one, did not proceed from
+principle, but was an accident of college companionship; the fact is,
+however strange it may seem, he had no politics, but stood apart from
+the great antislavery cause just as he did from the transcendental
+philosophy; neither of these two main movements in the life of his times
+touched him at all in a personal way. It belongs to the shallowness of
+his objection to undertake the biography, his dislike to take office as
+a kind of pay, that it was easily removed. Fields very sensibly
+persuaded him that he should not neglect so favorable an opportunity to
+provide for his wife and children, who had no support but his life. When
+the newly elected President, therefore, offered him the best office in
+his gift, the Liverpool consulate, Hawthorne decided to take it. The
+nomination was confirmed March 26, 1853; and, after sending "Tanglewood
+Tales" to the press, which had been his winter's work, he prepared to
+leave Concord for a long residence abroad.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+LIFE ABROAD.
+
+
+Hawthorne left the Wayside home with a good deal of regret for its quiet
+happiness, and yet with pleasant anticipations of the opportunity of
+seeing foreign countries. He had the roaming instinct; and, though he
+had almost completed fifty years of life, its satisfaction had been of
+the slightest. It is necessary to recall how very little he had seen of
+the world in order to appreciate at all the way in which England and
+Italy looked to his middle-aged eyes, the points in which they failed to
+appeal to him as well as those in which they arrested his interest. With
+all his love, or at least sentiment, for the sea, this was the first
+voyage he had made, and finding himself a good sailor he enjoyed it
+immensely. It was the next thing to commanding a ship himself upon his
+ancestral element, and he felt the mystery and distance and that vague
+impression of indefinite time that belong to the ocean atmosphere,--the
+wish to sail on and on forever. In Liverpool, where he arrived in July,
+he was plunged at once into a confused mass of new impressions and also
+into the very mundane duties and surroundings of the consulate.
+
+The narrative of his European experiences in every aspect is fully told
+in the book of reminiscences "Our Old Home," which he published after
+his return, and in the voluminous note-books kept in his English,
+French, and Italian sojourns; and this long story is still further
+enlarged and varied by the letters of the family, and the recollections
+of his friends. It can be read in detail, and except as a story of
+detail it has very little interest. The essential point which belongs to
+his biography is to see how Hawthorne bore himself, the general
+impression made on him, the ways in which his character came out, in
+these novel circumstances. At first, he found the office itself very
+much an old story. In fact, as a matter of routine and a part of daily
+external affairs, the life of the consulate was that of the Boston coal
+wharf and the Salem Custom House over again. He repeated the history of
+these early experiences to the letter, except that he was no longer
+ridden with the idea that he must go to work in a material, every-day
+task in order to be a man among men; he was free from that delusion, but
+at the same time he welcomed the change of life. Politics had already
+begun to take on that unpleasantness for a Northern man of his
+affiliations which could make even so dull a participant as he was, in
+his sluggish conservatism, very uncomfortable; he had felt its rude
+censures and misapprehensions of delicate personal relations--such as
+existed between himself and President Pierce--disagreeably near at
+hand; and he was glad to get away from his native land, upon which
+before a year had passed he looked back with the feeling that he never
+desired to return to it. He did not enjoy England so much, however, as
+this might seem to indicate; and, especially, he did not enjoy his work,
+for, notwithstanding his philosophy of the usefulness of manual toil and
+regular occupation of an unliterary kind, the touch of work always
+disenchanted his mind at once. He liked it no better than on the two
+previous occasions at Boston and Salem; it bored and wearied him, and
+just as before, though he does not now complain of the fact, it put an
+end to his literary activity, paralyzed and sterilized his genius as
+completely as if it had blasted him with a curse. The difficulty of
+serving two masters, though it is sometimes thought to be a service
+peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's
+career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly
+than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered
+the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote
+vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition
+was the opiate it had always been for his higher imaginative and moral
+powers, and exercised only his faculty of observation. The fact that he
+does not complain of this state of affairs is due probably to his
+growing weariness of higher literary effort, the true power of his
+genius, which now had only an ebbing physical force for its basis. He
+was too much engaged in affairs, and too tired, to write; but he was not
+displeased to have so good an excuse, and perhaps his ambition was
+already really satisfied by the success he had achieved, and he felt the
+spur less.
+
+Altogether, the first and lasting impression made by his account of his
+life at Liverpool is that he was the same discontented employee who had
+chafed against circumstances before, and had not changed his mind with
+the skies over him. The expression of his moods has the old touch of
+irritability, too, in its excess of language, its air of confiding
+something that one would not say aloud, its half-conscious pettishness.
+In March, 1854, he writes to Bridge, in this character, though here
+possibly it is the presence of politics that is the disturbing factor:--
+
+"I like my office well enough, but any official duties and obligations
+are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will
+be a sufficient inducement to keep me here, though they are not above a
+quarter part what some people suppose them.
+
+"It sickens me to look back to America. I am sick to death of the
+continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad blood which we keep up
+about political topics. If it were not for my children I should probably
+never return, but--after quitting office--should go to Italy, and live
+and die there. If Mrs. Bridge and you would go, too, we might form a
+little colony amongst ourselves, and see our children grow up together.
+But it will never do to deprive them of their native land, which I hope
+will be a more comfortable and happy residence in their day than it has
+been in ours. In my opinion, we are the most miserable people on earth.
+
+"I wish you would send me the most minute particulars about Pierce--how
+he looks and behaves when you meet him, how his health and spirits
+are--and above all, what the public really thinks of him--a point which
+I am utterly unable to get at through the newspapers. Give him my best
+regards, and ask him whether he finds his post any more comfortable than
+I prophesied it would be."
+
+Another year's experience completed his dissatisfaction, and it had
+reached the familiar acute stage, as early as July, 1855, when he
+indited that well-known note to Mr. Bright, "the tall, slender,
+good-humored, laughing, voluble" English friend, who had done everything
+in the world to make him happy:--
+
+Dear Mr. Bright,--I have come back (only for a day or two) to this black
+and miserable hole.
+
+Truly yours, Nath. Hawthorne.
+
+There spoke the man, as if the sun had photographed him. It is true that
+he had a particular occasion for black spirits at the moment, inasmuch
+as the law reducing the emoluments of the office had just gone into
+effect, in consequence of which the wages of his slavery were much
+reduced. He was now very much disposed to resign. He had saved enough
+money to free his mind from any anxiety for the future, since he thought
+he could live on what he had with the exercise of economy; the health of
+Mrs. Hawthorne was somewhat impaired, and it was necessary to arrange a
+change of residence for her; and he was thoroughly weary of his English
+surroundings. The President offered him a post in the American Legation
+at Lisbon, but he declined to consider it; and finally the matter was
+settled by Mrs. Hawthorne spending the winter at Lisbon with O'Sullivan,
+who was minister there, while Hawthorne himself retained the consulate
+and remained in Liverpool, keeping Julian with him while the other two
+children accompanied their mother. Mrs. Hawthorne, after a delightful
+visit, returned much improved in health, and it was not until the autumn
+of 1857 that Hawthorne retired from office, after Buchanan became
+President.
+
+As a consul Hawthorne discharged his duties with fidelity and
+efficiency, and was in every way a satisfactory officer. He was diligent
+and attentive in business affairs, and he was especially considerate of
+the numbers of distressed citizens who naturally drifted into his care
+and notice, and was always conscientious and generous in dealing with
+them, while the burden was a heavy charge. The only matter that stands
+out notably in his official action is his interest in the inhumane
+treatment of sailors on American ships, and just before he left office
+he sent a long dispatch to his government in respect to it. His
+reflections on the subject, which are apposite and sensible enough, are
+of less interest biographically than a few sentences upon himself in
+this philanthropic character, which he wrote to his sister-in-law:--
+
+"I do not know what Sophia may have said about my conduct in the
+Consulate. I only know that I have done no good,--none whatever.
+Vengeance and beneficence are things that God claims for Himself. His
+instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they
+have, it is a pretty sure token that they are _not_ His
+instruments. The good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be
+attained by direct effort, but incidentally. All history and observation
+confirm this. I am really too humble to think of doing good! Now, I
+presume you think the abolition of flogging was a vast boon to seamen. I
+see, on the contrary, with perfect distinctness, that many murders and
+an immense mass of unpunishable cruelty--a thousand blows, at least, for
+every one that the cat-of-nine-tails would have inflicted--have resulted
+from that very thing. There is a moral in this fact which I leave you to
+deduce. God's ways are in nothing more mysterious than in this matter of
+trying to do good."
+
+This is the same voice that was heard in "The House of the Seven Gables"
+and "The Blithedale Romance," and shows how deep-seated was Hawthorne's
+antipathy to conscious philanthropy, and doubtless he meant Elizabeth
+Peabody as she read it to lay it to heart as an abolitionist.
+
+If Hawthorne observed much cruelty among the crews of American ships, he
+must have accepted it as a part of the general misery of the world with
+as much philosophy as he was master of, while he did his duty with
+regard to it according to his opportunities. He was well liked by the
+sea captains who came in contact with him. He had, indeed, a good
+previous training, inasmuch as his terms of service in the Custom House
+had made him familiarly acquainted with this seafaring type, to which he
+was also akin. He met the American captains not only at his office, but
+at the boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, where they resorted in numbers,
+and where he himself lived at various times, and during the whole period
+of his wife's absence in Portugal. This house is described by himself as
+strongly impregnated with tar and bilge-water, and the men as very much
+alive. He admired them, and thought they contrasted very favorably with
+Englishmen in vitality, and he liked to be with them. Just as he had
+associated happily and on equal terms with similar men whom he had known
+in his own country, and made good-fellowship with them at Salem, he now
+was a welcome and companionable member of this hardy group, which his
+son Julian remembered in its general look and quality, and describes in
+a smoking-room scene that makes this side of Hawthorne more lifelike
+than it appears elsewhere:--
+
+"The smoking-room was an apartment barely twenty feet square, though of
+a fair height; but the captains smoked a great deal, and by nine o'clock
+sat enveloped in a blue cloud. They played euchre with a jovial
+persistence that seems wonderful in the retrospect, especially as there
+was no gambling. The small boys in the house (there were two or three)
+soon succeeded in mastering the mysteries of the game, and occasionally
+took a hand with the captains. Hawthorne was always ready to play, and
+used to laugh a great deal at the turns of fortune. He rather enjoyed
+card-playing, and was a very good hand at whist; and knew, besides, a
+number of other games, many of which are now out of fashion, but which
+he, I suppose, had learned in his college days. Be the diversion or the
+conversation what it might, he was never lacking in geniality and
+good-fellowship; and sparkles of wit and good humor continually came
+brightening out of his mouth, making the stalwart captains haw-haw
+prodigiously, and wonder, perhaps, where his romances came from.
+Nevertheless, in his official capacity, he sometimes made things (in
+their own phrase) rather lively for them; and it is a tribute to his
+unfailing good sense and justice, that his enforcement of the law never
+made him unpopular."
+
+Christmas Day was an occasion of special festivity at this
+boarding-house, and that of 1855 was unusually distinguished in its
+annals by the presence of Hawthorne and the legend of the merry-making
+about him which his friend Bright put into his clever rhymes of the
+"Song of Consul Hawthorne." Whether in his office, or at the
+boarding-house, or going about the docks at Liverpool, "Consul
+Hawthorne" was evidently a very typical New Englander abroad, and
+popular with his own people. He had laid the author off, and was as
+purely a practical man of nautical affairs as would be found in any
+shipping office in the city; and it needed no close observer to see that
+the native element in him was of a very obstinate and unmalleable
+nature.
+
+It has been suggested that Hawthorne was afraid of liking English people
+better than an American ought, as he says he suspects Grace Greenwood
+did:--
+
+"She speaks rapturously of the English hospitality and warmth of heart.
+I likewise have already experienced something of this, and apparently
+have a good deal more of it at my option. I wonder how far it is
+genuine, and in what degree it is better than the superficial good
+feeling with which Yankees receive foreigners,--a feeling not calculated
+for endurance, but a good deal like a brushwood fire. We shall see!"
+
+He had abundant opportunity to see, for he was very kindly received by
+the society which it was natural for him to mingle with, and several of
+his hosts were untiring in their efforts to please him and render him
+comfortable. He was by no means incapable of social intercourse,
+notwithstanding his retired habits; the capacity had never been
+developed by early breeding or by later necessity, and though on his
+return home, the change in him was noticeable, even under the influence
+of his foreign travels he remained a silent, difficult, and evasive
+person in society. When he was among his own old and familiar friends,
+such as Bridge or Pierce, or with new companions whom he accepted into
+his circle, such as Fields, he was open enough and took his share
+genially and sometimes jovially, as well as when he was with the
+American sea captains or his old associates in Salem; but the touch of
+social formality, the presence of a stranger, the ways and habits of
+conventionality shut him up in impenetrable reserve and made him
+temporarily miserable. In England, however, he was compelled to meet and
+be met in the ordinary intercourse of men and women, and he fared much
+better than might have been anticipated. Very greatly to the surprise of
+his friends he proved an excellent after-dinner speaker, not only on the
+public occasions where the sense of his official station as a
+representative of his country would have spurred him to acquit himself
+well, but also at private parties and in purely personal relations. Like
+many silent men he was a good listener, and his sensitiveness and mental
+alertness gave the impression of more sympathy than perhaps he felt. He
+made himself agreeable, at all events, and he submitted to an amount of
+human fellowship that was astonishing to himself. The novelty of the
+society he entered, doubtless, attracted him, and fed his curiosity, as
+it certainly was an excitement to his wife. They had lived all their
+lives in a community so much simpler in all the furnishings of refined
+living, so much less characterized by the material luxuries of wealth,
+than this in which they now found themselves, that the mere sight of the
+houses, dinners, and liveries was a new experience, and they observed
+them like country cousins. The manners of this society, also, arrested
+their attention. It was inevitable that Hawthorne should maintain an
+aloofness from all this, nevertheless, with the natural democratic
+questioning of the reality of the courtesy, the propriety of the system,
+the kind and quality of the social results. He felt the appeal that this
+life made, he perceived its fitness to the soil, he saw it as a growth
+that belonged in its place; but he was thoroughly glad that there was
+nothing like it in his own country. There is not the slightest hint in
+any word of his that he regarded himself as an ambassador of friendship
+in a foreign country or thought that it was any part of his duty to
+cultivate international good feeling: he felt himself politically,
+socially, fundamentally, an alien in England, and he preferred to be so;
+what first struck him were those obvious differences that distinguish
+the two peoples, and these remained most prominently in his mind. He was
+a stranger when he landed at Liverpool, and he never suffered the least
+tincture of naturalization while he was in the country.
+
+This attitude determines the point of view in his notes and
+reminiscences. He was an observer, close and accurate and interested;
+but he had not that sympathy which seeks to understand, to interpret, to
+justify what one sees, and to put one's self in accord with it. He had
+his standards already well fixed, and his limitations which he was not
+sufficiently aware of to desire to escape. He had, too, the critical
+spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural
+attendant, the habit of speaking his mind. In writing down his
+impressions of English manners and institutions and people, he behaved
+exactly as he had done in his records of similar things at home; there
+was no difference in his method or in the character of what he said; he
+was telling what he saw with that indifference to how it would strike
+other people which comes near to being unconsciousness. He was a good
+deal surprised when he discovered that the English did not relish what
+he said; he protested that he had done them more than justice, that they
+were too easily hurt, and as for hating them, he adds, "I would as soon
+hate my own people." There is no ill-nature in "Our Old Home;" there is
+only the clearly expressed, bare, unsympathetic statement of what he had
+seen, touched here and there with that irony and humor which were apt to
+mix with his view of men and things. So the people at Salem had thought
+he did them injustice in his sketch of his native home, and he in turn
+had told them that he had treated them very considerately, without
+enmity or ill feeling of any kind, and in fact what he had written
+"could not have been done in a better or kindlier spirit nor with a
+livelier effect of truth." He had written of England in precisely the
+same way, with that remorseless adherence to his own impression which
+was second nature to him, and with that willingness to see the wrong
+side of things that he disliked, to minimize human nature when it bored
+him, and to get a grim humor out of his victims, which was also a part
+of his endowment. In all this, as in some other parts of Hawthorne's
+personality, there is a reminder of Carlyle. The hard judgment he wrote
+down of Margaret Fuller, for example, and the humorous extravagance of
+his visit to Martin Tupper, are not to be paralleled except in Carlyle's
+reminiscences; there was the same unflinching rigor, the same cold
+obtuseness, the same half-wearied contempt for what excited their humor
+in both men. In his vexation of spirit Hawthorne is especially
+suggestive of some discomfortable cousinship between them; and he was
+often vexed in spirit. He was, it would seem, especially burdened by the
+material comfort of England, in which he found a grossness but little
+consonant with his own taste and spirit, and he made of this the type of
+things English, as it is easy to do:--
+
+"The best thing a man born in this island can do is to eat his beef and
+mutton and drink his porter, and take things as they are; and think
+thoughts that shall be so beefish, muttonish, portish, and porterish,
+that they shall be matters rather material than intellectual. In this
+way an Englishman is natural, wholesome, and good; a being fit for the
+present time and circumstances, and entitled to let the future alone!"
+
+The ascetic and intellectual element, which was large in his ideal past,
+was revolted by these things, just as the democratic instincts of his
+nature were shocked by the aristocratic system of society with its
+social results. He was, too, always in a certain sense homesick; not
+that he was anxious to go home or looked forward to his return with
+great pleasure, but he was a man out of place, and had lost the natural
+harmonies between the outer and the inner life. He had taken a house at
+Rock Park, a suburb of Liverpool, but he could not make a home out of
+it, and his account of his residence there gives the whole interior
+atmosphere of his English stay.
+
+"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 mantelpiece, 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."
+
+It is plain to see that he rather endured than enjoyed English life,
+notwithstanding the true pleasures he found and the kind friends he
+made. He was a stranger, taking a stranger's view and with much
+suspicion of his surroundings, anticipating something hostile in them
+and forestalling it with his own defenses not too friendly in aspect; in
+a word he was a foreigner, and he never lost the sense of being in a
+country not his own, to which he felt superior in all essential matters.
+
+Some regret has been expressed that he did not come into closer contact
+with English literary life, and especially with the more famous writers
+of the day. He did not even make the acquaintance of Dickens, Thackeray,
+Tennyson, Carlyle, George Eliot, to name the most important, nor was he
+really introduced to the best intellectual life of England at all. He
+met several second-rate writers, and he knew the Brownings more
+particularly in Italy. It is not likely, however, that much was lost by
+this failure to get into touch with the great masters of his own art or
+with English thinkers and poets in general. Hawthorne had never cared
+for such society in his own country, and it was probably by his own
+choice that he missed the literary sets in London. The distaste that he
+felt for society seems to have taken an aggravated form where his own
+craft was concerned, whether through self-consciousness, or the memory
+of his years of obscurity, or for whatever reason; perhaps he had known
+authors enough at Concord and had no spirit of adventure left in that
+direction. His own genius was solitary, and in his friendships literary
+sympathy had no share, for he neither received nor gave it; in fact, if
+he became familiar with an author, such as Thoreau or Ellery Channing or
+Herman Melville, it was with the man, not the author. The terms on which
+he stood with Longfellow and Emerson are those on which, at the
+happiest, he might have met Thackeray, Tennyson, or Carlyle; but, though
+speculation must be vain, it is far more probable that he would have
+found little congeniality with any one of the three. Lord Houghton
+appears to have made an effort to take him about, but with so little
+success that he thought Hawthorne had taken a dislike to him. As it was,
+Hawthorne saw quite enough, and more than he desired, of literary
+England; it was mostly weariness to him.
+
+It must be acknowledged that the manners and institutions of the
+country, and its people for the most part, were little to Hawthorne's
+taste, and he showed this in his book about them; but, for all that, he
+found the country interesting and often lovely in its picturesque
+antiquity and softnesses of light and color, and he appreciated to the
+full the literary and historical sentiment that most appeals to
+Americans of like education and breeding. He made many excursions in
+different parts of England, and visited Scotland and the Isle of Man,
+and he lingered in many towns and villages and was disposed to haunt old
+places with a pilgrim devotion. He loved the face of the country, too,
+and notwithstanding its misted and dreary skies, especially over
+Liverpool, he found some good words for its weather, its seasons, its
+long days, and all its out-door look. He went about with the mind and
+senses of a tourist, satiating his instincts for minute and detailed
+observation and writing it all down; in a spirit, too, of enjoyment and
+discovery; and out of this satisfaction of his inveterate habits of
+observing and noting and walking about with no other end in view, just
+as if he were taking an autumn stroll in Salem, came the felicity of the
+English notes, which after all deductions is very great in its own field
+of delicate sentiment and realistic grasp and the atmosphere of a mind.
+Hawthorne was thoroughly happy in indulging his wandering propensity in
+such voyages of discovery; especially in London he found a city that
+satisfied his idea of it, and he seems to have busied himself there for
+days and weeks in merely going about from point to point and seeing the
+spectacle of its vast and varied life. Hawthorne's English experiences
+will, perhaps, be best realized, if he is thought of apart from
+literature, as a man much identified with the shipping interests and
+commercial society of Liverpool, and attending to this business rather
+doggedly and wearily, not especially liking the place or the people,
+whose ways and notions he was instinctively against, being himself a
+settled New Englander of a strong race type; and yet, besides this, a
+man who managed in his four years' residence to see a great deal of the
+length and breadth of England, as a summer tourist might visit its
+shrines on pilgrimage. This describes his life, nevertheless, only from
+the outside; as soon as one opens his note-books, his personality
+changes the impression, and pervades even his least sympathetic pages
+with a human quality that wins on the reader in spite of all
+reservations, and one sees how in the face of his prejudices and
+limitations England was saved to him by his literary faculty, the
+interests, susceptibilities, and powers that were his as a man of
+letters. One finds in his experience, too, besides the consul and the
+man of letters, a kindly and simple manhood of a more primitive element,
+the human heart in its own original right, as in the well-known incident
+of the workhouse child who was so strangely drawn to him. Of the humane
+actions, however, of which any record remains, none is so honorable as
+his considerateness, generosity, and conscientiousness in his
+correspondence with Delia Bacon, whom he endured and befriended with
+infinite patience and delicacy; the letters which he wrote to her show
+his character in a very noble light, and bring out one side of his life
+which has little illustration, his habitual thoughtfulness for the weak.
+One recalls his care for his Brook Farm friend Farley at Concord, for
+example; and all his relations with what one may call the wayside
+acquaintance of life were to his honor.
+
+One other incident must also find a place here, which completes an
+earlier story and rounds out his own conception of integrity. On coming
+to Liverpool he had incurred heavy expenses, but six months of his more
+fortunate days had not gone by before he sent to Hillard the money which
+his friends had given to him in his sore need at Salem while he was
+writing "The Scarlet Letter." His own words best express the feelings
+which led him to make this restitution:--
+
+Liverpool, _December 9, 1853._
+
+Dear Hillard,--I herewith send you a draft on Ticknor for the sum (with
+interest included) which was so kindly given me by unknown friends,
+through you, about four years ago.
+
+I have always hoped and intended to do this, from the first moment when
+I made up my mind to accept the money. It would not have been right to
+speak of this purpose before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it
+has never been out of my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for
+a single working hour. I am most happy that this loan (as I may fairly
+call it, at this moment) can now be repaid without the risk on my part
+of leaving my wife and children utterly destitute. I should have done it
+sooner; but I felt that it would be selfish to purchase the great
+satisfaction for myself, at any fresh risk to them. We are not rich, nor
+are we ever likely to be; but the miserable pinch is over.
+
+The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not
+felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this
+pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all
+along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an
+unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured
+that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did
+me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of
+sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for
+myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even
+at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his
+fellow-creatures, beyond bread and water and a grave, unless he can win
+it by his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those
+unknown friends whom I thank again with all my heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This money must have been the first he had saved, and he could now spare
+it from his income. In the four years that he held the consulate he had
+held to his main purpose of laying by a competency, and when he
+resigned, on August 31, 1857, his mind was at ease with regard to the
+future for himself and his family. His gratitude for this late won
+independence, humble as it was, must have been deeply felt, as is
+apparent from his letters at the time; a great weight had been lifted
+from his spirit, and his happiness was such as only a man with his ideas
+of personal independence could realize. He proposed now to linger in
+Europe for some time longer; and when he was relieved from his duties in
+the fall he went with the family through France to Italy, hoping that
+the southern winter would be of benefit to Mrs. Hawthorne's still
+uncertain health.
+
+Life in Italy proved far more agreeable than it had been in England, and
+there were periods in it when Hawthorne enjoyed as great happiness in
+the placid course of the days as he ever experienced. For the first time
+in his life he was free from the necessity of labor, and he had recently
+escaped from that practical business of affairs and daily duties which
+was always irksome to him. The change, too, from the dark skies of
+England and its grimy Liverpool materialism to an atmosphere of sun and
+warmth and artistic beauty was itself enough to reanimate his spirit;
+and he found at once some congenial society, and not a few who seemed to
+him like old friends. He appears for the first time in his life really
+to live with other people, not as an occasional visitant coming out of
+his hermitage, but as one of themselves. He sought out Story, who was an
+old neighbor at Salem, though he had known him only slightly, and under
+his guidance he mixed with the American artists then in Rome,--Miss
+Hosmer, Thompson, Kopes, and Miss Lander,--as well as with others of the
+foreigners resident there, Miss Bremer, Mrs. Jameson, and Bryant among
+the rest; and he became good friends with Motley and his family, whose
+companionship he enjoyed in a very natural, frank way. The picturesque
+ruins of Home, its gardens and fountains and the sky and air appealed to
+him, as if to new senses or at least to senses newly awakened and
+developed; and he was sensibly attracted by the artistic works on every
+hand. He was not wholly uncultivated in art, though his aesthetic sense
+had been rather a hope than a reality all through his life. He had
+written to his wife before marriage, nearly twenty years ago, "I never
+owned a picture in my life; yet pictures have been among the earthly
+possessions (and they are spiritual ones too) which I most coveted;" and
+in his tales there is a recurring reference to pictures as a part of his
+imaginative world. The influence of his wife's artistic tastes in his
+home life had also been a kind of preparation for appreciation of the
+masterpieces, many of which had long been familiar to his eyes and
+thoughts in reproductions. In his Boston days he use to visit such
+collections of pictures as were accessible to him, and he knew sculpture
+somewhat through casts. Such cultivation, however, was at best a very
+limited and incomplete preparation, and did not preserve him from the
+tourist's weariness of galleries. He had wished in London that the Elgin
+marbles had all been reduced to lime. There was something pictorial in
+his genius, but painting was slower to give up its secrets to him than
+sculpture, which, being a more abstract art and simpler in intention, as
+well as nearer to the living form, made the easier appeal to him. He did
+not respond to Italian painting very perfectly at the best, and his
+education hardly proceeded farther than an appreciation of the softer
+and brighter works of Guido and Raphael, nor did he ever free himself
+from the intellectual prepossessions of his mind. He did not become even
+an amateur in art, and he probably knew it; he had begun too late to
+enter that world; and he contented himself with a moral sympathy, an
+apprehension of idea and feeling, rather than the seeing eye and
+understanding heart by which one takes possession of the artistic world
+as a free citizen there. It was not an important matter, however; his
+comments on art have only a personal interest, lighting up his own
+nature; but, within his limits, he enjoyed a new and great experience,
+one that illumined and softened his mind, in his wanderings about the
+galleries and churches and his sittings in artists' studios. The
+contemporary and native world of Italy he attended to but very little,
+noting its picturesque aspects somewhat, but taking the slightest
+interest in its people; if he had felt a barrier between himself and the
+English, here was a gulf of difference that it was hopeless to attempt
+to pass over, and he left the Italians in the inaccessible foreignness
+in which he found them.
+
+The first four months were spent at Rome, in this gradual opening of his
+mind to the new impressions of the city, so fascinating to his
+imagination, and in establishing himself and his family in the new
+society of their daily life. Late in May, 1858, they went north by the
+carriage road, and settled at Florence in the Casa Bella, near Casa
+Guidi, where the Brownings were, and not far from Powers's studio. In
+August they took possession of the old villa of Montaüto on the hill of
+Bellosguardo, near the city, which is so closely associated with
+Hawthorne's Italian days as the tower of Monte Beni. Here he began to
+write "The Marble Faun," shutting himself up for an hour or two every
+day in the stern effort, as he describes it, of coming "to close grip
+with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind." The
+scene of his labors was quite remote, such a place as he liked to have
+to write in, and he was undisturbed unless it were by the Spiritualism
+of the Browning villa, where Mrs. Browning was a believer; and, perhaps
+under the influence of this association, Mrs. Hawthorne showed more
+plainly her natural inclination to a more than curious interest in the
+phenomena. She was, indeed, somewhat a believer in the power of
+communication with the spiritual world, and its near presence and
+influence in our lives. The seclusion of the villa of Montaüto was very
+grateful to Hawthorne, and he writes of it to Fields with almost a
+home-feeling, as if he had again found a lodging place at least for his
+wandering Penates:--
+
+"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 me 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."
+
+The kind of life that was led by the family is more vividly sketched by
+his daughter in her reminiscences of the time, and her pages afford the
+only full companion picture to those of the Old Manse and the Berkshire
+cottage, and to some extent supply the lack of that autobiographic
+background to "The Marble Faun" which the reader misses in Hawthorne's
+own preface.
+
+"The walls of the hall and staircase were of gray stone, as were the
+steps which led echoingly up to the second story of the house. My sister
+exclaims in delight concerning the whole scene: 'This villa,--you have
+no idea how delightful it is! I think there must be pretty nearly a
+hundred rooms in it, of all shapes, sizes, and heights. The walls are
+never less than five feet thick, and sometimes more, so that it is
+perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live here always. I am
+sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the morning freshness. Oh,
+how I love every inch of that beautiful landscape!' The tower and the
+adjacent loggia were the features that preëminently sated our thirst for
+suggestive charm, and they became our proud boast and the chief
+precincts of our daily life and social intercourse. The ragged gray
+giant looked over the road-walls at its foot, and beyond and below them
+over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with azure distance, and touched with
+the delicate dark of trees. Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough
+old king of the days of the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was
+dusty, broken, and somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every
+wrinkle of despair and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices
+in the deserted rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the
+unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these
+unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the
+other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In
+contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares
+of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian
+heavens and countryside....
+
+"Some of the rooms at Montaüto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern
+of a parlor, or ballroom, I remember to have seen only once. There was a
+painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls
+were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen
+cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that
+told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the
+room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of
+all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre
+apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by the force
+of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my sister, who was
+courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved of this corner of
+her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied
+spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the
+wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In 'Monte Beni'
+this oratory is minutely pictured, where 'beneath the crucifix ... lay a
+human skull ... carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done ... with
+accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns.'
+Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montaüto, for
+my father's romance."
+
+Amid such surroundings the new romance was sketched out, but not very
+much progress could have been made with it. In October the family
+returned to Rome by way of Siena, where some happy days were spent with
+Story,--a town which impressed Hawthorne almost temperamentally,
+standing apart in his mind with Perugia. "A thoughtful, shy man," he
+says, "might settle down here with the view of making the place a home,
+and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness." At Rome they
+settled again in the Piazza Poli, and entered on the winter days with
+much happiness, feeling acquainted now and partly at home in the city.
+But a misfortune came to them in the illness of Una, who was taken with
+Roman fever, and her life was despaired of. Hawthorne always took his
+sorrows hard, and he suffered much in this period of anxiety, enduring
+in his stoic way the heavy pressure; happily the doctor proved mistaken
+in his confidence that the child would die, and though her illness was
+long, she gradually recovered strength. It was during her convalescence
+that Pierce came to Rome, and Hawthorne found in his friendship a great
+support and comfort. It is plain that Pierce was the only man that
+Hawthorne loved with his full heart, and he had come to recognize the
+great place this friendship held in his life. His loyalty to Pierce was
+a true tribute, and its expression does honor to both men:--
+
+"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 favor, 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 illness of Una had thrown a shadow over these last days at Rome, and
+it was in any case necessary to take her away. In a characteristic
+outburst Hawthorne writes to Fields:--
+
+"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever;
+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."
+
+They left Rome late in May and went by sea to Marseilles, and after a
+rapid journey up the Rhone and to Geneva went by Paris to London. The
+return to England was somewhat like homecoming, and during this second
+residence Hawthorne shows a more sympathetic and contented spirit. He
+determined to finish his romance here, and settled first at Whitby and
+afterwards at Redcar, and still later he migrated to Leamington; but the
+romance was mainly put into shape at Redcar, where the necessary
+conditions of solitude were best realized. He lived very much as when he
+had written his other works at home, writing in the morning and spending
+the rest of the day with the children out of doors on the sands. He
+finished the book on November 8, and it was published early the
+following spring. [Footnote: _The Marble Faun_, or the Romance of
+Monte Beni. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter."
+Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1860. 12mo. 2 vols., pp. 283; 288.]
+
+Hawthorne came to the writing of "The Marble Faun" after his genius was
+matured, with his temperament fully ripened, his intellectual and moral
+and artistic nature consonant in its varied play, and at the height of
+his literary powers. The story is in one sense a culmination, and it is
+perhaps his most complete expression of life; but it is less
+characteristic of him, less peculiarly his own, than the American tales,
+notwithstanding its greater breadth, its finer beauty, and its more
+profound mystery. In method he develops nothing new; the scheme, the
+manner, the tone are the same already made familiar. He had recourse to
+his life abroad for the realism of the scene, and took out of his
+note-books and memory the whole visible world of his romance, precisely
+as he had formerly utilized the New England village life and the Brook
+Farm experience. He has drunk in the charm of Italy and absorbed the
+picturesque and artistic atmosphere of Rome and its religious
+impressiveness; he has taken most delicately and harmoniously into his
+sensitive temperament the loveliness and the power of both the world of
+the past and the world of art, and he renders them back in description
+as they were mirrored in himself; the stir of Roman life, its antiquity,
+its still and immutable forms of picture and sculpture, are given back
+with full sympathy and as clearly as the autumn woodland of the old
+Puritan town in his first romance; and this realism, for such it is
+notwithstanding its glamour, is the substance of the tale, though it is
+all surface, just as was the case with "The House of the Seven Gables."
+He has done for Rome and Italy what he there did for Salem, different as
+the effect may seem, owing to the greater nobility and dignity of the
+material.
+
+He has also in the management of the story confined himself, as was his
+wont, to a few characters, Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon, each
+strictly isolated in peculiar individuality, and offering the
+opportunity for powerful contrasts; and he has allowed his imagination
+to find its spring in the symbolism of a physical object, here the
+marble statue of the faun, and let his moral scheme evolve out of the
+brooding of his thought upon the spiritual thing thus suggested for the
+play of meditation. The plot itself, though more definitely disclosed in
+its main incident of crime, which is made central in the narrative, is
+of the simplest sort, and no more than enough to provide corporal fact
+sufficient to give the body of event and situation; and, for the rest,
+the story both before and after is left wholly vague, the mystery of
+Donatello's fate repeating the mystery of Miriam's past. In this he
+showed again his indifference to what became of his characters when they
+had fulfilled their function artistically; he had no human sympathy with
+their personal fortunes. This peculiarity is only another phase of the
+fact that crime itself did not interest him in its mortal career. The
+use he found in crime was only as the means by which sin was generated
+in the soul; and his concern was with the latter, not the former.
+
+He has projected on such a background and out of such a group of
+characters an analytic study of the nature of evil, and this is his main
+theme, overlaid as it is with all the decorative beauty of his
+interpretation of Italy. He had formerly set forth the history of sin in
+the heart, taking the evil for granted and reflecting upon it as a thing
+given; he now looks backward and is engaged with the genesis of sin in a
+natural man, the coming of sin into the world of nature; and yet this is
+not all, but he endeavors to think about the meaning of evil, the reason
+for sin's existence, the old problem fundamental in thought about the
+spiritual life. It cannot be regarded as a matter on which he came to
+any satisfactory conclusion or even uttered any novel reflections; and
+it is this that gives its lack of firmness to the work on the ethical
+side. Donatello is made into a living soul of a higher capacity by his
+experience of crime; but Hawthorne suggests that evil serves a good
+purpose in this only with much reluctance, and indeed he may almost be
+said to reject this explanation. Donatello became "a sadder and a wiser
+man," and with that old phrase the issue for him seems to be summed. It
+is noticeable that, as in "The Scarlet Letter," there is no question of
+how this soul that has come into a miserable consciousness is to be
+healed; and it is remarkable that the only consolation the Church can
+give is vouchsafed by Hawthorne to the heretic Hilda, but not to the
+child of its own bosom. Hawthorne, if he indicates through Kenyon his
+ideas, seems to advise, as elsewhere, letting the dead past bury its
+dead while Donatello and Miriam should go on to what self-sacrificing
+life they can find. Unsatisfactory as the story is, merely as a tale, it
+is less vague than the central truth, the moral theme which it embodies.
+The truth is that after all, in the ethical sphere of the story,
+Hawthorne has given no more than his meditations, very much at random,
+upon sin as it appears in the world of nature, and the way in which his
+chosen characters react under its influence. Hilda is as innocent as
+Donatello, but her soul frees itself from the contact; and Miriam is as
+guilty, yet she alone is unaffected by the crime in her essential
+nature, so far as appears. She is the most vital character in the book,
+having touches in her of both Hester and Zenobia; the three women are
+all of one kind in their different environment, and Miriam is the most
+human of the three,--strong, assertive, practical as they all are, and
+also entirely resourceless in their tragedies.
+
+The romance is not of a kind to sustain very firm critical handling, for
+its structure is thus weak, not merely in the plot but in its ethical
+meaning; if the former is left unwrought, so the latter is left
+unclarified. The power of the work lies rather in its artistic effects,
+independent of any purpose Hawthorne had in writing; his genius was
+creative in its own right, and when he had once brought the background,
+the characters, and the idea together, they in a certain sense took life
+and built up their own story, while his hand linked picture to picture
+in the unfolding scene, with a free play of sentiment, fancy, and
+meditation round about them. Intense points show out, as if by an inner
+and undesigned brilliancy. The companionship of Donatello, full of the
+freshness and laughter of the early world, with Miriam tracked by her
+own terrible secret, is itself a startling situation, and the effecting
+of their union by a crime, which paralyzes the love of one while it
+creates the love of the other, is the work of a master imagination.
+Hilda in her dove-cote, keeping the perpetual lamp burning at the
+Virgin's shrine and taking into her heart the lovely pictures of old
+time as a pool reflects heaven in its quiet depths, is a figure of
+sensitive purity, rendered symbolically, with the same truth and
+delicacy as Donatello, though so opposed in contrast to his natural
+innocence blighted and stained; even the quality of mercilessness, which
+Hawthorne gave her out of his own heart, she turns to favor and to
+prettiness, till it seems to belong to her as a part of her chastity of
+nature. The reduplication of the characters in the world of art about
+them, though it is frequently resorted to by Hawthorne, does not grow
+monotonous; but by this method he rather animates the external world, as
+if picture and statue and tower had absorbed life and were permeated
+with its human emotion. The faun is, perhaps, a somewhat hard symbol,
+and needs to be vitalized in Donatello before its truth is felt to be
+alive; but the drawing that reproduces the model as the demon's face,
+the sketches of Miriam portraying a woman's revengeful mischief, the
+sights that Donatello and Kenyon shape out of the sunset, the
+benediction of the statue of the pontiff, the evasive eyes of Beatrice
+felt in Hilda, Donatello, and Miriam, are instances of borrowed or
+attributed life, which illustrate how constantly and effectively
+Hawthorne uses this means of expression, and it is the chief means by
+which he has integrated and harmonized the various material into a whole
+artistically felt. It is an error, however, to force his interpretation
+too far, as in the attempt to see in the Beatrice portrait a shadow of
+Miriam's mystery; if such a thought crossed his mind, it left no record
+of itself, and he was as ignorant as others of Miriam's actual past, one
+may be sure. That unwillingness to be gazed upon, of which he makes so
+much, recurring to it again and again and most pointedly in Donatello,
+was the simplest and primary symbol to him, apparently, of the shock of
+sin, whether it were in the victim like Beatrice or the participant like
+Donatello or the spectator like Hilda. In Miriam it is less felt,
+because to her the knowledge of evil had come in her earlier career.
+
+It is in rendering this spiritual shock, disturbing the very seat of
+life, that Hawthorne best succeeds in the moral part of his subject; and
+it is by awakening some answering vibration in his readers that he
+imparts to the romance that universal interest which makes it rank so
+high as it does in the literature of the soul's life. He was not,
+however, very apt in the mechanics of his art, and in lieu of structure
+such as a man of far less faculty might be an adept in, he finds in his
+imagined tale a principle of life itself; his work is seldom well
+reasoned, but it has vital germs of thought, emotion, and action, and
+these are loosed into activity and grow of themselves, and he fosters
+and develops them in his richly brooding mind. So, here, the spiritual
+shock, which is the central spring of the romance, is allowed to
+transmit itself in every direction, and he lays bare its workings. It is
+saddest in Donatello in the moment when he heard the cry of the falling
+wretch, when he turned cold at Miriam's touch, when he lost his kinship
+with the wild creatures he loved; and it is fixed in his unquiet,
+evasive eyes. One loves Donatello, and of no other character of
+Hawthorne can it be said that it wins affection; and one wishes that, if
+he must have a soul, he might have come into it in some way of natural
+kindness dissociated from a moral theory. This theory--and here is the
+one discord--is, after all, felt to be an exotic in the Italian air.
+Donatello has been puritanized, and though the character may be a
+perfect symbolic type, it has nothing racial in it; and to be racial was
+Donatello's charm. It is the same wherever the story is taken up; it is
+charming as an artistic work, but when one begins to think about it, the
+method of approach is proved to be wrong because it solves nothing and
+ends in futility. It is throughout a Puritan romance, which has wandered
+abroad and clothed itself in strange masquerade in the Italian air.
+Hawthorne's personality pervades it, like life in a sensitive hand. It
+is the best and fullest and most intimate expression of his temperament,
+of the man he had come to be, and takes the imprint of his soul with
+minute delicacy and truth. It is a meditation on sin, but so made
+gracious with beauty as to lose the deformity of its theme; and it
+suffers a metamorphosis into a thing of loveliness. To us it is in
+boyhood our dream of Italy, and in after years the best companion of
+memory; it is also a romance of nature and art, and of the mystery of
+evil, shot through with such sunshine gleams, with the presence of pure
+color and divine forms, as to seem like the creations of that old mythic
+Mediterranean world which, though it held shapes of terror, was the most
+beautiful land that the imagination has ever known.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+LAST YEARS.
+
+
+Hawthorne reached Concord, on his home journey, late in June, 1860, and
+took possession of the Wayside almost unobserved. He had intended to
+improve the house and grounds, and set about the task; the well-known
+tower, in memory of the tower of Montaüto, was added for his study, and
+some other changes were made, but his funds, which were diminished by an
+unfortunate loan, were insufficient to enable him to do all he desired.
+He was welcomed by his old Concord friends, and began again the
+agreeable village life he had formerly known; but he mingled more on
+equal terms with other people than had been his custom before his
+foreign residence had forced him into some share of society. He went not
+infrequently to the Saturday Club in Boston, and though always a silent
+and reserved person in such gatherings, his enjoyment of these occasions
+was as great as he could ever derive from literary companionship, and
+many of the members were old and familiar acquaintances. It was at home,
+however, that he spent his days, working in his study over his writing,
+and pacing the footpath on the hill-ridge back of his house, and from
+time to time going to the seaside at Beverly or in Maine with his son
+Julian for a companion. His health was not so firm as it had been. A
+change seems to have fallen on him with some suddenness on his return to
+America; for some years, ever since the hard winter of "The Scarlet
+Letter" at Salem, he had complained of fatigue in writing and of
+lassitude and slowness of mind; after the winter in Rome he felt this
+with new weariness, as he says when he practically ended his notebooks
+in Switzerland, not having the vital impulse to continue them, and in
+the intervening time he had completed "The Marble Faun;" now he began
+perceptibly to lose physical force, to grow thin, and to lack energy. He
+wrote a good deal, sitting down to his desk and "blotting successive
+sheets of paper as of yore;" but with little satisfaction to himself.
+
+The times were unfavorable to peace of mind and the quiet of literary
+occupation. Secession began soon after he arrived, and war followed in
+the spring with that outburst of passionate devotion to the Union which
+was transforming all his neighborhood into a camp and sending all the
+youth of his people to the battle southward. To Hawthorne, being in such
+imperfect sympathy with this feeling and the causes which gave it
+passion, the war was only vexation and disaster, with much
+meaninglessness, foolishness, uselessness, however he might try to look
+at it with Northern eyes. In nothing is his natural detachment from life
+so marked as in this incapacity to understand the national life in so
+supreme a crisis and under the impulse of so profound a passion. He
+stood aloof from it, unmoved in his superannuated conservatism, as
+abroad he had stood aloof from the English life wrapped in his
+imperturbable New England breeding. He was obliged to take some stand in
+his own mind, and he naturally went with his own State, never having
+been really an American, on the national scale, but only a New
+Englander, as he confessed. During his life at Liverpool, four years
+before, he had made up his mind which side he would be on, when the
+prospect of war began to loom up as a possibility, and wrote briefly to
+Bridge about it:--
+
+"I regret that you think so doubtfully (or, rather, despairingly) of the
+prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the
+old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent
+with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a
+stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. At present we have no
+country--at least, none in the sense an Englishman has a country. I
+never conceived, in reality, what a true and warm love of country is
+till I witnessed it in the breasts of Englishmen. The States are too
+various and too extended to form really one country. New England is
+quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.
+
+"Don't let Frank Pierce see the above, or he would turn me out of
+office, late in the day as it is. However, I have no kindred with, nor
+leaning towards, the abolitionists."
+
+In the first flush of the war he felt the contagion of the patriotic
+thrill, and was with his friends a "war Democrat;" but his mind was
+filled with reservations. On May 26, 1861, he again writes to Bridge:--
+
+"The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits,
+which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it was delightful
+to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a
+country,--a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing
+as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The
+regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and
+the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with
+a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum
+age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished before that
+time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't
+quite understand what we are fighting for, or what definite result can
+be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none
+the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should
+be to cut them adrift. If we are fighting for the annihilation of
+slavery, to be sure it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible
+result, and the only one which is consistent with a future union between
+North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to
+us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for
+future citizenship by allowing them to fight for their own liberties,
+and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I
+must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one
+people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was
+formed."
+
+Six months later he writes again with nearly the same point of view,
+accepting in fact the theory of disunion as the only possible result:--
+
+"I am glad you take such a hopeful view of our national prospects so far
+as regards the war; but my own opinion is that no nation ever came safe
+and sound through such a confounded difficulty as this of ours. For my
+part I don't hope, nor indeed wish, to see the Union restored as it was.
+Amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight
+for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members
+shall be lop't off. I would fight to the death for the northern slave
+States and let the rest go."
+
+It is this despair of the Union that characterizes his attitude
+throughout, and with it goes also an absence of belief in the Union; but
+one feels that he is not deeply interested in the matter for its own
+sake. Thus after another interval he again writes to Bridge, February
+14, 1862:--
+
+"Frank Pierce came here and spent a night, a week or two since, and we
+mingled our tears and condolences for the state of the country. Pierce
+is truly patriotic, and thinks there is nothing left for us but to fight
+it out, but I should be sorry to take his opinion implicitly as regards
+our chances in the future. He is bigoted to the Union, and sees nothing
+but ruin without it; whereas I (if we can only put the boundary far
+enough south) should not much regret an ultimate separation."
+
+The next month Hawthorne visited Washington and saw the edges of the
+conflict, and he wrote out his impressions of men and of the scenes in
+his article "Chiefly about War Matters," which was published in "The
+Atlantic Monthly" for July, 1862. The text was sufficiently
+unsympathetic with the times to trouble the editor's mind, and
+Hawthorne, to ease the situation, added explanatory comments of his own
+as if from an editorial pen. The article shows conclusively how little
+Hawthorne had been affected, how completely he stood out of the national
+spirit, being as mere an observer of what was going on as at any time in
+his life and expressing his own view from time to time with entire
+obliviousness, as in the passages on Lincoln and on John Brown, of
+everything except his own impression. The judgment he passes on John
+Brown illustrates, too, better than pages of comment, his mental
+attitude in politics, its excuses and its limitations:--
+
+"I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther
+than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did
+I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage,
+whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that
+saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), 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 firmly. 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."
+
+Whatever one may think of this as the truth of common-sense, its
+publication in the summer of 1862 in Massachusetts showed an
+impenetrable self-possession in the author, and it is doubtless true, as
+has been said, that no other Northern man could have written such an
+article as this, so disengaged from the realities, the passion and
+prejudices of the time, so cold in observation and so impartial in
+feeling, so free from any participation in the scene.
+
+It was during the winter of this year and the spring of 1863 that
+Hawthorne renewed his literary work by contributing to "The Atlantic
+Monthly" the papers afterwards published as "Our Old Home." [Footnote:
+_Our Old Home_. A Series of English Sketches. By Nathaniel
+Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1863. 12mo. Pp. 398.] The
+contents of this volume have already been spoken of, and it need only be
+remarked here that some allowance may fairly be made for their tone and
+manner on the score of the depression of the time, arising from
+Hawthorne's increasing ill-health as well as from public confusion. The
+one memorable incident connected with the new book is the adherence of
+the author to his design of dedicating it to Franklin Pierce, to whom
+indeed it fitly belonged. Fields, however, was doubtful how the public
+would look on a compliment paid to the unpopular ex-President, and on
+communicating his views to Hawthorne he received this answer:--
+
+"I thank you for your note of the 15th instant, and have delayed my
+reply thus long in order to ponder deeply on your advice, smoke cigars
+over it, and see what it might be possible for me to do towards taking
+it. 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 is enough 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."
+
+Hawthorne's decision was in the line of his character, and the
+dedication itself was in excellent taste.
+
+The imaginative work of these last years was considerable in bulk, but
+it was never brought to any perfection; and though it has been
+published, the entire mass of it is only a bundle of more or less rough
+or uncompleted sketches and studies. It is comprised in the group of
+half-wrought tales, "The Ancestral Footstep," "Septimius Felton," "Dr.
+Grimshawe's Secret," and "The Dolliver Romance," which are all various
+shapes of the one work that Hawthorne was trying to evoke from his mind.
+They are interesting illustrations of the operation of his imagination,
+of his methods of thought, construction and elaboration, and in general
+of the manner in which a romance might grow under the hand; but there is
+little probability, so far as can be judged, that Hawthorne ever before
+worked in this experimental and ineffectual way. He had sketched an
+English romance "The Ancestral Foot-Step," in 1858, before his Italian
+experiences, and laid it aside. It was after his return to Concord that
+he again took up the scheme, and he attempted to join it with another
+plan involving a different idea. The four states in which the romance
+exists are the results of his various efforts, but in none of them is it
+anything more than inchoate. The idea on the English side of the story
+sprang from the imprint of a bloody footstep at the foot of the great
+staircase at Smithell's Hall; on the American side it sprang from a
+tradition which Thoreau reported about the Concord house, to the effect
+that a man had lived there in the Revolution who sought the elixir of
+life. But neither of these two topics developed satisfactorily. The
+physical type which had served Hawthorne so well hitherto no longer
+responded to his art; neither the bloody footstep, nor the flower that
+grew upon the grave, which was after all only a fungus and not the real
+flower of life, had any story in them, either alone or together, and the
+figure of Sylph, who embodies allegorically this graveyard flower, has
+no power to win credence such as other, earlier, symbolic characters had
+won. The power of narration, the rich surface of romantic art, the
+character of the physician and the child, the scene of the Revolutionary
+morning, the English chamber, the white-haired old man, the treasure
+chest with its secret of golden hair,--all these things are in one or
+another of these studies, and there is much loveliness of detail; but
+there is no vitality in any of these; that element of life which has
+been spoken of before, as the germinal power in Hawthorne's imaginative
+work, is gone; here are only relics and fragments, the costume and
+settings, the figures, the sentiment, the beauty of surface, the
+atmosphere of romance, but the story has refused to take life. Whether
+it was due to Hawthorne's failing powers or to inherent incapacities of
+the theme, is immaterial; he was not to finish this last work, and he
+knew it. He had gone so far as to give Fields the promise of "The
+Dolliver Romance," as if it were in that form that he meant to reduce
+the whole; but he did so with no confidence, as appears from his
+successive notes:--
+
+"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
+the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantoms to be
+encountered if I enter.... I don't see much probability of my having the
+first chapter of the Romance ready as soon as you want it. There are two
+or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not robust enough to
+begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through." And he writes
+again: "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 vigor.
+That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a
+further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, 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 vigor, if I wait
+quietly for it; perhaps not."
+
+In February, 1864, he advises that some notice be given the readers of
+the magazine that he cannot furnish the promised romance, and he tries
+to touch the subject with humor, but it is too plain that his spirits
+are ill at ease:--
+
+"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."
+
+At the end of March he started south with Ticknor, in hopes of some
+improvement by the change of air and scene; his companion, who was
+expected rather to have the care of Hawthorne, was himself taken ill and
+suddenly died in Philadelphia. The shock to Hawthorne in his state of
+health was a great one, and he returned home excited and nervous. He
+failed rapidly, and his family and friends became anxious about him,
+though they did not anticipate the suddenness of the end. In the middle
+of May Frank Pierce proposed that they should go to the New Hampshire
+lakes and up the Pemigewasset, by carriage, and Hawthorne consented. He
+bade his wife and children good-by, and was perhaps convinced that he
+would never return; whatever thoughts were in his mind, he kept silence
+concerning them. The narrative of the journey, with its end, is given by
+Pierce in a letter to Bridge:--
+
+"I met H. at Boston, Wednesday (11th), came to this place by rail
+Thursday morning, and went to Concord, N. H., by evening train. The
+weather was unfavorable, and H. feeble; and we remained at C. until the
+following Monday. We then went slowly on our journey, stopping at
+Franklin, Laconia, and Centre Harbor, and reaching Plymouth Wednesday
+evening (18th). We talked of you, Tuesday, between Franklin and Laconia,
+when H. said--among other things--'We have, neither of us, met a more
+reliable friend.' The conviction was impressed upon me, the day we left
+Boston, that the seat of the disease from which H. was suffering was in
+the brain or spine, or both; H. walked with difficulty, and the use of
+his hands was impaired. In fact, on the 17th I saw that he was becoming
+quite helpless, although he was able to ride, and, I thought, more
+comfortable in the carriage with gentle motion than anywhere else; for
+whether in bed or up, he was very restless. I had decided, however, not
+to pursue our journey beyond Plymouth, which is a beautiful place, and
+thought, during our ride Wednesday, that I would the next day send for
+Mrs. Hawthorne and Una to join us there. Alas! there was no next day for
+our friend.
+
+"We arrived at Plymouth about six o'clock. After taking a little tea and
+toast in his room, and sleeping for nearly an hour upon the sofa, he
+retired. A door opened from my room to his, and our beds were not more
+than five or six feet apart. I remained up an hour or two after he fell
+asleep. He was apparently less restless than the night before. The light
+was left burning in my room--the door open--and I could see him without
+moving from my bed. I went, however, between one and two o'clock to his
+bedside, and supposed him to be in a profound slumber. His eyes were
+closed, his position and face perfectly natural. His face was towards my
+bed. I awoke again between three and four o'clock, and was surprised--as
+he had generally been restless--to notice that his position was
+unchanged,--exactly the same that it was two hours before. I went to his
+bedside, placed my hand upon his forehead and temple, and found that he
+was dead. He evidently had passed from natural sleep to that sleep from
+which there is no waking, without suffering, and without the slightest
+movement."
+
+The funeral took place at Concord on May 24, 1864, and he was buried in
+Sleepy Hollow; on his coffin lay his unfinished romance, and his friends
+stood about the open grave, for he was almost the first of the
+distinguished group to which he belonged to lay down the pen. Emerson
+and others whose names have been frequent in this record now lie with
+him in that secluded spot, which is a place of long memory for our
+literature. His wife survived him a few years and died in London in
+1871; perhaps even more than his genius the sweetness of his home life
+with her, as it is so abundantly shown in his children's memories,
+lingers in the mind that has dwelt long on the story of his life.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Advertisement, the tenth Muse.
+Ĉsthetic Papers, Hawthorne's contributions to.
+Alcott, Amos Bronson.
+Aliston, Washington.
+American Magazine of Useful and
+  Entertaining Knowledge, The, Hawthorne edits.
+American Monthly Magazine, The;
+  Hawthorne's contributions to;
+  Benjamin writes of Hawthorne in.
+Andrews, Ferdinand, a Salem printer.
+Androscoggin Loo Club.
+Annuals, contemporary opinion of.
+Arbella, the ship.
+Athenĉum Society at Bowdoin College.
+Athenĉum, The London, favorable
+  notice of Hawthorne in.
+Atherton, Senator Charles G., meets Hawthorne.
+Atlantic Monthly, The, Hawthorne's contributions to.
+Atlantic Souvenir, The, Philadelphia.
+Augusta, Maine, Hawthorne visits Bridge at.
+Austin, William, so-called "American predecessor"
+  of Hawthorne.
+
+Bacon, Delia, Hawthorne's kindness to.
+Bancroft, George, appoints Hawthorne
+  weigher and ganger in Boston Custom House;
+  offers Hawthorne a clerkship in Charlestown
+  Navy Yard.
+Benjamin, Park, recognizes Hawthorne's genius;
+  coolness of Hawthorne toward.
+Bewick Company, The, Boston.
+Blithedale Romance, The, estimate of;
+  external realism of.
+Blodgett, Mrs., with whom Hawthorne
+  boarded at Liverpool.
+Boston American Stationers' Company.
+Boston Athenĉum.
+Boston Miscellany, The, "A Virtuoso's
+  Collection" published in.
+Bowditch family, the.
+Bowdoin College;
+  simplicity of;
+  Hawthorne's distinguished classmates in.
+Boys' and Girls' Magazine, The,
+  Hawthorne's contributions to.
+Bradford, George P.
+Bradley, Rev. Caleb, Hawthorne tutored by.
+Bremer, Fredrika.
+Bridge, Horatio, Hawthorne's early confidant;
+  Hawthorne's letters to, quoted;
+  his friendship for;
+  guarantees publication of "Twice-Told Tales";
+  again aids Hawthorne;
+  Hawthorne assists in revising
+  "Journal of an African Cruiser";
+  his "naval picnic," _note_;
+  visits Hawthorne in Berkshire;
+  "a reliable friend,".
+Bright, Henry,
+  his "Song of Consul Hawthorne,"
+Brook Farm;
+  Hawthorne at;
+  broken up.
+Brown, Charles Brockden, so-called
+  "American predecessor"
+  of Hawthorne.
+Brownings, the, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett.
+Bryant, William Cullen.
+Buchanan, James.
+Buckingham, Joseph Tinker.
+Barley, Miss Susan,
+  of Salem.
+
+Canterbury,
+  Shaker Community in.
+Carlyle, Thomas,
+  wherein Hawthorne resembled.
+Casa Bella,
+  Hawthorne's residence in Florence.
+Chamber under the Eaves, the.
+Charming, Ellery.
+Channing, William Ellery.
+Choate, Rufus.
+Chorley, Henry F.
+Cilley, Jonathan,
+  classmate of Hawthorne;
+  elected to Congress;
+  shot in a duel.
+Clark, S. Gaylord,
+  editor Knickerbocker Magazine.
+Concord, Mass.,
+  Hawthorne moves to Old Manse in;
+  literary work in;
+  hard conditions of Hawthorne's life in;
+  Hawthorne settles at The Wayside in.
+Cooper, James Fenimore.
+Custom House, Boston.
+Custom House, Salem,
+  Hawthorne appointed surveyor;
+  his sketch of;
+  an antidote to Transcendentalism.
+
+Democratic Review, The, Hawthorne's contributions to.
+Dewey, Rev. Orville.
+Dial, The, transcendental publication.
+Diary, Hawthorne's first, _note_.
+Dickens, Charles,
+  his manner suggested in "House of the Seven Gables".
+Dike, Mrs. Priscilla Manning.
+Duyckinck, Evert Augustus.
+Dwight, Mrs. William (Eliza White).
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo,
+  his visit to Sophia Peabody;
+  relations with Hawthorne.
+Everett, Edward.
+
+Faërie Queene, The,
+  Hawthorne's first book purchase.
+Fairfield, Senator John,
+  meets Hawthorne at Portsmouth Navy Yard.
+Farley, Frank.
+Fesseuden, Thomas Green.
+Fields, James T.,
+  quoted;
+  his wise suggestion;
+  good advice;
+  Hawthorne writes to, from Montaüto;
+  from Rome;
+  regarding dedication to "Life of Franklin Pierce";
+  about "The Dolliver Romance".
+Fuller, Margaret,
+  Hawthorne's hard judgment of.
+
+Gardner family, the.
+Giddings family, the.
+Goodrich, Samuel Griswold,
+  "Peter Parley";
+  his "Recollections," quoted;
+  transactions with Hawthorne;
+  Hawthorne's ungenerous view of.
+Graham's Magazine,
+  Hawthorne's contributions to.
+Graves, William J.,
+  his duel with Jonathan Cilley.
+"Greenwood, Grace" (Sara Jane Lippincott),
+  Hawthorne's comment on.
+Griswold, Rufus Wilmot.
+
+Hathorne, family stock of.
+Hathorne, Daniel,
+  of Revolutionary ballad fame.
+Hathorne, Judge John,
+  of witchcraft memory.
+Hathorne, Joseph.
+Hathorne, William, emigrant planter.
+Hathorne, Nathaniel.
+Hawthorne, Elizabeth;
+  her mental resemblance to Nathaniel;
+  quoted;
+  "an invisible entity,".
+Hawthorne, Julian;
+  quoted.
+Hawthorne, Louisa;
+  letter from Nathaniel to, quoted;
+  no recluse;
+  letters to Nathaniel quoted;
+  death of.
+Hawthorne, Mrs., mother of Nathaniel;
+  relations with her son;
+  her solitary life;
+  Elizabeth Peabody's description of;
+  delight in her grandchildren;
+  her home in Herbert Street;
+  moves to Mall Street;
+  death.
+Hawthorne, Nathaniel
+  parentage;
+  date of birth;
+  life at Raymond, Me;
+  returns to Salem;
+  early reading;
+  preparation for college;
+  letters to his sisters and mother;
+  considers choice of profession;
+  enters Bowdoin College;
+  youthful characteristics;
+  excels in Latin and English;
+  narrow circumstances;
+  early friendships;
+  changes spelling of his name;
+  aspirations;
+  manner of life in Salem;
+  a born Solitary;
+  drifts into authorship;
+  choice of subjects;
+  literary ventures;
+  yearly journeys;
+  basis of imaginative work;
+  discouragement;
+  first substantial gains;
+  a close observer;
+  editor of American Magazine of
+  Useful and Entertaining Knowledge;
+  editorial difficulties;
+  quarrels with Benjamin;
+  his anonymity dispelled;
+  Bridge guarantees publication of "Twice-Told Tales";
+  Goodrich's services to;
+  reception of "Twice-Told Tales";
+  Pierce suggests South Sea Exploring Expedition;
+  challenges a man to a duel;
+  his solitude broken;
+  meets Miss Sophia Peabody;
+  is appointed weigher and gauger in Boston Custom House;
+  bids farewell to Herbert Street;
+  practical life wearies;
+  his courtship;
+  loses place in Boston Custom House;
+  reasons for joining Brook Farm;
+  life there;
+  letter to Sophia Peabody;
+  averse to literary society;
+  barren years;
+  marriage;
+  Paradise in the Old Manse, Concord;
+  Una's birth;
+  straits for money;
+  Bridge and Pierce assist;
+  temperament and art analyzed;
+  literary faculty;
+  permanently influenced by Scott;
+  prime qualities in his work;
+  provincial note;
+  primary element in genius;
+  allegorizing temperament;
+  vivid symbolism;
+  his objectivity;
+  a moralist;
+  essentially an artist;
+  capacity for idleness;
+  his democracy;
+  "obscurest man of letters in America,";
+  made surveyor of the port of Salem;
+  his feeling for Salem;
+  as a government official;
+  literary revenge;
+  gossip concerning;
+  imagination languishes;
+  Julian born;
+  home happiness;
+  dismissed from office;
+  his resentment;
+  his susceptibility;
+  applies to Hillard;
+  his mother's death;
+  visited by Fields;
+  a bitter experience,
+  letter to Hillard;
+  finishes "Scarlet Letter";
+  fame established;
+  characteristics of his genius;
+  stoicism;
+  unsympathetic as an artist;
+  farewell to Salem;
+  family life in Berkshire;
+  productive period;
+  "House of the Seven Gables" written and published;
+  power of realistic detail;
+  marvelous art;
+  no sympathy with reform;
+  fatalistic trait;
+  Rose born;
+  delight in his children;
+  his "spiritual sense of life";
+  narrow intellectual interests;
+  temporary residence in West Newton;
+  "Blithedale Romance" written;
+  purchases "The Wayside";
+  objects to writing Pierce's "Life";
+  friendship for Pierce;
+  an unsparing critic;
+  accepts Liverpool consulate;
+  life at Liverpool;
+  notable official action;
+  his opinion of philanthropy;
+  kindly received in England;
+  good after-dinner speaker;
+  alien in England;
+  excursions;
+  competence secured;
+  resigns consulate;
+  life in Italy;
+  its influence;
+  begins "Marble Faun";
+  describes Villa Montaüto;
+  Una's illness;
+  leaves Rome and finishes "Marble Faun";
+  height of his literary power;
+  sensitive temperament;
+  creative genius;
+  defective technique;
+  his fullest expression;
+  returns to Concord;
+  health fails;
+  despairs of the Union;
+  mental attitude in politics;
+  last days;
+
+Works.
+  _Alice Doane's Appeal_;
+  _Ambitious Guest, The_;
+  American Note-Books;
+  Ancestral Footstep, The;
+  _Artist of the Beautiful, The_;
+  _Bald Eagle_;
+  _Bells_;
+  _Bell's Biography, A_;
+  Biographical stories, _note_;
+  _Birthmark, The_;
+  _Buds and Bird Voices_;
+  _Canterbury Pilgrims, The_;
+  _Celestial Railroad, The, note_;
+  _Chiefly about War Matters_;
+  _Chippings with a Chisel_;
+  _Christmas Banquet, The_;
+  _Cilley, Jonathan_;
+  _Custom House, The_;
+  _David Swan_;
+  _Devil in Manuscript, The_;
+  _Diary, First_, authenticity questioned, _note_;
+  Dr. Grimshawe's Secret;
+  Dolliver Romance, The;
+  _Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_;
+  _Downer's Banner, The_;
+  _Drowne's Wooden Image_;
+  _Duston Family, The_;
+  _Earth's Holocaust_;
+  _Edward Fane's Rosebud_;
+  _Edward Randolph's Portrait_;
+  _Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent_;
+  _Endicott and the Red Cross_;
+  _Ethan Brand_;
+  _Fancy's Show Box_;
+  Famous Old People;
+  Fanshawe, _note_;
+  _Fessenden, Thomas Green_;
+  _Fire Worship_;
+  _Footprints on the Sea-Shore_;
+  _Gentle Boy, The, note_;
+  Grandfather's Chair;
+  _Graves and Goblins_;
+  _Gray Champion, The_;
+  _Great Carbuncle, The_;
+  _Great Stone Face, The_;
+  _Hall of Fantasy, The_;
+  _Haunted Mind, The_;
+  _Haunted Quack, The_;
+  _Hollow of the Three Hills, The_;
+  House of the Seven Gables, The;
+  _Howe's Masquerade_;
+  _Intelligence Office, The_;
+  _John Inglefield's Thanksgiving_;
+  _Journal of a Solitary Man_;
+  _Lady Eleanore's Mantle_;
+  Liberty Tree, The, _note_;
+  _Lily's Quest, The_;
+  _Little Annie's Ramble_;
+  _Little Daffydowndilly_;
+  _Main Street_;
+  _Man of Adamant, The_;
+  Marble Faun, The;
+  _Maypole of Merry Mount, The_;
+  _Minister's Black Veil, The_;
+  _Monsieur du Miroir_;
+  Mosses from an Old Manse _note_;
+  _Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe_;
+  _Mrs. Bullfrog_;
+  _My Uncle Molineaux_;
+  _My Wife's Novel,_ attributed to Hawthorne;
+  _Nature of Sleep_;
+  _New Adam and Eve, The_;
+  _New England Village, The_;
+  _Ontario Steamboat, An_;
+  _Niagara, My Visit to_;
+  _Old Apple Dealer, The_;
+  _Old Esther Dudley,_ first story to
+  bear Hawthorne's name;
+  _Old French War, The_;
+  _Old Manse, The_;
+  Old News;
+  _Old Ticonderoga_;
+  _Old Tory, The_;
+  Our Old Home _note_;
+  _Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner_;
+  _Passages from a Relinquished Work_;
+  _Pepperell, Sir William_;
+  _Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure_;
+  _"Peter Parley's" Universal History, note_;
+  Pierce, Franklin, Life of;
+  _Procession of Life, The_;
+  _Prophetic Pictures, The_;
+  _Province House Series_;
+  _Provincial Tales_;
+  _P.'s Correspondence_;
+  _Rappaccini's Daughter_;
+  _Rill from the Town Pump, A_;
+  _Roger Malvin's Burial_;
+  Scarlet Letter, The;
+  Septimius Felton;
+  Seven Tales of my Native Land;
+  _Seven Vagabonds, The_;
+  _Shaker Bridal, The_;
+  _Sights from a Steeple_;
+  _Sister Years, The_;
+  _Night Scenes under an Umbrella_;
+  _Sketches from Memory_;
+  _Snowflakes_;
+  Snow Image, The, _note_;
+  _Spectator, The,_ first essay in journalism;
+  _Story-Teller, The_;
+  _Sunday at Home_;
+  _Sylph Etheredge_;
+  Tanglewood Tales;
+  _Three-fold Destiny, The_;
+  _Time's Portraiture_;
+  _Toll Gatherer's Day, The_;
+  Twice-Told Tales, _note_;
+  _Veiled Lady, The_;
+  _Village Uncle, The_;
+  _Virtuoso's Collection, A_;
+  _Vision of the Fountain, The_;
+  _Visit to the Clerk of the Weather, A,_
+  never yet attributed to Hawthorne;
+  _Wakefield_;
+  _Wedding Knell, The_;
+  _White Old Maid, The_;
+  _Wives of the Dead_;
+  Wonder-Book, A;
+  _Young Goodman Brown_;
+  _Young Provincial, The, note_.
+Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel. See
+  Sophia Peabody.
+Hawthorne, Rose,
+  her sketch of Montaüto.
+Hawthorne, Una,
+  a beautiful child;
+  illness at Rome.
+Hillard, George S.,
+  Hawthorne writes to;
+  letter to Hawthorne.
+Hoffman, Charles Fenno,
+  his apt characterization of "Twice-Told Tales".
+Holden's Dollar Magazine,
+  "Ethan Brand" published in.
+Holmes, Oliver Wendell.
+Hosmer, Harriet,
+Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes).
+House of the Seven Gables, The,
+  analysis of;
+  lax unity in;
+  local realism of;
+  suggestion of Dickens in;
+  ancestral quality;
+  ethical meaning in.
+Howe, Dr. Samuel Gridley.
+
+Ilbrahim.
+International Magazine, The,
+  "Snow Image" published in.
+Irving, Washington,
+  Hawthorne compared to.
+Italy, Hawthorne's life in.
+
+Jameson, Mrs. Anna.
+
+Kemble, Fanny.
+Knickerbocker Magazine, The,
+  Hawthorne's contributions to.
+
+Lander, Louisa.
+Lathrop, George Parsons,
+  his study of Hawthorne;
+  quoted.
+Liverpool.
+Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth;
+  recognizes college days in "Fanshawe,";
+  Hawthorne's letter to;
+  notices "Twice-Told Tales" in North American Review.
+Long Wharf.
+Lord family, the.
+Loring, Dr. George B.,
+  on Hawthorne's connection with Salem Custom House.
+
+Maine Hall,
+  at Bowdoin College.
+Mann, Horace.
+Manning, Elizabeth Clarke. See Mrs. Hawthorne.
+Manning, Richard,
+  of St. Petrox Parish.
+Manning, Richard,
+  Hawthorne's grandfather.
+Manning, Richard,
+  Hawthorne's uncle.
+Manning, Robert;
+  undertakes Hawthorne's education.
+Manning, Samuel,
+  Hawthorne travels with.
+Manning, William,
+  Hawthorne writes in office of.
+"Manning's Folly".
+Marble Faun, The;
+  ethical weakness of;
+  source of its interest;
+  Puritan romance masquerading;
+  analytic study of nature of evil.
+Marsh and Capen, Boston,
+  publish "Fanshawe" at Hawthorne's expense.
+Mason, Alfred,
+  Hawthorne's roommate in college.
+Melville, Herman.
+Montaüto, villa of,
+  where Hawthorne began "Marble Faun".
+Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow's.
+Mosses from an Old Manse.
+Motley, John Lothrop,
+  Hawthorne's friendliness toward.
+
+National Era,
+  The "Great Stone Face" published in.
+Navy Club.
+Navy Yard, Charlestown.
+New England;
+  homes of;
+  colonial tradition of;
+  central fact in life of;
+  the secret of.
+New England Magazine, The,
+  Hawthorne's contributions to, _note_;
+  Hawthorne noticed in.
+North American Review, The;
+  Longfellow's notice of "Twice-Told Tales" in.
+Note-Books, Hawthorne's,
+  beginning of;
+  quoted;
+  his use of.
+
+"Oberon," signature Hawthorne used
+  in writing to Bridge;
+  farewell to his eidolon.
+Old Manse, the.
+Oliver, Benjamin.
+O'Sullivan, John,
+  editor "Democratic Review,";
+  U. S. minister at Lisbon.
+Our Old Home; remorseless impressionism of, _note_.
+Outre-Mer.
+
+Peabody, Elizabeth, quoted;
+  letters of Hawthorne to.
+Peabody, Mary (Mrs. Horace Mann).
+Peabody, Sophia;
+  her love story;
+  Hawthorne's letters to;
+  recovers health and is married;
+  "A New Adam and Eve";
+  Hawthorne's devotion to;
+  quoted;
+  courage in ill-fortune;
+  spends winter in Lisbon;
+  English life interests;
+  uncertain health;
+  death of.
+"Peter Parley." See Goodrich, S. G.
+Peter Parley's Universal History on
+  the basis of Geography, written
+  by Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne.
+Peucinian Society, at Bowdoin College.
+Phelps family, the.
+Pickering, John.
+Pierce, Franklin
+  early friendship for Hawthorne;
+  interests himself in his fortunes;
+  elected Senator from New Hampshire;
+  advises change of scene for Hawthorne;
+  his affection for;
+  at Portsmouth Navy Yard;
+  Hawthorne writes Life of;
+  elected President of the United States,
+  and appoints Hawthorne to Liverpool consulate;
+  offers Hawthorne a post in American Legation at Lisbon;
+  Hawthorne's love for;
+  writes Bridge about Hawthorne's last days.
+Pioneer, The,
+  Hawthorne's contributions to.
+Plymouth, N. H.,
+  Hawthorne's death at.
+Poe, Edgar Allan,
+  Hawthorne's only rival in harmony of tone.
+Polk, James K.
+Portsmouth Navy Yard,
+  political "naval picnic" at.
+Potter family, the.
+Powers, Hiram.
+
+Raymond, Captain George.
+Raymond, Maine,
+  Hawthorne's boyhood home.
+Rome, Hawthorne in.
+Ropes, Joseph.
+
+Salem;
+  Hawthorne born at;
+  Dr. Worcester's school in;
+  Hawthorne's life in;
+  much missed in;
+  unappreciative "of its illustrious son";
+  Hawthorne characterizes people of;
+  Hawthorne's debt to.
+Salem Athenĉum, The.
+Salem Gazette, The,
+  Hawthorne writes Carrier's Address for.
+Salem Lyceum, Hawthorne an officer of.
+Sargent, Epes.
+Sargent, John Osborne.
+Saturday Club, the.
+Sawtelle, Cullen,
+  a classmate of Hawthorne.
+"Scarlet Letter, The";
+  analysis of;
+  genesis of;
+  a study of punishment;
+  reality of;
+  parable of soul's life in sin;
+  moral despair of.
+Scott, Sir Walter, Hawthorne influenced by.
+Sebago Lake, Maine.
+Sedgwick, Catherine Maria.
+Siena, Hawthorne's happy days at.
+Sleepy Hollow, Concord, Hawthorne's burial place.
+Southern Rose, The,
+  Charleston, S. C., "The Lily's Quest" appeared in.
+Spectator, The,
+  Hawthorne's first essay in journalism.
+Stoddard, Richard Henry.
+Story, William Wetmore;
+  Hawthorne's happy days with.
+
+Thompson, Launt.
+Thoreau, Henry D.
+Ticknor, William D., sudden death of.
+Token, The;
+  Hawthorne's contributions to;
+  Park Benjamin notices Hawthorne's articles in.
+Tupper, Martin Farquhar,
+  Hawthorne's visit to.
+Tyler, John.
+
+Upham, Charles W.
+
+Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin.
+Very, Jones.
+
+War, the Civil.
+Wayside, The,
+  Hawthorne's home in Concord.
+Willis, Nathaniel Parker.
+Worcester, Dr. Joseph Emerson,
+  Hawthorne's first master.
+
+Youth's Keepsake, The,
+  Hawthorne's contributions to.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ***
+
+This file should be named 7301-8.txt or 7301-8.zip
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+ PROJECT GUTENBERG LITERARY ARCHIVE FOUNDATION
+ 809 North 1500 West
+ Salt Lake City, UT 84116
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/7301-8.zip b/7301-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b8f4862
--- /dev/null
+++ b/7301-8.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..59c03bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #7301 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7301)