From: The Memoir of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1872)
Author: Alexander Hay Japp
Published: Henry S. King & Co. 1872 London
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born in the quaint old town of Salem, on July 4, 1804—There is something striking in the circumstance that the man who was to give New England fresh life in literature—to garner up in words most rare and fine, ‘the light and colour of every historic day that had dawned and set in it’—saw the light as the 4th of July bells were ringing, and on the very ground where took place the weirdest events with which early story in the Massachusetts colony is associated. For he was a direct descendant of the Puritan persecutors—of that Hawthorne who hunted down the Quakers, and of that Justice John Hawthorne, the son, who, strong in the idea of at once serving the state and propitiating heaven, was not loth to give sentence against the witches, and has been so faithfully pictured by Longfellow in his tragedy of ‘The Salem Farms.’
Whether it were that these grim persecutions of Quakers and witches were doomed to bear no lucky fruit for those who had taken part in them, or even for their descendants, as time went on, it would be hard to say; but, at any rate, the worldly success of the Hawthorne race did not long continue. The family declined rapidly, and ran on for generations in a long line of mariners and inconsiderable merchants; all of them being blessed with but little prosperity, contrasted with the high position which their forefathers had held among the first settlers of Massachusetts. ‘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.’
Thus writes Hawthorne himself, so intent upon the past, that it was not required of him to specify there the very important circumstance that the last of the line of sailors never did come back to Salem to lay his dust by the side of his kindred in the natal earth. Captain Nathaniel Hawthorne, his father, who had had due share of the world-wanderings—‘a brave and fearless man—never returned from one of his long voyages. He died some say at Calcutta, some say at Surinam, after two girls and a boy had been born to him; he having married a woman of sensibility, strong character, and remarkable beauty of person—Elizabeth Clarke Manning—who had also come of a good Salem family. The death of her husband cast such a gloom over her life, that she remained a sorrowful recluse ever afterwards; the dark shade of her sorrow no doubt falling heavily on the boy, and preparing him to receive the more readily the weird impressions which Salem was so well fitted to produce.’
We read that Hawthorne’s mother had ‘many characteristics in common with her distinguished son, she also being a very reserved and thoughtful person.’ We shall see that there was a good deal both of father and mother in the boy’s temperament; for we are told that the elder Hawthorne, though an excellent sailor, and perfectly contented with his sphere, was yet a ‘devourer of books,’ and would take away with him on his long voyages volumes and pamphlets of a most unlikely character for one in such an occupation. With these he mainly passed his spare time on board ship; for he was ‘inclined to melancholy and very reticent.’
The Mannings were next door neighbours of the Hawthornes in Union Street, but had secured some property elsewhere. So it came about that the young Nathaniel—left fatherless at four years of age—was much thrown upon his mother’s people, spending his early years mostly under the care of his uncle, Robert Manning, and often living on an estate which belonged to them near to the town of Raymond, not far from Sebago Lake, in Maine. One can easily imagine the glee with which the boy would set out on his journeys, and how, boy-like, he would be just as eager to return to the old house in Union Street, near to the Long Wharf, the centre of the now dwindling foreign trade of Salem, which was flowing fast into the ports of New York and Boston; notwithstanding that Salem could boast honours in that regard of which they could not deprive it. The first American ship for India and China sailed from its port, and Salem ships opened the trade with Holland and the South Seas. It had still its Custom House and its wharves, and, though some of its once busy courts were grass-grown, the seafaring flavour clung about the whole town. The recurrent noise and stir of traffic would please the lad vastly after the quiet of Manning’s Folly, as the country-house was named, with its large rooms and rambling passages.
But Salem had other interest besides its trade, not unlikely to exercise a powerful influence over his quick, sensitive mind. It was redolent of the past The spirit of New England seemed to hover over it Some of its quaint wooden houses had been the scene of tragic story; for they had been the abodes of Endicotts, Corwins, Curwins, Gedneys, Gardners, Higginsons, Hutchisons, Mathers, and Hathornes—names that carry a whiff of New England air with them. The Witch-house, where, in 1692, the old women who had the misfortune to be ugly as well as old were tried and mercilessly condemned for witchcraft, by the pious fathers of New England, still stood; and one could sit upon the Gallows-hill, where the witches were hung, and look out upon the far-stretching sea, as one mused on the ways of Providence, and the strange, changes that time brings to the birth. The memory of these witchcraft tortures and executions has thrown a kind of ghostly spell over Salem, exactly of the kind to entrance the imagination of a boy like Hawthorne.
And he soon became a voracious reader of the very sort of books calculated to deepen the impression that would inevitably be made by the stories he would constantly hear. An early accident, too, withdrew him from companions of the same age, and tended to breed the shyness and love of solitude by which he was ever afterwards characterised. When between eight and nine years of age, while playing at bat and ball, he was struck in the foot and lamed, so that he was compelled to use crutches. Up to this time he had been a lively boy, entering with enthusiasm into all kinds of games and fun. We are told that, during his lameness, he found all his delight in books, lying flat upon the carpet and reading whatever he could lay his hands on. It is not without significance, in one respect, that the ‘Castle of Indolence’ was a special favourite, and that the first book he bought with his own money was ‘The Faerie Queen.’ But still more significant is his fondness for Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim.’ Whenever he went to visit his grandmother Hawthorne he used to take the old family copy to a large chair in a corner of the room, near a window, and read by the hour without once speaking; no one ever interfering with him, or asking him any questions. Thus early he used to invent long stories of a wild and fanciful character, and would speak of the travels he would undertake, and the adventures he would engage in, when he became a man, a suggestive forecast of that mixture of love for shy studious retirement, and hunger for practical contact with men, and with new scenes and situations, which characterised him to the end.
He had not long recovered from his lameness when he was seized by an illness which deprived him of the use of his limbs, so that once again he was only able to move about by the aid of crutches. But all this while his education was solicitously superintended by his uncle Robert. When the boy could no longer go to school, he engaged the best masters, who regularly came and heard him his lessons. The most notable of these was Joseph Worcester, the well-known author of the dictionary.
When he was between ten and eleven, his mother retired with him and his sisters to the property of her family, near Sebago Lake. She longed for more complete retirement than Salem would allow; and she could scarcely have found a more suitable spot than Manning’s Folly. It was almost shut in by the great pine-trees, which, when the house had first been built, had been partially cleared away, but had, in course of years, almost regained their old dominion. The lasting effect of his few years’ residence here Hawthorne has himself put on record in most characteristic words: ‘I lived in Maine like a bird in the air,’ he says, ‘so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude.’ We can easily imagine the dreamy dark-eyed youth, haunted by sad thoughts of his mother’s singular circumstances and all unjoyous life. Unable to frame into words the sympathy he could not but feel, he endeavoured to find relief in outdoor exercise and observation of nature.’ During the moonlight nights he would skate until midnight all alone upon the Sebago Lake, with the deep shadow of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with skating, he would take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the loghearth. He would sit in the ample chimney and look at the stars through the great aperture which the flame went roaring up. “Ah,” he said, “how well I recall the summer days also when with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine. How sad middle life looks, to people of erratic temperaments. Everything is beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it.”’ These days spent, in the piny solitudes of Maine without companions—skating in the moonlight, and shooting in the long summer afternoons, have left witnesses of themselves in many a shadowy picture and sombre glimpse of natural grandeur.
At fourteen, he returned to Salem to attend school, where, under the care of his uncle, he was prepared for college. Here he took great delight in wandering at night about the old town, or on the sea-beach, his imagination full of the weird memories that clustered about its weather-stained, wooden-gabled houses. He was quick to learn, and showed that he was made of the very material for a scholar: but he had little ambition to surpass others, and was not likely to strain a faculty in the keen race of competition. Even at this time he was marked by quiet solicitude for the satisfaction of real self-development rather than by any concern for the applause of others.
While yet only sixteen, Hawthorne was sent by his uncle to Bowdoin College, in Maine, where he studied with great success. Half a lifetime afterwards, his teachers remembered the excellence of his English and Latin compositions. He had for fellow-students Longfellow, Cheever, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge. All these acknowledged to have received from him a singularly powerful influence. Bridge entered the navy, and his ‘Journal of an African Cruiser’ was edited by Hawthorne, who again dedicated to Bridge his volume entitled ‘The Snow Image.’ In the course of the dedicatory letter, he gives this exquisite glimpse of himself as a student:—
‘On you, if on no other person, I am entitled to rely, to sustain the position of my dedicatee. 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 blue-berries, in study-hours; under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts 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 had been the worse for us; still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction.’
Hawthorne made close friends of several of his fellow-students. In their society it would seem that his confirmed shyness and reserve, to a great extent, vanished. He was then famous for his manly beauty and for his feats of physical strength. His frame would have given the impression of a soldier or a sportsman rather than of a student, had it not been for ‘a certain reserve and grace which rendered the size and strength of frame unobtrusive.’
Here we meet with another illustration of the truth, that those who are destined to impress remarkable characters most deeply, often themselves remain obscure or become distinguished in ways that tend to make one’s surprise at their early power all the greater. Franklin Pierce, it is evident, had then more influence with Hawthorne than all the rest. Pierce himself, as everyone knows, became a lawyer, later turned a soldier, and then a politician; for in the States every profession seems to point to politics as a final goal. It is clear that, with the best desire to look favourably on his strange, though successful career, it was not quite so invariably spotless and high-minded as his early friend Hawthorne was inclined to paint it. Hawthorne could see no fault in Frank, his old class-mate. When there was a feeling in the States that Pierce had compromised himself, Hawthorne set about writing a defence of him, and the defence took the shape of a biography—certainly one of the most characteristic of biographies. It is a slight volume, but it stands entirely by itself for its transparent candour, its ease and frankness; and yet it is not wanting in a certain worldly shrewdness and a sort of unconscious casuistry. It is of value to us because of the references to their early life which it contains. Indeed, the one substantial plea Hawthorne gives for writing it, is that he did intimately know Pierce when both were boys. He thus apologises, in the third person, for the bold course he has taken of Justifying his friend:—
‘This species of writing (political biography] is too remote from the author’s customary occupations—and, he may add, from his tastes—to be very satisfactorily done, without more time and practice than he would be willing to spend for such a purpose. If this little biography have any value, it is probably of another kind—as the narrative of one who knew the individual of whom he treats, at a period of life when character could be read with undoubting accuracy, and who, consequently, in judging of the motives of his subsequent conduct, has an advantage over much more competent observers, whose knowledge of the man may have commenced at a later date.’
Here, as elsewhere, of course, we cannot detach Hawthorne from the subject of which he writes. In every touch he reveals himself: if we only look closely and sympathetically, we read as much of Hawthorne’s life at college as we do of Pierce’s. If Pierce has frank and friendly traits, they can only be brought out by a glance at the shyness which they overcame; if he was fond of sport and pleasure, it can only be acknowledged in connection with the infectious and inspiriting influence which he constantly carried with him. How fresh and beautiful and friendly, and yet how ingenuously self-confessing, is this touch:—
‘He [Pierce] was then a youth, with the boy and man in him, vivacious, mirthful, slender, of a fair complexion, with light hair that had a curl in it; his bright and cheerful aspect made a kind of sunshine both as regarded its radiance and warmth, insomuch that no shyness of disposition in his associates could well resist its influence.’
If Hawthorne’s shyness was conquered so completely by Pierce, then Pierce must have possessed remarkable force of character, and winning charms of disposition. It is clear, too, that he did possess such. He led Hawthorne, the recluse, to share his sports with him; under his enthusiasm Hawthorne actually became a volunteer, arrayed himself in uniform, and went to exercise I It seems so utterly foreign to our ideas of Hawthorne, to see him as a young man strutting about in dilettante soldiership. He himself seems to look back to those days and their pastimes with a sad, flickering smile, not, however, without token of pleasure and satisfaction in the remembrance. With all his graceful, earnest playfulness, he writes:-
‘I remember, likewise, that the only military service of my life was as a private soldier in a college company of which Pierce was one of the officers. He entered into this latter business, or pastime, with an earnestness with which I could not pretend to compete, and at which, perhaps, he would now be inclined to smile.’
So passed the pleasant days at Bowdoin; faithful records of which were to remain in many ways. Hawthorne left it with a new and deeper sense of friendship than he had almost believed himself capable of it was something that he could carry into his after self-sought solitude such kindly thoughts as he did carry thence. They had their own share, doubtless, in saving him from the cynicism which often seemed to threaten him. After he had graduated with honour he retired from this ‘country college’ to Salem, in 1825, as ‘though it were for him the inevitable centre of the universe;’ and here, in his native place, he lived the life of a recluse—’ passing the day alone in his room, writing wild tales, most of which he destroyed, and walking out at night.’
Soon after he left college he wrote some stories which he called’ Seven Tales of my Native Land.’ The motto which he chose for the title-page was, ‘We are Seven,’ from Wordsworth. ‘My informant read the tales in manuscript,’ writes Mr. Fields, ‘and says some of them were very striking, particularly one or two Witch Stories,’ which may readily be believed. As soon as the little book was well prepared for the press, he deliberately threw it into the fire, and sat by to see its destruction.
But, in spite of this severity with the products of his own pen—a thing unusual enough with young writers—he still went on busily producing; and, before very long, he published anonymously a slight romance with the motto from Southey, ‘Wilt thou go with me?’ He never acknowledged the book, but it shows plainly the natural bent of his mind. ‘It is a dim, dreamy tale, such as a Byron struck youth of the time might have written, except for that startling self-possession of style, and cold analysis of passion, rather than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation, but remarkable original power.’ The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his works. It is uncanny; the figures of the romance are not persons, they are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations. He met all requests to republish it in later days with a firm refusal, even begging his friend, Mr. Fields, never to mention the dead book to him again.
A desire for adventure, for practical contact with men, is in him singularly combined with shyness and reticence. It is significant and worthy of remark that about this time he applied for a situation under Commodore Wilkes to go on an exploring expedition. He did not succeed in obtaining an appointment, and regarded this as a great misfortune; for he had been volubly enthusiastic about the wonderful things he should do, if he were permitted to join the voyeurs. He had to remain yet a while longer in Salem.
It was now that the old town put forth her full power of fascination on him. It is told how that he would decline invitations to the drawing-rooms of the better class, and would seek out illiterate old friends, and would familiarly hob-nob with them. The gloomy mystery of Puritan life and character had fallen on a sensitive imagination in many ways prepared to take its impress. Struggling by day to unravel the obscurer mysteries of the spiritual life, he would find fresh suggestions of weird horror in the sombre monuments that met his gaze as he wandered, ghost-like, through Salem streets at dead of night. It was during this period, when so much was at work to colour and give permanent bent to his genius, that the ‘Twice Told Tales ‘ were mostly written. They clearly tell of the influences which were most powerful. They either concern themselves with the analysis of mixed and morbid conditions of feeling, or they quaintly describe scenes of the olden time, with a gleam of sunshine thrown into the picture, that, like a little stream half hidden under leaves in a shadowy pine wood, glimmers here and there only to deepen the sense of sombre loneliness, when the glimpse of it is momentarily lost again.
‘I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang 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.’—Referring to his early friend, Horatio Bridge.
Bridge and O’Sullivan, who was then editor of ‘The Democratic Review,’ urged him to contribute to its pages, and thus an efficient way was first opened to him for contact with the public. But the great public did not at once get into raptures over the airy and allegoric pabulum with which Hawthorne was most inclined to supply it. He himself was pleased with the warm recognition of a limited circle, and wrote of himself, afterwards, with a touch of semi-cynical pride, as having been for long years, ‘the most obscure man of letters in America.’
In 1836, he went to Boston to edit the ‘American Magazine of Useful Knowledge,’ for which he was to be paid a salary of six hundred dollars a year. The proprietors soon became insolvent, so that he received nothing, but he kept on just the same as if he had been paid regularly. The plan of the work proposed by the publishers of the magazine admitted no fiction into its pages. The magazine, [consisting of forty pages a month], was printed on coarse paper, and was illustrated by engravings painful to look at. There were no contributors except the editor, and he wrote [nearly] the whole of every number.’ Short biographical sketches of eminent men, descriptive papers, scraps of scientific information, historical narratives, and now and then a bit of music, filled up its pages; and the presence of Hawthorne is not otherwise to be detected than in an occasional felicity of style—an aptly turned sentence or a happy characterisation. No doubt his fine taste was often offended by the style of illustration dealt in, but he went on from March till August, sometimes throwing in, notwithstanding all these disadvantages, a very characteristic little paper. The magazine looks terribly dull in spite of the publisher’s claim that it was ‘illustrated in the best style.’ However, Hawthorne’s patience at last gave way, and he resigned. In the note in which he took leave of his readers, he relieved himself from certain responsibilities in these terms:—In some few cases perhaps the interests of the work might have been promoted by allowing the editor the privilege of a veto, at least, on all engravings which were to be presented to the public under his auspices, and for which his taste and judgment would inevitably be held responsible. In general, however, the embellishments have done no discredit either to the artists or their employers.’
Through this magazine, Hawthorne became known to many members of ‘the more influential class, and doubtless his connection with it helped towards his appointment as collector at the Custom-house of Boston. But still he was to the great reading public a comparatively unknown man.
Even when the ‘Twice Told Tales’ were gathered together and published in book form—the first volume having appeared in 1839—they produced little or no impression, notwithstanding that the critics were ready to proclaim the advent of a new literary force. Longfellow, ever alert to what is excellent and eager to see an old fellow-student duly appreciated, was among the reviewers, having written a very discriminating but highly laudatory notice of the work in the ‘North American Review.’
After Hawthorne had had eighteen months’ trial of life as an assistant collector in the Custom-house at Boston, the duties of which he seems to have discharged with singular patience and discreetness, he wrote thus whilst he was a temporary inmate of the Union Street family mansion:—
‘Now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the ~ew 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.’
When we shall be endowed with our spiritual bodies, I think that they will be so constituted that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance in no time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of those whom we love. But, after all, perhaps it is not wise to intermix fantastic ideas with the reality of affection. Let us content ourselves to be earthly creatures, and hold communion of spirit in such modes as are ordained to us.’
In 1841 Hawthorne lost his place through political changes, and it was then that he ventured on the bold experiment of residence at Brook Farm, which had a far more intimate bearing on his mental development than almost any other of the outward changes of his life. It is scarcely possible that a man of his temperament could have embarked in a socialistic experiment expecting very much from it, in any other form than as presenting a medium for fresh observation of character. There is a tone of hopefulness in the first entries of his journal, and yet a sort of cynicism seems to surcharge them almost unconsciously.
‘Through faith,’ he says, ‘I persist in believing that spring and summer will come in their due season; but the unregenerated man shivers within me and suggests a doreot whether I may not have wandered within the precincts of the Arctic Circle, and chosen my heritage among everlasting snows. . . . Provide yourself with a good stock of furs, and if you can obtain the skin of a Polar bear, you will find it a very suitable summer dress for this region.’
It has been said that Brook Farm was an attempt to practically exhibit the ‘transcendental’ ideas which had been eloquently proclaimed, and that Emerson, the apostle of the new ideas, though interested in Brook Farm and a constant visitor, did not regard himself as being called to organise expedients for the practical embodiments of these ideas. But this would scarcely account for Hawthorne’s having taken part in the enterprise. He was singularly free from being subject to ‘transcendental’ enthusiasm, and, while a warm friend of Emerson’s, did not suffer himself to be moved an iota from his own groove of poised and self-centred, yet half-morbid meditation. Clearly Hawthorne’s presence at Brook Farm had not been dictated by any great hope of a regeneration of humanity, such as inspired Dana, and Ripley, and Pratt, who were professed enthusiasts in the scheme—men who had devoured the works of Owen and Fourier, and fancied that their ideas only needed the infusion of sound religious sentiment, to secure such a permanence as had been denied to former schemes of the kind. Hawthorne was too sharp an observer of human nature to cherish such dreams as these. Besides, he was by nature sceptical of anything which interfered with the free development of natural tendencies. He had no faith in philanthropy. He was a conservative and an aristocrat simply in virtue of that wistful scepticism which made him ever doubtful of new courses. But at the same time there was in Hawthorne a very decided vein of curiosity and a strong need for contact with fresh scenes and situations) he fell on torpid moods, on periods of ‘suspended animation,’ as he himself has called them, and needed to be quickened out of them by contact with prosaic and extraordinary conditions of life. We believe that Hawthorne expected to find such in Brook Farm. Not that he consciously framed to himself the reasons for his going thither. (He went in obedience to a dictate of his nature—the same as had reconciled him so completely to coal-weighing at Boston, and was yet to reconcile him to the surveyor’s work at Salem and the consul’s work at Liverpool. It was that element in his character which led to the following confession, which reappears in manifold forms throughout the more personal portions of his stories and his journals:—
‘It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have often offered me this advantage.’
Yet so far, we are compelled to believe there was a disinterested motive behind Hawthorne’s movements while at Brook Farm. He took his fair share of the work; and the first savings of his pen were put into the scheme. But he could not devote himself to it, as he had hoped. He was involuntarily an observer rather than a co-worker. Mr. Noyes, in his ‘History of American Socialisms,’ waxes rather wroth against Hawthorne; but he fails to appreciate the man’s nature in this regard, and, consequently, tends to do him an injustice. ‘This brilliant Community,’ says Mr. Noyes, ‘has a right to complain that its story should have to be told by aliens. Emerson, who was not a member of it; nor in sympathy with the socialistic movement to which it abandoned itself, has volunteered a lecture of reminiscences; and Hawthorne, who joined it only to jilt it, has given the world a poetico-sneering romance about it; and that is all the first-hand information we have except what can be gleaned from obsolete periodicals. George William Curtis, though he was a member, coolly exclaims in “Harper’s Magazine:”—strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority upon the romantic episode of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart more than he, whose faith and energy were all devoted to its development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent record, have never done so, and it is already so much a thing of the past, that it will probably never be done.” In the name of history we ask, Why has not George. William Curtis himself made the permanent record? Why has not George Ripley taken the story out of the mouths of the sneerers? Brook Farm might tell its story through him, for he was Brook Farm. It was George Ripley who took into his heart the inspiration of Dr. Channing, and went to work like a hero to make a fact of it; while Emerson stood by smiling incredulity. It was Ripley who put on his frock and carted manure, and set Hawthorne shovelling, and did his best for years to keep work going, that the Community might pay as well as play. It was no “picnic,” or “romantic episode,” or “chance meeting in a ship’s cabin” to him. His whole soul was bent on making a home of it. If a man’s first-born, in whom his heart is bound up, die at six years old, that does not turn the whole affair into a joke. There were others of the same spirit, but Ripley was the centre of them. Brook Farm came very near to being a religious Community. It inherited the spirit of Dr. Channing and of Transcendentalism. The inspiration in the midst of which it was born, was intensely literary, but also religious. The Brook Farmers refer to it as the “revival,” the “newness,” the “renaissance.” There was evidently an afflatus on the men, and they wrote and acted as they were moved. “The Dial” was the original organ of this afflatus, and contains many articles that are edifying to Christians of good digestion.’
Hawthorne, no doubt, went to Brook Farm with hopes of results upon his own mind and character which were not realised; and, therefore, all that was left for him was to leave it, as soon as he could in honour do so.
Looked at impartially, the ‘Blithedale Romance’ is a ‘poetico-sneering one,’ as Noyes has called it. It is a semi-cynical argument against all such schemes for reforming society. The moment Hawthorne went to Brook Farm, it seemed to become his main business to observe. He could not help himself; it consisted with his genius so to do. The redeeming point is that he deals as fairly by Miles Coverdale, his acknowledged alter ego, as by the rest Coverdale is put before us with his cold inquisitiveness, his incredulity, his determination to worm out the inmost secrets of all associated with him. Perhaps there is not a more characteristic touch in the work than we have in this passage, saturated as it is by a quiet cynical humour. He is speaking of the secret which seemed to lie sealed in Zenobia’s heart, imparting a sort of falseness to her whole character and conduct.
‘It irritated me, this self-complacent, condescending qualified approval and criticism of a system to which many individuals—perhaps as highly endowed as our gorgeous Zenobia—had contributed their all of earthly endeavour and loftiest aspirations. I determined to make proof if there were any spell that would exorcise her out of the part which she seemed to be acting. She should be compelled to give me a glimpse of something true—some nature, some passion, no matter whether right or wrong, provided it were real.’
And this was but a special instance of the exercise of a faculty which he speaks of generally as ‘That quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled me (often against my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort) to live in other lives, and to endeavour—by generous sympathies, by delicate intuitions, by taking note of things too slight for record, and by bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with the companions God had assigned me—to learn the secret which was hidden even from themselves.’
In this way it was that Brook Farm served Hawthorne—in quite a different way, of course, from what he himself had expected. It gave him new views and impulses to literary production it furnished him with several types of character:—‘The self-conceited philanthropist; the high-spirited woman bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex; the weakly maiden, whose trembling nerves endowed her with sibylline attributes; the minor poet beginning life with strenuous aspirations which die out with his youthful fervour.’
‘Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm,’ writes Hawthorne during a short holiday at Salem, in September 1841, ‘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 day-break, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honour to assume my name. But the 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, potatoehoer, and hay-raker. But such people do not know a reality from a shadow.’
Yet, in spite of all this, he returns to it, with full intent to profit, and to work to others’ profit; only underneath all we see the same ever-recurrent vein of cynicism, and cold, self-removed observation:—
‘Nothing here is settled; everything is but beginning to arrange itself; and though I would seem to have little to do with aught beside my own thoughts, still I cannot but partake of the ferment around me. My mind will not be abstracted. I must observe, and think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter. Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set seriously about literary occupation for the present It will be good to have a longer interval between my labour of the body, and that of the mind. Meantime, I shall see these people and their enterprise under a new point of view, and, perhaps, be able to determine whether we have any call to cast in our lot with them.’
Hawthorne’s connection with the first phase of the Brook Farm enterprise gives to it an importance which it would hardly otherwise have. The following sentences from an article in ‘The Dial’ by Miss Elizabeth Peabody, sketching the plan of the Community as an economy, may be read with interest: ‘All who have property to take stock and receive a fixed interest thereon; then to keep house or board in commons, as they shall severally desire, at the cost of provisions purchased at wholesale, or raised on the farm; and all to labour in community, and be paid at a certain rate an hour [the labour was afterwards paid according to the work done], choosing their own number of hours, and their own kind of work. With the results of this labour and their interest, they are to pay their board, and also purchase whatever else they require at cost, at the warehouses of the Community. All labour, whether bodily or mental, is to be paid at the same rate of wages; and none will be engaged in merely bodily labour. The hours of labour will be limited by a general law, and can be curtailed at the will of the individual still more; and means will be given to all, for intellectual improvement and for social intercourse, calculated to refine and expand. The hours redeemed from labour by the Community will not be re-applied to the acquisition of wealth, but in the wealth itself which money should represent. As a Community, it will traffic with the world at large, in the products of agricultural labour; and it will sell education to as many young persons as can be domesticated in the families, and enter into the common life with their own children. If the parents are unable to pay for them, the children will be educated gratuitously on condition of their agreeing to remafo and work for the Community afterwards.’ The farm was about eight miles from Boston, and consisted of about 200 acres of land ( unfortunately far from being of a productive character), and yet at the end of two years the Community possessed about 39,000 dollars; 22,000 of this being invested in the stock of the company, and in good loans at 6 per cent interest.
But, gradually, and whilst Hawthorne was resident there, changes were introduced; and the more experience of community life that he gained, the less he felt himself fitted to attach himself to it permanently. Just when, as Noyes says, it was about to transform itself into a Fourieristic institution, Hawthorne, no doubt wisely, took his leave of it with this retirement we may date the beginning of a new era in his life. He is hereafter less inclined to trust to ideas, and far less interested in them; he seems determined to cultivate more than he has done acquaintance with the world as it goes. In 1843 he marries Miss Sophia Peabody, and retires to the Old Manse at Concord, which he has described so excellently at the opening of the ‘Mosses from an Old Manse.’
He himself records that his life at this period was more like that of a boy externally than it had been since he was really a boy. ‘It is usually supposed,’ he proceeds, ‘that the cares of life come with matrimony, but I seem to have cut off all care, and live on with as much easy trust in Providence as Adam could possibly have felt before he had learned that there was a world beyond Paradise. My chief anxiety consists in watching the prosperity of my vegetables, in observing how they are affected by the rain or sunshine, in lamenting the blight of one squash and rejoicing at the luxurious growth of another. It is as if the original relation between man and nature were restored in my case, and as if I were to look exclusively to her for the support of my Eve and myself, to trust to her for food and clothing, and all things needful with the full assurance that she ‘will not fail me . . . Then [after breakfast] I pass down through an orchard to the river-side, and ramble along its margin in search of flowers; . . . Having made up my bunch I return home with them. Then I ascend to my study, and generally read, or perchance scribble, till the dinner-hour. In pleasant days the chief event of the afternoon is our walk. So comes the night, and. I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet, but which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True, it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but for a few summer weeks it is good to live as if this world were heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be, although in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil will mingle itself with our realities.’
And so it speedily did. The responsibilities and necessities of a wedded home soon made themselves felt, and he cheerfully bent himself to his work. His residence at the Old Manse was a very productive period, though perhaps on the list it may not show so well as some others. ‘Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth,’ says William Blake. Hawthorne here went through good journeymanship service, and laid in store of material to be wrought out in later days. A little of what he did at this time is classic. He wrote books of a less artistic character than he was well fitted to write, ,simply because the public would buy them; but here he wrote a portion of those ‘The Stories told from Grandfather’s Chair,’ in which early American history is touched with so free yet so reverent a hand. The ‘Mosses’ were also gathered together here, and the charming introduction written whilst he was daily enjoying the exquisite scenery near Concord, and in close association with congenial minds like those of Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow.
‘During Hawthorne’s first year’s residence in Concord,’ writes his friend, G. W. Curtis, who had left Brook Farm later to live at Concord, ‘I had driven up with some friends to an æsthetic tea at Mr. Emerson’s. It was in the winter, and a great wood fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled; and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man, who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his black eyes clearly burning under his black brow as I drifted down the stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as Webster might have looked had he been a poet—a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and walked to the window, and stood there quietly for a long time watching the dead-white landscape. No appeal was made to him; nobody looked after him; the conversation flowed steadily on, as if everyone understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed æsthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light in his eye which assured me nothing was lost so supreme was his silence, that it presently engrossed me to the exclusion of everything else. There was very brilliant discourse; but this silence was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers; but much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson, “With the slow, wise smile that breaks over his face like day over the sky, said, “Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night”
Such was his life at this time, quiet, busy, productive. Sometimes, when Mrs. Hawthorne was absent seeing her friends at Boston, he would dismiss the ‘help,’ and do all menial service for himself, such as cooking food, washing dishes, and chopping wood. For this latter bit of work, indeed, he seems to have had quite a fancy. The washing of dishes irritated him; if the dishes once cleaned would remain so for ever, one might be content,’ he says; thus covering some of his own awkwardness by the play of a humorous irony, which is deeply characteristic of him. To the end, much of the most pretentious effort of men seemed—to have its symbol in his washing of the dishes!
Near to the Old Manse had been fought a battle in the War of Independence. The monument erected in commemoration of it could be seen from Hawthorne’s garden; but very significant are his confessions with respect to these things, and the manner in which other traces and traditions of the war affected him.
‘The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest rather than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national history. Still, by the fathers of the village this famous deed was done; and their descendants might rightfully claim the privilege of building a memorial.
‘A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates the battle ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the grave-marked by a small, moss-grown fragment of stone at the head and another at the foot—the grave of two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was their warfare ended; a weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the river, and then these many years of rest In the long procession of slain invaders who passed into eternity from the battlefields of the revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.
‘Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, to1d me a tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. The story has something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot altogether be reconciled with probability. A youth in the service of the clergyman happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the bridge he hastened across the intervening field to see what might be going forward; It is rather strange, by the way, that this lid should have been so diligently at work when the whole population of town and country were startled out of their customary business by the advance of the British troops. Be that as it might, the tradition says that the lad now left his task and hurried to the battle-field with the axe still in his hand. The British had by this time retreated; the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground—one was a corpse; but as the young New Englander drew nigh, the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees,—and gave a ghastly stare into his face. The boy—it must have been a nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and betokening a sensitive, impressible nature rather than a hardened one—the boy uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.
‘I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career, and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood stain, contracted as if had been before the long custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity, and while it still seemed murderous to slay a brother-man. This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.’
It was not likely that such a thing should fail to make a deep impression on Hawthorne’s mind, or that it should be lost in a literary point of view; nor has it.
After nearly a three years’ residence at the Old Manse, he was appointed by Mr. Bancroft to the office of Surveyor of the Port of Salem. All the world is familiar with the literary outcome of that period. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is its never-dying memorial. He entered on his duties there in ‘1848, and in 1849 the first sketch of that unique production was shown to Mr. Fields, the famous publisher of Boston. But it illustrates well the character of Hawthorne, that he himself had no desire to seek the public favour again. The indifferent reception which ‘The Twice Told Tales’ had met with, and the slow sale even of his later efforts, seemed to have made him distrustful of his power to secure popularity, though it never seems to have made him doubtful of his destination as a burrower in the field of psychological romance. Mr. Fields, at once with the tact of a true literary adviser and the delicate consideration of a friend, managed to make the shy, reticent mail confess to the existence of a hidden treasure, and did not leave till he had carried it away with him for perusal. The work was at once developed more fully under Mr. Field’s advice, and no sooner was it published than it won its author fame.
Mr. Fields tells us that Hawthorne had intended to issue ‘The Scarlet Letter’ as the longest of a series of tales to be entitled ‘Old Time Legends’; together with Sketches Experimental and Ideal.’ When an extension of ‘The Scarlet Letter and a separate publication of it was proposed to him, he wrote;
‘If the book is made up entirely of “The Scarlet Letter,” (I fear) it will be too sombre. I found it. impossible to relieve the shadow of the story with so much’ light as I would gladly have thrown in. Keeping so close to its point as the tale does, and diversified no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader’s eye, it will weary very many people and disgust some. Is it safe, then, to stake the fate of the book entirely on this one chance? A hunter loads his gun with a bullet and several buck shot; and, following his sagacious example, it was my purpose to conjoin the one long story with half a dozen shorter ones, so that, failing to kill the public outright with my biggest and heaviest lump of lead, I might have other chances with the smaller bits individually and in the aggregate. However, I am willing to leave these considerations to your judgment, and should not be sorry to have you decide for the separate publication.’
Of course the separate publication was decided for, and wisely; the ‘Old Time Legends’ taking their place among the ‘Twice Told Tales;’ but the exquisite self-criticism here summed up in the words ‘diversified no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader’s eye’—is very noticeable and incisive, and shows at the same time a shrewd judgment of the popular taste.
At the end of three years’ service at Salem Custom-house Hawthorne lost his place and retired to Lenox, where he lived a quiet, homely life. His family were now grown to boyhood and girlhood and were companionable. But he was much more inclined than before to be sociable; and was often to be found among his neighbours at Mr. Dudley Field’s, at Holmes’s, or at Herman Melville’s. Parties and excursions were frequently planned, and Hawthorne would sometimes on these occasions brighten and break out into flashes of quaint humour and anecdote. He was busy too; here he wrote the’ Wonder Book,’ and’ The House of the Seven Gables,’ and thought a good deal about the ‘Blithedale Romance’ as he wandered among the Berkshire hills. He had always been much dependent on times and seasons; and he confesses that he was now more so than ever. ‘I shan’t have the new story’ [“The House of the Seven Gables”] ‘ready by November,’ he writes on October I, 1850; ‘for I am never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me,—multiplying and brightening its hues; though they are likely to be sober and shabby enough, after all.’
Again he confesses:—
‘I find the book [“The House of the Seven Gables”] requires more care and thought than “The Scarlet Letter;” also l have to wait oftener for a mood. “The Scarlet Letter,” being all in one tone; I had only to get my pitch, and could then go on interminably. Many passages of this work ought’ to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their proper effect. Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careering on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible without actually tumbling over.’
However, it may very well be that that bright, beautiful character, Phœbe, caused him more trouble and thought than he was fain to acknowledge. Such is, after all, a legitimate inference from what is here said. To get relief from the sombre vein of cold and morbid analysis, seems to have been ever his main difficulty; and it would almost appear as though in Phœbe—so natural, so pure, so healthy in her devotion and self-denial—he had resolved ,to create a type—the true American woman of the time—to refute once for all the objections so loudly raised to his morbidity, and to make an end of the remarks about his incapacity to deal with simple and healthy life. But his own confession, here so naively made, is a kind of unconscious justification of the common sense of the public, which the current criticism had merely uttered in scientific terms.
Ill-health came with the finishing of this wondrous work of art. At the close of 1851 he had such an attack as indisposed him from any exertion; and probably it was the hope of good being effected by change of air and scene, that he left Lenox and went to Concord, where he had purchased a little place to which he had given the name of the Wayside. Nothing of note was accomplished here at this time, however, save that, the moment he recovered he set about writing his ‘Life of Pierce,’ and gave the finishing touches to the ‘Blithedale Romance,’ in which we have more than anywhere else of that ‘beautiful strangeness’ which his imagination gave to familiar things. It may be said indeed that in ‘Blithedale’ Hawthorne made his genius fully efficient by ‘penetrating it with passion.’
Pierce meanwhile, to the surprise of many sharp observers of American politics, had become President; and it was not likely that he would forget; his old friend and recent apologist, notwithstanding—that the said old friend the first time he saw Pierce after his accession to dignity, had met him with, ‘Frank, I pity you;’ to which Frank had replied, with a smile, ‘I pity myself.’ Hawthorne was soon appointed United States Consul at Liverpool, and accordingly sailed for England in 1853.
We all know something of the prejudices and whimsical dislikes he brought to the old country with him; for he has made candid confession of all these in his work—‘Our Old Home,’ and in his Note Books. But it is very pleasing to observe how gradually familiarity vanquishes him, how he gets to love what he had been inclined to despise, and has to acknowledge himself more happy and contented on English ground than he had been for long. He found much room for observation, and could not help admiring. He loved to look on the old English manor houses, on the venerable ancient churches; nothing pleasing him more ‘than a ramble through an old churchyard, reading the odd inscriptions as he went’ He acknowledges that ‘of all things, I should like to find a gravestone in one of these old churchyards with my own name upon it, although for myself I should wish to be buried in America. The graves are too horribly damp here.’ His love for the old; for the shades and middle tones in which American life and history are so deficient, and which he so often desiderated, was here gratified; and gradually he found himself so much at home that he had but little wish to leave. He found attached friends, too—of one of these, Francis Bennoch, he has spoken in such terms of love arid tenderness as he used towards but few, even among his friends.
In 1858, he left Liverpool, and went to Italy. Few men have ever entered more deeply into the spirit of Italian life, notwithstanding that at first he found it difficult to strike root in Italy—feeling the change from England to the Continent as much as he had done the change from America to England, or even more. First impressions soon wore off, and he found much to engage his mind in Rome. Its art, its history, its crumbling piles of ruin, its very squalor and dirtiness, had a fascination for him. If the old Rows of Chester drew him thither over and over again, how much more must the ancient memorials of Rome have excited his interest and imagination. He was visited by affliction whilst there in the form of serious illness in his family. For relief he set himself to gather the materials for ‘The Marble Faun;’ but, when his daughter was at the worst, he could do nothing. Mrs. Hawthorne informs us that for months he did not even make an entry in his note-book. We regret such omissions; but surely facts like these add a new lustre to the character of the man who was as loving and kindly as he was greatly gifted.
His stay in Italy was very fruitful; but it is noticeable that for a long time he did not reconcile himself to the Italian schools of painting, preferring the Dutch masters, with their realism and minute details. In one point of view, indeed, Hawthorne was a realist, as is also borne out by the circumstance that, when he wrote for children, he either chose historical or biographical subjects, or contented himself with recasting classic legends.
He returned to America in the middle of 1860, and quietly re-established himself at the Wayside, Concord, for which place he had always felt a liking. He had, however, little domestic difficulties to face. Some time before he had written anticipatingly:—‘If I had but a house fit to live in, I should be greatly more reconciled to going home, but I am really at a loss to imagine how we are to squeeze ourselves into that little old cottage of mine. We had outgrown it before we came away, and most of us are twice as big now as we were then.’ By adding to the little cottage a sort of wing, which he dedicated to his own use, as library and so on, the Wayside was made sufficiently roomy, and there was still promise of a peaceful and productive period of years for him. Unfortunately, his household was ere long visited with a succession of serious illnesses, which rendered it impossible for him to work steadily; then came the Civil War, in which, notwithstanding his desire to keep aloof from politics and public life, he was so deeply absorbed, that he could not retreat into solitude with the creatures of his fancy. He wrote the chapters of ‘Our Old Home,’ which appeared in ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ as he wrote them. He elaborated ‘Septimius’ and threw it aside again as involved and unsatisfactory to himself. Then he made a fresh start with ‘Pansie’ or ‘The Dolliver Romance,’ which he wrought at only by fits and starts, and without any sense of satisfaction, although some of the passages in this choice fragment are as felicitously turned as anything he ever wrote. He was often visited with ill-health and complete prostration both of body and mind. His elasticity and freedom seemed gone; and we find a peculiar despondency hovering over his letters from the Wayside in these years. ‘Those verses entitled “Weariness” in the last magazine,’ he writes to Mr. Fields, ‘seem to me profoundly touching. I too am weary and begin to look ahead for the Wayside Inn.’ But there is a flicker of the old humour still: ‘If I subside into the almshouse before my intellectual faculties are quite extinguished, it strikes me that I would make a very pretty book out of it: and seriously, if I alone were concerned, I should not have any great objection to winding up there.’ . . . ‘You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigour. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the 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 vigour, if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not.’
In March 1864, Hawthorne was persuaded to undertake a journey to the South for the sake of his health in the company of Mr. Ticknor. His friends at Boston all speak of the great change that had taken place in him. Without delay, the two set forth. The stronger man was taken away instead of the weakly invalid. Mr. Ticknor died suddenly at Philadelphia; and on Hawthorne devolved the duty and the trial and grief of performing for his friend such services as he himself had expected to require at the hand of others. He returned home; but he never recovered the shock. His health rapidly gave way. Another journey to the New Hampshire Hills was undertaken in hopes of a recovery, in the company of President Pierce. Hawthorne’s appearance is thus described by his friend Dr. Holmes, who saw him on this occasion as he passed through Boston. ‘Late on the afternoon on the day before he left Boston, I called upon him at the hotel where he was staying. He had gone out but a moment before. Looking along the street, I saw a figure at some distance in advance which could only be his—but how changed from his former port and figure! There was no mistaking the long iron-grey locks, the carriage of the head, and the general look of the natural outlines of movement; but he seemed to have shrunken in all his dimensions, and faltered along with an uncertain, feeble step, as if every movement were an effort.’
Hawthorne died in the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire, May 19, 1864—He had often expressed a wish that he might die suddenly, and his desire was granted. ‘The moment, and even the hour, could not be told, for he had passed away without giving any sign of suffering, such as might call the attention of the friend near him.’ His body was taken back to Concord. ‘On the summit of a gently swelling mound where the wild flowers had climbed to find the light and the stirring of fresh breezes, the tired poet was laid beneath the green turf. Poet let us call him, though his chants were not modulated in the rhythm of verse. The element of poetry is air; we know the poet by his atmospheric effects, by the blue of his distances, by the softening of every hard outline he touches, by the silver mist in which he veils deformity and clothes what is common, so that it changes to awe-inspiring mystery, by the clouds of gold and purple which are the drapery of his dreams.’
The root of Hawthorne’s genius was puritan, but he dipped the puritan sternness in finest dyes of fancy, caught largely from his early impressions. For do we not see in all his writing traces of early community with sorrow, of contact with moods most alien to childhood and youth, of the weird impression and haunting mystery of Puritan life which he drank-in during these night rambles in Salem, and plenteous evidences, too, of the deep hold which the beauty and terror of Nature had laid upon his soul in these days and nights—of solitude in the Raymond woods, on the ice, or on the water? Hawthorne in one place regrets the lack of a favourable atmosphere in which the fruits of his mind might have ripened to literary form; but yet he says of one of the most depressing periods of his life, ‘I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them here, 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 had this passage in it.’ The latter view we are inclined to think the true one. Hawthorne’s debt to what seemed unfavourable circumstances is incalculable; his life in this regard is as good an illustration as could well be found of the strange law of spiritual compensation which plays grandly through all human life, and of which he is himself, perhaps, the greatest literary exponent of later times.
Thus we can see how important to a man of Hawthorne’s type was the outward life he lived, the circumstances into which he was thrown. The form of his work was to a large extent determined by these;!. For long periods he was often powerless, when, suddenly, a face, a figure, a defect, an oddness of character would give him the handle of his symbol; which for a long while he had studiously sought without any success. Often, doubtless, had Hawthorne pondered the mystery of sin, and its strange effects upon humanity, both injurious and beneficial,—even the sin of adultery had inevitably been meditated on over and over again by this most subtle casuist of human nature; but it was not till one day, fumbling among old records, at the Custom House of Boston, he came on a sentence decreeing that a woman convicted of adultery should stand on the Meeting House steps with the letter A marked upon her breast, that the problem flashed upon his imagination in full artistic form. The friend who was beside him at the moment showed insight in saying, ‘We shall hear of the letter A again.’
Another writes: ‘I do not doubt but it was Thoreau’s wonderful intimacies with various animals that suggested to his friend and neighbour, Mr. Hawthorne, the character of Donatello in the tale of “Transformation.’” Perhaps it may be remembered that Henry Thoreau, well-bred and well-educated, would enter none of the learned professions at the urgent wishes of his friends, but retreated into the woods, and built for himself, with his own hands, a hut at Walden, near Concord, where, in solitude, he pursued his studies of natural history, with something like instinct His love for animals and all natural things was a passion. Though a man of supreme brain, as is attested by his several books and his unique letters, he was, in his habits, really like some creature taking rank between man and the brutes, and bringing them, as Hawthorne feigns of Donatello and his ancestors, into something like sympathy arid good understanding. His fame spread, and he soon drew students and children from far places.
‘Sometimes,’ says the writer above quoted, ‘I have gone with Thoreau and his young comrades for an expedition on the river, to gather, it may be, water lilies. Upon such excursions, his resources for our entertainment were inexhaustible. He would tell stories of the Indians who once dwelt thereabout, until the children almost looked to see a red man skulking with his arrow on the shore; and every plant or flower on the bank or in the water, and every fish, turtle, frog, lizard about us, was transformed by the wand of his knowledge, from the low form into which the spell of our ignorance had reduced it, into a mystic beauty. One of his surprises was to thrust his hand softly into the water, and as softly raise up before our astonished eyes a large bright fish, which lay as contentedly in his hand as if they were old acquaintances. If the fish had also dropped a penny from its mouth, it could not have been a more miraculous proceeding to us. We could not then get his secret from him.’
Even then the thought of a romance, in which the chief character should unite the sylvan creatures with man in something like sympathy and mutual confidence had occurred to him. But nothing at that time came of it. He seems to have abandoned his intention, till he was in Italy, and gazed on the ‘Faun of Praxiteles,’ at the Villa Borghese. He then, writes down his impression thus:—
‘Many of the specimens of sculpture displayed in these rooms are fine, but none of them, I think, possess the highest merit. An Apollo is beautiful; a group of a fighting Amazon and her enemies trampled under her horse’s feet, is very impressive; a Faun copied from that of Praxiteles and another, who seems to be dancing, were exceedingly pleasant to look at. I like these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, linked so prettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature; and something quite good, funny, and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. The Faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something of a divine character intermingled.’
Still in the same happy equable mood of mind he goes some months after, and again renews the impression derived from the Faun:—
‘We afterwards went into the sculpture gallery, where I looked at the Faun of Praxiteles, and was sensible of a peculiar charm in it; a sylvan beauty and homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but not preposterous ears, and the little tail, which would, we infer, have an exquisite effect, and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of Fauns was the most delightful of all’ that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and. pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared by dint of constant intermarriages with ordinary mortals, but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family: and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the Faun might be most picturesquely brought out without detriment to the human interest in the story.’
Then nearly a month later still he again sets this down:—
‘I likewise took particular note of the Faun of Praxiteles, because the idea keeps recurring to me of writing a romance about it, and, for that reason, I shall endeavour to set down a somewhat minutely itemised detail of the statue and its surroundings.’
The sight of the dead monk in the Church had evidently suggested a more tragic interest than was at first intended, and gradually the lean kine, so to say, ate up the fat ones—the simple fun and pathos were overshadowed by the tragic, the weird, and terrible. The more Hawthorne dwelt on it, the more the dead monk and the Faun inextricably interblended themselves, and refused to be separated; suggesting themselves as symbols for an artistic statement of the manner in which sin may stimulate the hitherto dormant moral powers. And it was always so, more or less, with him. Naturally good-tempered, hopeful, sunshiny, he had not the power to ‘write a sunshiny book,’ though he often expressed the wish that he had. Before he left England, he wrote: “When I get home, I will try and write a more genial book; but the Devil himself always seems to get into my inkstand, and I can only exorcise him by pensful at a time.” He could not write till he was haunted by some weird idea—till he had stirred up some thought that lay almost at the unallowed recesses of his nature, so that he had to peer down into the depths to see how it muddied the waters—catching glimpses of the shadow of his own face between whiles.
With that peculiar power of abstracting himself, as it were, from his own intellectual activity, he sets down in the calmest manner how his stories took shapes which he himself had not at first designed, and recognises himself as being, in fact, a ‘haunted man.’ And so he really was. His mind, by its very nature, was constantly hovering over the boundary that divides sense from spirit; and hence the strange ghostliness that sometimes haunts one in reading him. But the reader is haunted simply because Hawthorne himself was haunted, and could only escape by taking to retirement and writing down the results of his self-observations. He was a haunted man, who craved contact with men and the world to quicken the imagination and make it fix on some one point; and this being once attained, he then needed absolute retirement till the work was done.
It is noticeable that after the conception of ‘The Marble Faun ‘ had come to something like clearness in his mind, he then sought absolute solitude, notwithstanding that he was still in Italy, amidst its many sights and scenes, its clear air, and stately architecture, and gorgeous paintings. ‘Six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties,’ is his singular confession. But when he had once written out his conception, the need for contact with the real world returned in double force. This necessity, indeed, was what saved him. He would have been simply melancholic and helpless, if it had not been a necessity of his nature that he should go out and observe; that he remained literally unproductive until he had caught from real life at once the impulse to production and the symbol with which to work. The exhaustive verification of this fact would form one of the most interesting of literary exercises. It is worth a moment’s trouble. If we get a clear idea of Hawthorne’s dependence on reality and the world without, and the effect it had on his whole development, it may turn out a not unfruitful bit of work.
Mr. Moncure Conway, who has written a very graceful little sketch of Hawthorne for Mr. Hotten’s edition of the ‘American Note-Books,’ takes occasion to say that, ‘No one who has been startled by seeing the strange profile on the side of the Profile Mountains in New Hampshire, can doubt where the story of “The Great Stone Face” was conceived.’ But in 1840 we find Hawthorne recording in his Note-book what is evidently the original suggestion for this story, which does not seem to acknowledge any such specific local reference, though no doubt the Profile Mountain brought the idea into definite objective form at the last. The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturæ. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries; by-and-by a boy is born, whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait. At some critical juncture the resemblance is found to be perfect. A prophecy might be connected.’ Even the phantasy of self-criticism, which is so humorously carried out by way of introducing the wonderful tale of ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ was evidently suggested by the circumstances of the queer little foreigner, half Swiss, half German, whom Hawthorne met in 1837, at Bridge’s on the Kennebec, and who Frenchified Hawthorne’s name into M. de l’Aubépine.
The more closely we enquire, the more definitely we can fix the starting-points of fact and incident on which he built his unique creations. Perhaps the story of ‘The Great Carbuncle’ affords the most remarkable illustration of this. A sketch, which until now has not been published in this country, throws a veritable flood of light on his process of creation. We discover that, in the story, we have but a set of real circumstances lifted into a sort of misty atmosphere of allegorical meaning, the moral purport shining powerfully through, and intparting to the whole a peculiar dusky brightness. By comparing this ‘Notch of the White Mountains’ with the allegory point by point, all this will the better be brought out. The characters, one by one, we can identify: the very dress and features of the folks he met at Ethan Crawford’s mountain hostel are reproduced for us in a different atmosphere. ‘One was a mineralogist, a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy hammer, with which he did great damage to the precipices and put the fragments in his pockets. I asked the mineralogist whether, in his researches about these parts, he had found the three “Silver Hills,” which an Indian Sachem sold to an Englishman nearly two hundred years ago, and the treasure of which the posterity of the purchaser have been looking for ever since. But the man of science had ransacked every hill along the Saco, and knew nothing of the prodigious piles of wealth.’ Now, behold the identical figure thrown into the magnifying atmosphere of allegory: ‘The fourth of the group had no name that his companions knew of, and was chiefly distinguished by a sneer that always contorted his thin visage, and by a prodigious pair of spectacles, which were supposed to deform and discolour the whole face of nature to this gentleman’s perception . . . . These coloured spectacles probably darkened the cynic’s sight, in at least as great a degree as the smoked glasses through which people gaze on an eclipse . . . . “The Great Carbuncle,” cried the cynic, with ineffable scorn, “Why, you blockhead, there is no such thing in rerum naturâ. I have come three thousand miles, and am resolved to set my foot on every peak of these mountains, and poke my head in every chasm, for the sole purpose of demonstrating, to the ‘Satisfaction of any man that the “Great Carbuncle” is a humbug.’
Here, too, we have the actual poet: ‘Another was a well-dressed young man, who carried an opera-glass set in gold, and seemed to be making a quotation from some of Byron’s rhapsodies on mountain scenery.’ Afterwards, inside the hotel, we are told that two Georgians present held the album between them, and favoured us with the few specimens of its contents, which they considered ridiculous enough to be worth hearing. One extract met with deserved applause. It was a “Sonnet to the Snow on Mount Washington,” and had been contributed that very afternoon, bearing a signature of great distinction in magazines and annuals. The lines were elegant and full of fancy, but too remote from familiar sentiment and cold as their subject, resembling those curious specimens of crystallised vapour which I observed next day on the mountain-top. The poet was understood to be the young gentleman of the opera-glass, who heard our laudatory remarks with the composure of a veteran.’ Then this is the idealised poet: ‘The fifth adventurer likewise lacked a name, which was the greater pity, as he appeared to be a poet. He was a bright-eyed man who wofully pined away, which was no more than natural, if, as some people affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog, morning mist, and a slice of the densest cloud within his reach, sauced with moon-shine whenever he could get it.’
Then there is a physician, the original of Doctor Cacaphodel; and a ‘trader from Burlington, and an old squire of the Green Mountains; and two young married couples ail the way from Massachusetts, on the matrimonial jaunt. Besides these strangers, the rugged country of Coos, in which we were, was represented by half-a-dozen wood-cutters who had slain a bear in the forest and smitten off his paw. So here we see the whole of the raw material of the ‘Great Carbuncle,’ and its parts are still identifiable after its wonderful transmogrification. Even the most delicate touch about the young couple retiring to the comer, the bride having contrived to erect a little curtain to screen themselves from the rest, is substantially a reproduction. ‘The two brides and the doctor’s wife held a whispered discussion, which, by their frequent titterings and a blush or two, seemed to have reference to the trials or enjoyments of the matrimonial state. The bridegrooms sat together in a corner, rigidly silent, like Quakers whom the spirit moveth not, being still in the odd predicament of bashfulness towards their own young wives.’
Mr. Fields tells us that, when a youth, Hawthorne made a journey into New Hampshire with his uncle, Samuel Manning. They travelled in a two-wheeled chaise, and met with many adventures which the young man chronicled in his home letters. Some of the touches in these epistles were very characteristic and amusing, and showed in these early years his quick observation and descriptive power. The travellers ‘put up’ at Farmington, in order to rest over Sunday. Hawthorne writes to a member of the family in Salem: ‘As we were wearied with rapid travelling, we found it impossible to attend divine service, which was, of course, very grievous to us both. In the evening, however, I went to a bible-class with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling tailor, of very questionable habits.’
When the travellers arrived at the Shaker village of Canterbury, Hawthorne at once made the acquaintance of the Community there, and the account which he sent home was to the effect that the brothers and sisters led a good and comfortable life, and he wrote: ‘If it were not for the ridiculous ceremonies, a man might do worse than join them.’ Indeed, he spoke to them about becoming a member of the Society, and was evidently impressed with the thrift and peace of the establishment This visit in early life to the Shakers is interesting as suggesting to Hawthorne his beautiful story of ‘The Canterbury Pilgrims,’ which is in his volume of ‘The Snow Image’ and other ‘Twice Told Tales.’
Such facts as these give us some insight into Hawthorne’s manner of working. He burrowed, to use his own phrase, ‘to the utmost of his ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance;’ but it was essential to him that, before casting any thought into artistic form, he should receive from real life at least the handle of his symbol. Very little often sufficed him for this, but it was a conditio sine quâ non that he should have that little, if he was to be in any degree effective. Even ‘The Minister’s Veil’ is but a new allegorical rendering of the sad fate of Mr. Moody of Maine. This Hawthorne himself has freely acknowledged. To a number of his stories he at first attached notes, acknowledging the real facts on which he raised his airy fabric of allegory. And certainly it is surpassingly noteworthy that in the earlier ‘American Note-books’ we find Hawthorne more employed in ‘burrowing’ inward for principles, than in seeking for symbols in the outside world; while in the ‘English Note-books’ the process is exactly reversed. He no longer thinks it worth while to busy himself with setting down records of his subjective phantasies, but is rather curious and active to fix traits, characters, and incidents, suitable for being transformed into symbols. And just as the wisdom of the fancy became more and more the real possession of the intellect and the heart, he seems to have less cared for the perplexing joys of solitude, and learned to feel more relief and pleasure from contact with his fellow-men. Thus, it seems to us, that Mrs. Hawthorne’s words, prefatory to these ‘English Note-books,’ apply with much more force to the American ones. She writes:
‘Throughout his journals it will be seen that Mr. Hawthorne is entertaining, and not asserting, opinions and ideas. He questions, doubts, and reflects with his pen, and as it were, instructs himself so that these Note-books should be read, not as definite conclusions of his mind, but often merely as passing impressions. Whatever conclusions he arrived at are condensed in the works given to the world by his own hand, in which will never be found a careless word.’
Had we more space at our command, we believe it would be easy to verify this statement by extracts. We must give one or two:—
The dying exclamation of the Emperor Augustus. Has it not been well acted? An essay on the misery of being always under a mask. A veil may be needed, but never a mask.’
Under date 1837, we find these records:—
‘A blind man to set forth on a walk through ways unknown to him, and to trust to the guidance of anybody who will take the trouble; the different characters who would undertake it; some mischievous, some well-meaning, but incapable; perhaps one blind man undertakes to lead another. At last, possibly he rejects all guidance, and blunders on by himself.’
A person to be in possession of something, as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.’ [This is an idea which occurs under various refinements. Thus we have it some years later]: ‘A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection, yet his aiming so highly should be a comfort to him.’
‘Some very famous jewel or other thing, much talked of over the world. Some person to meet with it, and get possession of it in some unexpected manner, amid homely circumstances.’
‘A woman to sympathise with all emotions, yet to have none of her own.’
In one of his earliest note-books we find him questioning the effect which the slaying of a fellow creature, in circumstances such as made the act in some sense innocent, would have upon a brooding and speculative character, sensitive, and every way more inclined to thought and scepticism than to action or belief. The suggestion frequently, and in varied forms, recurs to him; and no doubt the recollection of the lad who, according to tradition, slew the wounded soldier with the axe, near the Old Manse, had its own share in keeping the subject before his mind. How, at last, he did work out such a theme, with what subtlety, delicacy, and variety of motif, English readers can now see in his latest novel—‘Septimius.’ All that seems rude or contradictory in the tradition is refined away;—Septimius is a student, stricken with a sense of the mystery of life and immortality. Out of his love for Rose Garfield—as yet untestified in words—rises the passion that made him hate, before the circumstances came that made him kill, the gay young officer; and, through the slaying of a creature whose sunshiny good-nature and generosity had already called forth his affection, in spite of his first desire for revenge, he obtains that wonderful document which has such a profound influence on his fate. Truly, the story told by Lowell over the nameless grave of the two British soldiers was anything but lost. The subtle workings of Hawthorne’s mind upon it, as it lay there for many years, has transformed it into one of the subtlest revelations of the workings of the human soul. Notwithstanding that the plan never clearly developed itself in Hawthorne’s mind; and that, at the middle of the story, as we have it, he changed his purpose with respect to the relations of Rose and Septimius; yet we can see what a masterpiece of art he could have made of it, had his health been better, and had he been a little while longer spared.
The peculiarly abstract character of his earlier conceptions is what most strikes one. They are so utterly without any apparent reference to the real world, and suggest only the vaguest moral paradoxes. The following, however, is of a somewhat different kind, and on the whole is more of the character of remark we meet with in the English Note-books.
‘The other day, at the entrance of the market-house, I saw a woman sitting in a small hand-waggon, apparently for the purpose of receiving alms. There was no attendant at hand; but I noticed that one or two persons who passed by seemed to enquire whether she wished her waggon to be moved. Perhaps this is her mode of making progress about the city, by the voluntary aid of boys and other people who help to drag her. There is something in this—I don’t yet well know what—that has impressed me, as if I could make a romance out of the idea of a woman living in this manner a public life, and moving about by such means.’
When one begins a systematic study of Hawthorne—eager to get all the light that circumstances (;art throw upon his strange creations—the Note-books, interesting in themselves, become very tantalising and unsatisfactory. They are so broken and disconnected. They jump from epoch to epoch, leaving some of the most interesting periods wholly dark. Thus, in the American Note-books, we have no record of the all-important years between 1825 and 1835, when ‘The Twice Told Tales’ were written, and when the most decisive influences were at work in forming Hawthorne’s character; the year spent at Boston, as weigher and gauger under Bancroft, is summed up in a dozen pages of extracts from his letters; the period of the surveyorship at Salem, extending over three years, has no record here at all, nor has the time he remained at Salem, after his escape from the Custom-house, before he went to Lenox in 1850. Yet all these periods are biographically interesting; that the first is especially so is clear from the very significant glance which he casts backwards, and which gives the passage a good right to be here presented, although it appears in the English Note-books—in 1856.
‘I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me—more content to enjoy what I have—less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was, perhaps, a good preparation for the declining. half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favourably with it For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamt it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college—or sometimes even at school—and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call myself famous and prosperous—when I am happy too!’
Mrs. Hawthorne, indeed, tells us in her preface, that as no journals were found prior to those of 1835, Mr. Hawthorne must have destroyed those he had written, which is a circumstance ever to be regretted. Had the wide gaps only been filled up, we should have had something like a complete and wholly unconscious memoir from Hawthorne’s own hand. As it is, we sometimes feel a little vexed that Mrs. Hawthorne has defrauded us of details of close personal interest, and has too often added to the wrong by irritating us with asterisks. It was not Hawthorne’s way to reveal too much even to his own eye; he was ever watchful over his confessions to himself. ‘I have often felt,’ he writes, ‘that words may be a thick and darksome veil between the soul and the truth which it seeks. Wretched were we, indeed, if we had no better means of communicating ourselves, no fairer garb in which to array our essential being, than these poor rags and tatters of Babel!’ But that is only a reason, why, if we are to be let into such a man’s confidence at all, we should receive it wholly and not partially. Just when we fancy we are to be drawn into a somewhat closer confidence, the Rhadamanthine hand of the editor is put forward and pulls our companion aside. But perhaps we are inclined to fancy that more was thus kept from us than really has been so. Anyway, to the end we feel that there is much untold, and that even now we are somewhat in the position of the old Quaker, who wrote to Hawthorne, ‘that he had been reading my introduction to the “Mosses” and “The Scarlet Letter,” and felt as if he knew me better than his best friend,’ which only calls forth from Hawthorne the quietly incisive words: ‘But I think he considerably over-estimates the extent of his intimacy with me.’ We must not fall into the old Quaker’s error, and over-estimate the extent of our intimacy with him.
But to those in quest of characteristics, the Notebooks cannot fail to be, in the highest sense, attractive. All Hawthorne’s prejudices, whims, and strange fancies find frankest revelation on the page; and in a style that radiates ever and anon all the peculiar fascination of his singular mind. He had left orders that’ no formal life of him should be given to the world; and his wife, believing that she was free to communicate as much of his private notes as could be thrown into form, thus discovered a means of gratifying a not unnatural curiosity on the part of a large section of readers, and, at the same time, of conforming with her late husband’s wish. We are not sure but Hawthorne is as directly revealed by this means as he could have been in any other way. One of his characters, he says, made himself awful only by hiding his face; and a good deal of the mystery that is inseparable from a man of Hawthorne’s type is his perpetual attempt to escape from himself in the very telling of his story through the veil of abnormal characters or conditions.
His mind was eminently of the elusive kind. Let him be as communicative and confidential as he may, he still keeps something back, acting, as it would seem, on the short. counsel of the Scotch poet—
Ye scarcely tell to ony.
It consisted with the very nature of the man so to do. He was almost as much a puzzle to himself as he was to anyone else. He seemed, in fact, to be two men; and the one was constantly in the attitude of watching and commenting on the other. Hence the lyrical quality of his writing, and yet what he has called its ‘objectivity’—the power of suddenly veiling his own moods and impressions and giving them the aspect of being something foreign, simply by dint of setting them faithfully alongside of other and alien moods, which he treats with equal impartiality. From this arises what appears his inquisitorial curiosity, but this, after all, consisted rather in a desire to analyse himself than to spy upon others—to trace the impressions shadowy as the wind-waves passing over the wheat in autumn—on his own delicate nature, and in some sense to fix and perpetuate them.
All his works are thus biographies of moods and experiences; only he needs the spectrum of other and alien moods through which to exhibit them. The peculiarly subtle manner in which he involves himself with the most morbid and conflicting of human emotions is, to a large extent, the secret of his strange attractiveness. And of this he himself seems to have been quite conscious; for we find him thus writing in the dedication of his ‘Snow Image’ to his friend Horatius Bridge:—
‘There is no harm, but on the contrary, good, in arranging some of the ordinary facts of life in a slightly idealised and artistic guise. I have taken facts which relate to myself, because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And as for egotism, a person who has been burrowing, to the utmost of his ability, into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance, and who pursues his researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as: the light of observation, will smile at incurring such an imputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the surface. These things hide the man instead of displaying him. You must make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of its fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of its essential traits.’
A history of Hawthorne’s inner life, as he himself confesses, thus lay in solution in his stories. He uniformly took facts which related to himself, because they chanced to be nearest at hand, and likewise were his own property. A satisfactory biography of him would thus, on one side, have been as nearly as possible an analysis of his books, and an attempt to discover the real and substantial groundwork in each of them. Perhaps this was the reason why Hawthorne was so determined that no one should undertake a life. He himself only could write a life, and he had already written it so far, in the only way in which it could be satisfactorily written. His life distributes itself into cycles, each one being marked by a crisis—the casting off of the shell of an old experience, and the appropriation of the new one, being signalised by the advent of a book. For ‘men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many more.’ It is very remarkable that, while he complains of the stagnation of his productive faculties during his employment at Salem Custom House and other places, he then seemed, nevertheless, to be quite consciously appropriating the needful material to be sooner or later drawn out in the shining webs of romance. And these ‘periods of suspended animation’ seemed as much a necessity of his genius as were the favourable circumstances for production. His life was a perpetual series of reactions, in which what we may call the two selves took position to view each other. ‘Though my form be absent, my inner man goes constantly to church.’ Hawthorne’s inner man, indeed, went into many places from which the form was absent; and the special characteristic of his genius is that he never failed to look back upon the other self left behind as being some thing shadowy, dreamlike, unreal. He believes only in his own mental world: men and outer things only begin to have a real existence for him, when they glide from out their ordinary relations to interpret and reveal that wonderful inner life of his. Men are but shadows drawn sometimes by a sort of fascination across the glass-slide of his imagination, leaving their impress there; but they are absolutely dim and colourless, if not viewed at proper distance and in congenial lights. Says the showman of Main Street, no other than Hawthorne himself, idealising history for us: ‘Only oblige me by standing further back, and, take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall assume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvas become an airy and changeable reflex of what it purports to represent.’
There are some writers who lead you with them by the hand into the very midst of the scene they portray-pointing out the characters of note, and introducing you, one by one, to those their familiars, thus helping you gradually to take in the whole scene from different points of view, and who thus excel, by the very want of atmosphere and the magic relief of subtle shades and side-tints. They scarcely put anything in words which a painter of ordinary capability would not creditably paint, or, at all events, paint in such a way that you would not be instantly shocked with a sense of disharmony—and impropriety. But Hawthorne is of a very different order. Every fresh condition that appeals to his sympathy sufficiently to lead him to see, in the inmost remote way to dramatically involve himself with it, is but a new magic circle into which he may transport himself to look thence upon real life, and eject over it a dewy haze as of morning mist, yet so changing the whole aspects and relations of things as to be a veil of mystery, wonder and surprise. But he never for a moment lost the overpowering consciousness that he has but transported one self there, to be wistfully viewed and contemplated by another self, hidden away among the shadows and foliage, and sometimes among rocks; such as those where Love was fabled of the ancients to dwell. It is this wistful self-dividedness, which, in our opinion, is the key to Hawthorne’s character, and the mysterious nearness yet far-offness of his art.
Hawthorne, in one place, significantly likened himself to a ‘doppel-ganger,’ and that essentially expresses the leading elements of his character. It is a radical mistake to suppose that, because he loved solitude, he was withdrawn from life and its manifold interests. No man ever had a keener or more watchfully anxious curiosity respecting all that concerns man, all that is bound up in the possibilities of human nature. These confessions are characteristically true:—
‘Though fond of society, I was so constituted as to need occasional retirements, even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself characterised by remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss (a thing whose life is in the shade, the rain, or the noontide dew), crumbling in the sunshine, after long expectance of a shower.’
And yet elsewhere in the same work he confesses that—
‘No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.’
Thus it comes about that, while the inner life of Hawthorne seems at first to be the all-important thing in a study of his writings, we find, before we have proceeded far, that in few cases has a, great writer been more dependent on outer circumstances for giving the impulse to production, and determining the form and pattern of it Fulfilling, so to speak, in his inner life and imagination, all possible abnormal experiences and composite conditions of feeling, even at times verging upon the inhuman, he approaches life, not so much as an artist, as a scientific man. He is desirous rather of verifying his own fancies, than of broadly and sympathetically viewing life to represent it as it is. Hence arises the ‘coldness’ which, as he himself remarks, is inseparable from the most effective portions of his work. You cannot ‘take it into the mind without a shiver,’ he goes on to say. This, to a great extent, proceeds from the conscious and determinate ends with which he approached the real world. He was incessantly on the outlook for symbols by which fitly to declare himself. The world was, to a large extent, another Egyptian gallery, from whose strange and motley groups he desired to isolate a figure or hieroglyph here and there, to testify for ever to his marvellous depth of thought and penetration of the paracloxes of human life. He often tried to overcome this tendency in his character, but without result. He must either be a silent hypochondriac, or he must go out and mingle observant in the busy stream of destiny that courses through all active human life. Repelled from men by the innate shyness of his nature, he was ever drawn to them by that triumphant need of utterance which betrays the artist He was blamed for abusing confidences when he painted his brethren of Salem Custom-House, and ‘so he was when he pourtrayed the community of Brooke Farm; yet he is absolutely right in the excuse he urged, that he had no. personal interest in the representations.’ To him they were merely serviceable as supplying suggestions of masks or symbols for great spiritual realities.
‘Nor,’ he argues, ‘are these present pages a bit of intrusive biography. Let not the reader wrong me by supposing it. I never should have written. ‘With half such unreserve, had it been a portion of this life congenial to my nature, which I am living now, instead of a series of incidents and characters entirely apart from my own concerns, and on which the qualities, personally proper to me, could have had no hearing.’
In a certain sense, indeed, Hawthorne never realised the practical nearness of anything, save what identified itself closely with his deepest affections. The officials of the custom-house of Salem were as remote from him as though they had belonged to a community in the moon. He would have written of both with equally unconscious freedom. For individual men he cares not, unless he has been led to love them; in man, he is deeply interested: but it is in a curious and remotely speculative way. Indeed, it may be said, that he has no direct concern with character as such, character is to him rather a ready medium through which to pour the stream of his own phantasies.
He needed solitude; he needed society; ‘he represents Coverdale as escaping from Blithedale to the city, to spy on people at their back-doors. He disliked the finesse of society and all its make believes; and yet he acknowledges his liking to study the physiognomy of cities, to pry into all their crannies and out-of-the-way comers. But it needed to be at a certain distance, so that he could isolate and arrange what he saw to suit his own fancy. Too close contact often spoiled the illusion: for then his heart spoke, and the person was transformed into a portion of his own life; and its secret was a confidence. Hence we can well believe what Mrs. Hawthorne has said: ‘He had the power of putting himself into each person’s situation, and of looking from every point of view, which made his charity most comprehensive. From this cause he necessarily attracted confidences, and became confessor to many sinning and suffering souls, to whom he gave tender sympathy and help, while resigning judgment to the Omnipotent and All-wise.’ In spite of his ‘awful insight’ he was as blind as a child to the defects of his friends. As we have found, he could see nothing to blame in his old college-mate, Franklin Pierce. He has given no portrait of a confessed friend in his fiction. Indeed, nearness to him blinded him. He felt that the extension of the realm of the heart by new individual affections narrowed the range of his observing power. Therefore he was jealous of making new friends: to them he literally gave away, far more than most men, a part of himself, of his own creative faculty. Whenever lie got interested in a character, so as to love it, he could no more analyse or dissect it for his artistic uses; and hence the cold reserve in which he oftentimes seemed to wrap himself. Coverdale, in ‘Blithedale,’ says significantly with respect to the Hermitage: ‘I brought thither no guest, because, after Hollingsworth failed me, there was no longer the man alive with whom I could think of sltaring all So there I used to sit, owl-like, yet not without liberal and hospitable thoughts. I counted the innumerable clusters of my vine, and forereckoned the abundance of my vintage. It gladdened me to anticipate the surprise of the community, when, like an allegorical figure of rich October, I should make my appearance, with shoulders bent beneath the burden of rich grapes, and some of the crushed ones crimsoning my brow as with a blood-stain.’ His genius constantly masters him. He has always more power in depicting what is repellent to his intellectual and moral sense than what he can personally love and admire. His ‘Life of Pierce’ is forced in spite of the love which he bore the man; but Hollingsworth, whom he dislikes, is characterised by the most distinctive and incisive points of portraiture.
Nor could anything well be more characteristic than the account he gives of his meeting with Douglas Jerrold,: how the little man was shocked that Hawthorne should think of him as a hard, ~ acrid,’ cynical creature, how the tears actually came into his eyes at being so misunderstood, and how Hawthorne, even while he felt there was a good deal of acting in the whole thing, could not help letting errold creep into a comer of his heart. The note-books are full of direct instances of this— notably so is he record of the Englishwoman who came to him and said she was an American, and fooled him out of half-a-crown, which, after all,—he might have spent in a far worse way.’
Hence there is some ground for saying, as indeed Zenobia did say of Miles Coverdale, that a shrinking sensitiveness, almost maiden-like, was combined in Hawthorne; with a cold curiosity truly Yankee-like. Zenobia had long recognised Coverdale as a sort of ‘transcendental Yankee, with all the propensity of your countrymen to investigate matters that come within your range, but rendered almost poetical in your case by refined methods which you adopt for its gratification.’
The cold curiosity of Hawthorne, however, must not be spoken of as though it were absolute and all Pervasive. He was saved from the worst result of this temper, as we have said, by warm human attachments which, rendering him blind even to the most patent faults of his favourites, restored his faith. He owed more to his blindness than to his insight; and he himself would doubtless have said that we all do; He was no sceptic. He believed in God and in humanity; with a firm and unquestioning allegiance. Only he was a keen detector of the false coin of humanity, and needed to protect himself against the scorn and cynicism which that qualification necessarily tends to engender. His heart was simple, though his intellect was large and keen. Indeed we discover now and again a trace of self-hate; when his suspicions carry him into too pronounced attitudes of dislike. If he quickly detects the bad side of any creature, he must for his own peace pursue the investigation until he finds some justifying trait or disposition. Nothing is so bad but it may have its use; no creature is so debased but he may be a: minister of good. And this is carried so far with him indeed, that, while reading him, we are constantly forced into a sort of questioning as to whether there is such a thing as evil after all, arid whether we ever can tell, amid the mixed and most fluctuatjng elements of life, what is for the good of the individual or of the race And yet there is a peculiar shadow lying at the root of his optimism. In the ‘New Adam and Eve,’ he says, ‘There must have been shadows enough, even amid the primal sunshine of their existence, to suggest the thought of the soul’s incongruity with its circumstances.’
But the larger sphere which the soul inevitably seeks must finally be found, as it only can be found, in Love; and, firmly believing this, Hawthorne is only cynical for a moment; and then he seems to reprove himself even for the momentary mood. Hence there is what we should hardly have expected to find in such a man—a dominating cheerfulness. Unless we have realised this, it is somewhat puzzling at first to find him, in 1856, writing thus:—‘I have suffered wofully from low spirits for some time past; and this has not often been the case since I grew to be a man, even in the least auspicious periods of my life.’
We should have fancied that Hawthorne was one of the most despondent of men. But when we find that there was such a large sphere of his nature kept wholly intact from all the confusion that may be bred of psychological riddle-reading—a pure chamber of love and trust—we at once find the sufficient explanation. Otherwise it is hardly possible that the ‘cold observer’ could have written thus:—
‘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 sympathise with them, not they with me.’
And how shall we fitly characterise the massive product of this most subtle mind? As the essence of his genius was Puritan, we may say that his novels are properly the poetry of Puritan sentiment take from them the almost bloodless spirituality, which sprang from his early contact with the terrible problems of sin and death and the future, and all interest would vanish, ‘Strong traits of his rugged ancestors,’ he frankly acknowledges, ‘had intertwined themselves with his,’ although he was but a ‘frivolous writer of story-books.’ To him as to them there is but one reality—Eternity. So close does it lie to his constant thought, that nothing more frequently occurs in his writings than questionings as to whether the real world is not more shadowy after all than the spiritual one. One of his characters in making this declaration is, for the moment, but Hawthorne’s own mouthpiece: ‘More and more I recognise that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial.’ The pervading ghostliness of his conceptions springs from the intensity with which this was constantly felt. His characters are the embodied passions, emotions, yearnings, and hopes of human nature. A cold current of ghostliness comes near us with their presence. They are just as much clothed on with flesh and blood as to render them visible to us. We see them for an instant, while we remain fixed in the position in which the Master has been pleased to place us the moment we move to get a fuller or a closer view; they vanish from our sight. This strangely elusive quality of Hawthorne’s characters is very notable; and still more the skill with which he nevertheless manages, by the play of peculiar lights of fancy, to give relief and variety to his singularly airy abstractions. ‘Gradually individual beings, definite in spiritual quality, but shadowy in substantial form, group themselves around his central conceptions, and assume an outward body and expression corresponding to the internal nature.’1 To him there are still demons and witches and angels, but they are more closely identified with the large facts of human nature than heretofore. In man’s life itself all the weird conceptions of man seem to be secretly realised, if we could but read it truly. And the laws of the spiritual world; secret, subtle, irresistible cannot be baulked. They alone are permanently powerful; and justify themselves in the last result of all. Other things are but appearances and delusions that draw men to destruction.
But the element of faith in Hawthorne, though in one point of view a product of the Puritan influence, is associated with peculiar fatalistic tendencies, owing to the hesitant wistful nature of his genius, exaggerated, as it was, by generous contact with all the culture of his time. He would not persecute for any cause, as did his ancestors; but this is only because he sees far more clearly than they did, that wrong-doing and falseness of all kinds infallibly carry their own punishment with them—a punishment which is far more terrible than any form of physical pain could possibly be. The passivity of his nature accords with his convictions; but still he is strong in his sense of justice, sometimes even to the point of cruelty, as his forefathers were. He, like them, can punish severely, although he uniformly takes care that Providence and the inner nature shall combine to effect the punishment. But with him punishment is purification. He can therefore sometimes deal out very hard measure even to those whom he seems to like; for this is the form in which the idea of atonement figures itself in his mind. He will not favour any ‘poetic justice:’ poor Hepzibah Pyncheon, unloved yet most worthy to be loved, in her extreme sensitiveness to the scorn of her customers, suffers for some of the sins of her scheming ancestors; and Zenobia, in ‘Blithedale,’ so strong and self-sufficing, must go down at last, as if under a dark wave of Fate.
The Puritan theology taught that we are not, and cannot be, saved by any goodness of our own, that of ourselves we are only evil—tainted with sin from the birth; that we are the sorrowful victims of morbid inheritances, of the strange fatalities of constitutional depravity; and that it is only through the imputation of another’s righteousness that we can hope for salvation. So far, it is thus also in Hawthorne’s scheme of things. He believes in inherited evils—in defects of will, in taints of blood, in diabolic tendencies of nature; but he has firm faith also in a divine purpose which embraces human life, and turns what appears to be only evil to the individual, into good for the Whole, in which he is finally embraced. We atone for each other by turns; and if not willingly, then Providence is avenger, and ‘wrongs the wronger till he render right.’
Had Hawthorne been as sceptical of Providence as he was of men he would have been helplessly melancholy. He could never have looked into other men with the steady quietness that he did, and his tales had been simply oppressive, if it had not been for this ever-present background of faith in humanity and its possibilities. Humanity is on the way towards a higher condition, and each individual, will he, nil he, must contribute his quota of help. But let no man trust in himself in view of the higher ends of life. Here we find the nexus between his highest speculative principles and his political and practical ideas. He is a fatalistic: optimist, preaching his doctrine with the weapons of the romancer. A touch of cynicism comes in whenever he regards individuals aiming to grasp and appropriate to themselves a secret which is the right of all; for he sees no hope for persons as such. ‘The world will be more and more;’ but the best directed efforts of the most far-sighted men, are as likely to hinder as to promote that end. They, indeed, are quacks who make it their aim to overreach or to outrun Providence, even in: struggling for ends the very noblest. For the moment that a map is impatient of a high result, and struggles or fights for it, he has lost faith and has become only ambitious; and ambition is always, and in all its forms, a cruel slave-driver. Compulsion is of its very essence. This is as much the case when the object seems noble as when it is mean. Philanthropy become a mere profession or an all-absorbing purpose,—a Moloch to which sweet human affections must be daily offered up,—is as vain and is likely to be almost as fruitful of evil result as is wickedness itself. Hawthorne sometimes winks with the eye that is fixed on the follies and delusions of the individual; he never winks with the eye that is directed to the spiritual world. This completely saves him from cynicism. All his insight never robbed him of his faith in that, but confirmed it. We have already quoted a passage which proves how true a spiritualist he was; and yet how he hates the ‘spiritualists,’ and holds them up to ridicule. In one word, Hawthorne holds by Providence, and not by men. Yet his idea, too boldly stated, would tend to paralyse noble effort. For this we blame him. Providence needs its human agents; but, amidst the materialism and the self-faith and the pretence of the present century, was it not something to hear a clear voice like that of Hawthorne raised in favour of other influences than those which men may put forth on their own account?
Hawthorne is the teacher of a ‘wise passiveness. But to make clear his ideas of the supreme play of Providence in human affairs, he needs in some sort to reduce the reverence for individuality by a strange mixing and conglomeration of motives. The good are not wholly good with him; neither are the worst of men wholly bad. The very goodness of the best, however, when it is reckoned on as goodness, may become an evil, and the shame of the sinner may be translated into a source of blessedness by the ministry of atonement. Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter transforms itself into a painful bliss in her little Pearl; but Arthur Dimmesdale’s scarlet letter, hidden from the eyes of all, burns into his very heart. And so, because of the casuistical constructions and the necessary apologies for some forms of transgression, Hawthorne does tend to somewhat confuse settled conventional moral judgments. But he could only do this with the thoughtless or the ill-disciplined. There never is the shade of oblique reference to true nobleness, or to real devotion, however opposed the object of it may be to what he himself would elect. Nothing could be finer than his sympathy at once for Endicott and the gay young Lord and Lady of the May, in his story of ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount’.
His morality is of the noblest. It is the consecration of unselfishness. All things yield to self-sacrifice. This is the perpetual miracle-worker. With what skill he shows us how Phœbe Pyncheon yields up her very life for Clifford arid Hepzibah. Poor Phœbe! It seemed that she was giving up her sunshine, her youth and all its heritage, for them. She half-ruefully says: ‘Ah, me! I shall never be so merry as before I knew Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal older in this little time. I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it; but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome notwithstanding.’ And yet Holgrave replies: ‘You have lost nothing, Phœbe , worth keeping, nor which it was possible to keep. Our first faith is of no value; for we are never conscious of it till after it has gone. I shouldn’t wonder if Clifford were to crumble away some morning after you are gone, and nothing be seen of him more except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you.’
This is a cardinal idea in Hawthorne’s theory of life. It often recurs. Giving up is truest gaining. That which robs us of what we most cherish is that which may most enrich. Our one business in life is to declare boldly for the soul. And if Hawthorne sometimes seemed unconsciously to do violence to cherished standards, he was, up to his measure, true to the deepest spirit of Christian teaching. A little note we have met with in one of our investigations leads us to conclude that this was to be the burden of the Dolliver Romance—that strange conception which was working itself into clearness in the mind of the Puritan poet when he was half consciously descending into the dark valley of the shadow:—
‘I can’t tell you,’ he writes to the publisher, ‘when to expect an instalment of the romance, if ever. There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin, I linger at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty to write a sunshiny book. . . . I want to prefix a little sketch of Thoreau to it, because, from a tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the original one. It seems the duty of a live literary man to perpetuate the memory of a dead one, when there is such fair opportunity as in this case; but how Thoreau would scorn me for thinking that I could perpetuate him! And I don’t think so.’
‘The idea of a deathless man!’ And so old Dr. Dolliver, with his faculties all decayed, and his frail body almost visibly lapsing away, was to live on and on by virtue of his love for Panzie, to guard and watch over her, till he should be esteemed as deathless; and Panzie, like Phœbe Pyncheon, was joyously to give up her youth for his sake to prevent his shrunken body from falling into a heap of dust. She was to give him her sunshine, life, and youth; he was to give her wisdom, and hope, and by his love to dower her with the tranquil joy of that lovely purity of age, which is so quiet and reposeful in contrast with the hard bold purity of youth. The situation is one quite to Hawthorne’s heart; and, though it seems not a likely one to be made powerfully interesting, he would have made it fascinating with touches of most quaint revelation.
We are debtors and creditors to each other, and our accounts can never be exactly balanced. The mysteries of life with Hawthorne close and centre here. He will not hear of perfect people. To be perfect were to be isolated. Those who are accredited with the possession of uncommon goodness, he is very apt to regard with suspicion. He loves unconscious goodness, and, like a certain shrewd poetess of our time, glories in childish naughtiness, if so be it is only childlike. The following shows him as the ruthless prober of ideals:—
‘There being a discussion about Lord Byron on the other side of the table, Mrs. N. spoke to me about Lady Byron, whom she knows intimately, characterising her as a most excellent and exemplary person, high-principled, unselfish, and now devoting herself to the care of her two grandchildren,—their mother, Byron’s daughter, being dead. Lady Byron, she says, writes beautiful verses. Somehow or other, all this praise, and more of the same kind, gave me an idea of an intolerably irreproachable person; and I asked Mrs. N. if Lady Byron were warm-hearted. With some hesitation, or mental reservation, at all events, not quite outspoken,—she answered that she was.’
As here, so in his fiction, Hawthorne is never for a moment lost in his own illusions. He looks coldly on the most beautiful shapes which he can conjure up before his imagination. He ruthlessly pricks his ideal to show how weak it is: and then calmly dips his pen in the blood to write out its story further, with a pale brightness of colouring, and a suggestion of higher perfection arising out of what appeared to be the fatal point of defect. His flowers nearly all grow out of graves. His sunshine is oppressive till it touches and is toned on shadow. Humanity is a mass of sores and blotches; were it not for these, indeed, men would stagnate into stupidity and animalism. The world improves by dint of its errors; for exceptional individual attainment is but the issue of disease. He is the Puritan casuist, preaching another kind of fatalism, in which the accepted ideals of life are not destroyed, but inverted. ‘We go all wrong by a too strenuous resolution to go right;’ he urges, over and over again, which is an indirect accusation of want of faith, for which less cold observers than Hawthorne have often blamed the present age. Of all writers, however, it may be said that Hawthorne is the least dogmatic; and of all books his tales are, perhaps, the least calculated to encourage positive ideas about human nature and human life. Rather it seems as though he was continually edging us on to paradoxes, that like shifting sands suck the shoes off our feet as we hasten onward, and all the more if they were weighted with defences to shield us from every chafe and injury. Shoes are good, but if the feet are being so crushed by them that we cannot walk barefooted, ‘tis well that we should throw them aside so as to gain the free use of our feet even at the cost of some momentary suffering. Delusions can never be real and positive helps.
Much of Hawthorne’s finest humour springs from the fear lest he should be taken for a sentimentalist, and this, notwithstanding that he had some of the symptoms of the sentimental disease. He shrunk from publicity, and yet he sought it; confessing, with something of maladroitness as it seems to us, in his preface to the ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ that they were written to open a point of contact with the world, and not for his own pleasure: while yet, in the very same breath, the verdict of the world is spoken of as having been but of little moment to him, and is of little moment even now. He sometimes unnecessarily depreciates himself and his works out of concern lest he should seem self-conscious. He is too strictly and stiffly on his guard, taking rather too much ‘care not to say anything which the critics and the public may hear that it is desirable to conceal.’ As was said by a person of good natural judgment, but of limited literary culture, to whom we had given one of Hawthorne’s earlier stories to read, ‘It is as if he threw in some humour, in case he should seem to be vain of his art.’ And this is true. He has little of the ordinary weakness of literary men in the need for sympathy. In a vein of remarkable self-assertion and self-depreciation, he would write to his more intimate friends about his books. This, for example, is part of a letter to Mr. Fields about ‘Our Old Home’:—
‘Heaven sees fit to visit me with an unshakable conviction, that all this series of articles is good for nothing; but that is none of my business, provided the public and you are of a different opinion. If you think any part of it can be left out with advantage, you are quite at liberty to do so. Probably I have not put Leigh Hunt quite high enough for your sentiments respecting him; but no more genuine characterisation and criticism (so far as the writer’s purpose to be true goes) was ever done. It is very slight. I might have made more of it but should not have improved it.’
He decries his own heroism, too, with a touch of cynical humour, even while heroically standing up for his friend. This is very significant; he is speaking of his determination to dedicate a book to Pierce, notwithstanding that the General had lost public favour, and was in a sense then proscribed:—
‘I have no fancy for making myself a martyr when it is honourably and conscientiously possible to avoid it, and I always measure out my heroism very accurately according to the exigencies of the occasion; and should be the last man in the world to throw a bit away needlessly. So I have looked over the concluding paragraph, and have amended it in such a way that, while doing justice to my friend, it contains not a word that ought to be objectionable to any set of readers. If the public of the North see fit to ostracise me for this, I can only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two dollars rather than retain the goodwill of such a herd of dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels.’
His works are not stories at all in the sense we mean when we call Scott’s novels stories. They are great allegories, in which human tendencies are artistically exhibited to us. Two of those now presented, ‘Mother Rigby’s Pipe,’ and ‘Passages from a Relinquished Work,’ are very characteristic of him. Were one to judge merely from first impressions, one might very easily be misled as to the chief source of the fascination of Hawthorne’s stories which really lies in the subtle but almost imperceptible way in which real circumstances are constantly slipped into a medium the most shadowy and fantastic. The framework of real circumstances which he gives to ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ to ‘Blithedale,’ and to ‘The Mosses from an Old Manse,’ are only somewhat extreme illustrations of the way in which he everywhere sought to bring into intimate contact the most shadowy and the most substantial elements in human nature. His works are thus the truest emblems of his life. Brooding, contemplative beyond most men, haunted by ideas which seemed to demand for their complete development a mind abstracted from the haze of ordinary sympathies, he yet never abandoned himself to the joys of solitude, which at first soften and expand, and then speedily cramp and freeze up the finer feelings and benevolences. He constantly felt that his one chance of escape from the danger peculiar to such dispositions as his, lay in more or less real association with persons whose tastes and ways of life were different from his own. He himself, as we have seen, deliberately put on record his opinion that nothing could be more beneficial for a literary man than to be thrown among people who did not sympathise with his pursuits, and whose pursuits he had to go out of himself to appreciate. To this peculiar feeling—for it was clearly something deeper than a conviction come at by any process of reasoning—we may no doubt attribute in great measure the steady patience and goodwill with which he applied himself to the mechanical duties he was called on to perform in the several offices he held the coal-weighing at Boston, and the consular examinations at Liverpool. His stolid patience and good humour are indeed very remarkable in a man of such peculiar genius—a genius that led him by preference to take up the most morbid studies and abnormal conditions of life, and to make them the materials for romances. But, after all, this pertains to the very character of the man. He seems imaginative, fanciful, working in materials that he may mould as fantastically as he pleases. It is really the reverse. He needs to gather his facts by a slow process of selection, consequent on the most inquisitorial investigation. He takes nothing on hearsay, but must test everything for himself. As some physicians have found it needful to resort to experiments on themselves, the more surely to detect the virtues of certain subtle poisons, so Hawthorne must reduce all that is abnormal, morbid, and mixed in emotional experience into his own life. And he absolutely needs the aid of facts as talismans wherewith to lure and master his own nature, and bend it the better to his purpose. Old criminal trials, newspaper reports, even old advertisements, were a great treat to him. He sometimes found mental aliment in the driest records; and his intimate friends not seldom were surprised at his enthusiasm over such things. One of them tells how, having heard him speak of his love for such writings, he picked up one day a set of old English State-Trials and sent them to Hawthorne, who declared that he spent more hours over them and got more delectation out of them than tongue could tell. If five lives were vouchsafed to him, he said, that he could employ them all in writing stories from these books. He had sketched in his mind various romances founded on the remarkable trials there reported, and one day he made the said friend’s blood tingle by relating to him some of the situations which he intended to weave into these romances. In one place he says that ‘The Diary of a Coroner’ would be a fine subject. There can be no doubt that there was a certain vein of realism in him which would have enabled him to treat such a theme in a wonderfully effective way. No doubt it was this conviction which made one of his French translators rank ‘The Journal of an African Cruiser’ as an original work of imagination. He writes:—‘Outre les œuvrages que nous venons de citer, on a de lui “L’Image de Neige et autres Contes,” le “Journal d’une Croisiere en Afrique” (!), le “Livre des Merveilles,” le “Fauteuil du Grand-papa,” et “Les Contes de Tanglewood.’”
It is on account of their letting us, far more completely than could have been done otherwise, into the secret processes of his art, that his notebooks are, from a critical point of view, so inexpressibly valuable. Where they are least interesting in themselves, they are all the richer in this regard. They show us how closely this great man studied his themes; how conscientious, how careful he was not to commit himself in any way; how persistently he returned to his work again and again; and how difficult he found it to bring anything up to the high level of his own exacting judgment Every page, free, sparkling, graceful as it seems, is the result of long, unwearied labour and meditation. He wrought on the same principle as any anatomist, taking nothing for granted. If he hears of a murder of specially horrible character, where the motives that led to it are so mixed and involved as to force from us the admission that, after all, a thread of something not wholly dark and diabolic runs through the perpetrator’s thoughts and feelings, he must first microscopically examine every fact and detail with the watchful brain of a detective, so that he may be able to place himself in the very position of the criminal, and faithfully report on his mood, and all the varying influences that led to it After the publication of ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ we read that he was constantly applied to by criminals and others for advice and help.
Hawthorne was in many ways a ‘confessor;’ and in his most repulsive subjects and characters there is a slight air as of justification for the wrongdoer. A kind of subdued apology for the vileness of human nature runs through his writings. This is not because he held light views as to duty—his views of duty were as strict and as high as those of any of his Puritan ancestors; but, as has been said, he desires to see everything in relation to a prevailing Providence; and the necessity that lies on him, in order to make this the better apparent, to rigidly reduce the claims of individuals, leads him almost of set purpose to mix and conglomerate motives. He himself has written, ‘Blessed are all simple emotions be they bright or dark; it is only the mixture of them that is infernal.’ But in spite of this he dealt in mixed emotions till it would almost seem as though he had no taste for simpler ones, or had wholly lost the faculty of interesting himself in them; as those who have been accustomed to highly spiced food and drink, cannot bring themselves afterwards to relish foods and drinks that are pure and unmixed. It was his morality and his need for actual contact with men, that saved him from the last and worst results of cynicism. He is no hero-worshipper. He sees too clearly into human nature, and detects its seamy places far too easily to be a sentimentalist in any form. But he is in the best sense a believer, though not perhaps after the precise orthodox type. He has the firmest faith in a divine purpose that embraces all man’s puny efforts, and takes them up and includes them, to educe from them at last a largesse of benefit for humanity, however far the individuals themselves may have failed to recognise, or to reach up to the height of, this divine design. And thus, notwithstanding that he is sometimes very divided as to several open courses of human action, he never really doubts. The more we get to know him we feel the more surely that he is a genuine believer in goodness and in God. In spite of his strange curiosity, which cannot even be restrained in face of the most perilous problems, he still keeps intact a region of his spiritual nature sacred to mystery. This man, with his ‘awful in-sight,’ and his morbid melancholy, yet held firmly by the spiritual world, refusing to surrender the inmost citadel. Here he takes his position with the most commonplace of men; and in this lies one element of his greatness. His works, while they may sometimes raise question as to conventional judgments on this or that action, always encourage the deepest reverence for the spirit of man itself—from which flows unceasingly the true morality that ever renews itself in love and sympathy. And he always will, on this account, be most truly appreciated by close students of human nature; while the ghostliness of his imagination gives him sometimes a strange fascination, which all alike must feel, and recognize the strength that lay behind it.
Of his qualities as a writer what need is there to speak? No man has ever used the English language with more perfect grace and self-control than he has done, no man has more skilfully brought out its more secret chords and harmonies. His words fit his thoughts, as neatly as do the coverings which nature provides for her finest and most delicate productions—chaste ornament never being spared.
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1 Mr. Edwin P. Whipple’s ‘Character and Characteristic Men,’ p. 236 (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1870). A work of rare insight and subtlety.
All Sub-Works of The Memoir of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1872):
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- Preface.
- Biographical Sketch.
- Mother Rigby's Pipe [Part I].
- Mother Rigby's Pipe [Part II].
- Mother Rigby's Pipe [Part III].
- Passages from a Relinquished Work [Part I. At Home].
- Passages from a Relinquished Work [Part II. A Flight in the Fog].
- Passages from a Relinquished Work [Part III. A Fellow Traveller].
- Passages from a Relinquished Work [Part IV. The Village Theatre].
- The Notch of the White Mountains.
