The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
by Frank Preston Stearns · English · Gutenberg #7170 · 658,674 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Author: Frank Preston Stearns
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7170]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7170
Credits: Text file produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
HTML file produced by David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ***
Produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
By Frank Preston Stearns
Author Of “The Real And Ideal In Literature,” “Life Of Tintoretto,”
“Life Of Bismarck,” “True Republicanism,” “Cambridge Sketches,” Etc.
[Illustration: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Frances Osborne Portrait: by
permission of the Essex Institute.]
INSCRIBED
TO
EMILIA MACIEL STEARNS
“In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,--
For the gods see everywhere.”
--_Longfellow_
“Oh, happy dreams of such a soul have I,
And softly to myself of him I sing,
Whose seraph pride all pride doth overwing;
Who stoops to greatness, matches low with high,
And as in grand equalities of sky,
Stands level with the beggar and the king.”
--_Wasson_
PREFACE
The simple events of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life have long been before
the public. From 1835 onward they may easily be traced in the various
Note-books, which have been edited from his diary, and previous to that
time we are indebted for them chiefly to the recollections of his two
faithful friends, Horatio Bridge and Elizabeth Peabody. These were first
systematised and published by George P. Lathrop in 1872, but a more
complete and authoritative biography was issued by Julian Hawthorne
twelve years later, in which, however, the writer has modestly refrained
from expressing an opinion as to the quality of his father’s genius, or
from attempting any critical examination of his father’s literary work.
It is in order to supply in some measure this deficiency, that the
present volume has been written. At the same time, I trust to have given
credit where it was due to my predecessors, in the good work of making
known the true character of so rare a genius and so exceptional a
personality.
The publication of Horatio Bridge’s memoirs and of Elizabeth Manning’s
account of the boyhood of Hawthorne have placed before the world much
that is new and valuable concerning the earlier portion of Hawthorne’s
life, of which previous biographers could not very well reap the
advantage. I have made thorough researches in regard to Hawthorne’s
American ancestry, but have been able to find no ground for the
statements of Conway and Lathrop, that William Hathorne, their first
ancestor on this side of the ocean, was directly connected with the
Quaker persecution. Some other mistakes, like Hawthorne’s supposed
connection with the duel between Cilley and Graves, have also been
corrected.
F. P. S.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800
II. BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821
III. BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825
IV. LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835
V. EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839
VI. PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841
VII. HAWTHORNE AS A SOCIALIST: 1841-1842
VIII. CONCORD AND THE OLD MANSE: 1842-1845
IX. “MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE”: 1845
X. FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849
XI. PEGASUS IS FREE: 1850-1852
XII. THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE: 1852-1854
XIII. HAWTHORNE IN ENGLAND: 1854-1858
XIV. ITALY
XV. HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858
XVI. “THE MARBLE FAUN”: 1859-1860
XVII. HOMEWARD BOUND: 1860-1862
XVIII. IMMORTALITY
PORTRAITS OF HAWTHORNE
EDITIONS OF HAWTHORNE’S BOOKS PUBLISHED UNDER HIS OWN DIRECTION.
MRS. EMERSON AND MRS. HAWTHORNE
APPENDICES
List of Illustrations
PORTRAIT OF HAWTHORNE, BY FRANCES OSBORNE IN 1893
HAWTHORNE’S BIRTHPLACE
HORATIO BRIDGE, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY EASTMAN JOHNSON
HAWTHORNE, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY CHARLES OSGOOD IN 1840
THE OLD MANSE, RESIDENCE OF DR. RIPLEY
THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM, MASS
THE WAYSIDE
GUIDO RENI’S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI
STATUE OF PRAXITELES’ RESTING FAUN
TORRE MEDIAVALLE DELLA SCIMMIA (HILDA’S TOWER) IN ROME
THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
CHAPTER I
SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800
The three earliest settlements on the New England coast were Plymouth,
Boston, and Salem; but Boston soon proved its superior advantages to the
two others, not only from its more capacious harbor, but also from the
convenient waterway which the Charles River afforded to the interior of
the Colony. We find that a number of English families, and among them
the ancestors of Gen. Joseph Warren and Wendell Phillips, who crossed
the ocean in 1640 in the “good ship Arbella,” soon afterward migrated to
Watertown on Charles River for the sake of the excellent farming lands
which they found there. Salem, however, maintained its ascendency over
Plymouth and other neighboring harbors on the coast, and soon grew to
be the second city of importance in the Colony during the eighteenth
century, when the only sources of wealth were fishing, shipbuilding,
and commerce. Salem nourished remarkably. Its leading citizens became
wealthy and developed a social aristocracy as cultivated, as well
educated, and, it may also be added, as fastidious as that of Boston
itself. In this respect it differed widely from the other small cities
of New England, and the exclusiveness of its first families was more
strongly marked on account of the limited size of the place. Thus it
continued down to the middle of the last century, when railroads and the
tendency to centralization began to draw away its financial
prosperity, and left the city to small manufactures and its traditional
respectability.
The finest examples of American eighteenth century architecture are
supposed to exist in and about the city of Salem, and they have the
advantage, which American architecture lacks so painfully at the present
time, of possessing a definite style and character--edifices which
are not of a single type, like most of the houses in Fifth Avenue,
but which, while differing in many respects, have a certain general
resemblance, that places them all in the same category. The small old
country churches of Essex County are not distinguished for fine carving
or other ornamentation, and still less by the costliness of their
material, for they are mostly built of white pine, but they have an
indefinable air of pleasantness about them, as if they graced the ground
they stand on, and their steeples seem to float in the air above us.
If we enter them on a Sunday forenoon--for on week-days they are like
a sheepfold without its occupants--we meet with much the same kind of
pleasantness in the assemblage there. We do not find the deep religious
twilight of past ages, or the noonday glare of a fashionable synagogue,
but a neatly attired congregation of weather-beaten farmers and
mariners, and their sensible looking wives, with something of the
original Puritan hardness in their faces, much ameliorated by the
liberalism and free thinking of the past fifty years. Among them too you
will see some remarkably pretty young women; and young men like those
who dug the trenches on Breed’s Hill in the afternoon of June 16,
1775. There may be veterans in the audience who helped Grant to go to
Richmond. Withal there is much of the spirit of the early Christians
among them, and virtue enough to save their country in any emergency.
These old churches have mostly disappeared from Salem city and have been
replaced by more aristocratic edifices, whose square or octagonal
towers are typical of their leading parishioners,--a dignified class,
if somewhat haughty and reserved; but they too will soon belong to the
past, drawn off to the great social centres in and about Boston. In the
midst of Salem there is a triangular common, “with its never-failing
elms,” where the boys large and small formerly played cricket--married
men too--as they do still on the village greens of good old England,
and around this enclosure the successful merchants and navigators of
the city built their mansion houses; not half houses like those in the
larger cities, but with spacious halls and rooms on either side going
up three stories. It is in the gracefully ornamented doorways and the
delicate interior wood-work, the carving of wainscots, mantels and
cornices, the skilful adaptations of classic forms to a soft and
delicate material that the charm of this architecture chiefly
consists,--especially in the staircases, with their carved spiral posts
and slender railings, rising upward in the centre of the front hall,
and turning right and left on the story above. It is said that after the
year eighteen hundred the quality of this decoration sensibly declined;
it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools no longer
exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones would
have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the false
rococo taste of the eighteenth century.
The Salem sea-captains of old times were among the boldest of our early
navigators; sailing among the pirates of the Persian Gulf and trading
with the cannibals of Polynesia, and the trophies which they brought
home from those strange regions, savage implements of war and domestic
use, clubs, spears, boomerangs, various cooking utensils, all carved
with infinite pains from stone, ebony and iron-wood, cloth from the bark
of the tapa tree, are now deposited in the Peabody Academy, where
they form one of the largest collections of the kind extant. Even
more interesting is the sword of a sword-fish, pierced through the oak
planking of a Salem vessel for six inches or more. No human force could
do that even with a spear of the sharpest steel. Was the sword-fish
roused to anger when the ship came upon him sleeping in the water; or
did he mistake it for a strange species of whale?
There is a court-house on Federal Street, built in Webster’s time, of
hard cold granite in the Grecian fashion of the day, not of the white
translucent marble with which the Greeks would have built it. Is it
the court-house where Webster made his celebrated argument in the White
murder case, or was that court-house torn down and a plough run through
the ground where it stood, as Webster affirmed that it ought to be?
Salem people were curiously reticent in regard to that trial, and
fashionable society there did not like Webster the better for having the
two Knapps convicted.
Much more valuable than such associations is William Hunt’s full-length
portrait of Chief Justice Shaw, which hangs over the judge’s bench in
the front court-room. “When I look at your honor I see that you are
homely, but when I think of you I know that you are great.” it is
this combination of an unprepossessing physique with rare dignity of
character which Hunt has represented in what many consider the best
of American portraits. It is perhaps too much in the sketchy style of
Velasquez, but admirable for all that.
Time has dealt kindly with Salem, in effacing all memorials of the
witchcraft persecution, except a picturesque old house at the corner of
North and Essex Streets, where there are said to have been preliminary
examinations for witchcraft,--a matter which concerns us now but
slightly. The youthful associations of a genius are valuable to us on
account of the influence which they may be supposed to have had on his
early life, but associations which have no determining consequences may
as well be neglected. The hill where those poor martyrs to superstition
were executed may be easily seen on the left of the city, as you roll in
on the train from Boston. It is part of a ridge which rises between the
Concord and Charles Rivers and extends to Cape Ann, where it dives into
the ocean, to reappear again like a school of krakens, or other marine
monsters, in the Isles of Shoals.
New England has not the fertile soil of many sections of the United
States, and its racking climate is proverbial, but it is blessed with
the two decided advantages of pure water and fine scenery. There is no
more beautiful section of its coast than that between Salem Harbor and
Salisbury Beach, long stretches of smooth sand alternating with bold
rocky promontories. A summer drive from Swampscott to Marblehead reminds
one even of the Bay of Naples (without Vesuvius), and the wilder coast
of Cape Ann, with its dark pines, red-roofed cottages, and sparkling
surf, is quite as delightful. William Hunt went there in the last sad
years of his life to paint “sunshine,” as he said; and Whittier has
given us poetic touches of the inland scenery in elevated verse:
“Fleecy clouds casting their shadows
Over uplands and meadows;
And country roads winding as roads will,
Here to a ferry, there to a mill.”
Poets arise where there is poetic nourishment, internal and external,
for them to feed on; and it is not surprising that a Whittier and a
Hawthorne should have been evolved from the environment in which they
grew to manhood.
It is a common saying with old Boston families that their ancestors came
to America in the “Arbella” with Governor Winthrop, but as a matter
of fact there were at least fifteen vessels that brought colonists to
Massachusetts in 1630, and I cannot discover that any lists of their
passengers have been preserved. The statement that certain persons
came over at the same time with Governor Winthrop might soon become a
tradition that they came in the same ship with him; but all that we know
certainly is that Governor Winthrop landed about the middle of June,
1630, and that his son arrived two weeks later in the “Talbot,” and
was drowned July 2, while attempting to cross one of the tide rivers at
Salem. Who arrived in the thirteen other vessels that year we know not.
Ten years later Sir Richard Saltonstall emigrated to Boston with the
Phillips and Warren families in the “Arbella” (or “Arabella”), and there
is no telling how much longer she sailed the ocean.
Hawthorne himself states that his ancestors came from Wig Castle in
Wigton in Warwickshire, [Footnote: Diary, August 22, 1837.] but no such
castle has been discovered, and the only Wigton in England appears to be
located in Cumberland. [Footnote: Lathrop’s “Study of Hawthorne,” 46.]
He does not tell us where he obtained this information, and it certainly
could not have been from authentic documents,--more likely from
conversation with an English traveller. Hawthorne never troubled himself
much concerning his ancestry, English or American; while he was consul
at Liverpool, he had exceptional advantages for investigating the
subject, but whatever attempt he made there resulted in nothing. It
is only recently that Mr. Henry F. Waters, who spent fifteen years in
England searching out the records of old New England families, succeeded
in discovering the connecting link between the first American Hawthornes
and their relatives in the old country. It was a bill of exchange for
one hundred pounds drawn by William Hathorne, of Salem, payable to
Robert Hathorne in London, and dated October 19, 1651, which first
gave Mr. Waters the clue to his discovery. Robert not only accepted his
brother’s draft, but wrote him this simple and business-like but truly
affectionate epistle in return:
“GOOD BROTHER: Remember my love to my sister, my brother John and
sister, my brother Davenport and sister and the rest of our friends.
“In haste I rest
“Your loving brother,
“From Bray this 1 April, 1653.
“ROBERT HATHORNE.”
From this it appears that Major William Hathorne not only had a brother
John, who established himself in Lynn, but a sister Elizabeth, who
married Richard Davenport, of Salem. Concerning Robert Hathorne we
only know further that he died in 1689; but in the probate records
of Berkshire, England, there is a will proved May 2, 1651, of William
Hathorne, of Binfield, who left all his lands, buildings and tenements
in that county to his son Robert, on condition that Robert should pay
to his father’s eldest son, William, one hundred pounds, and to his son
John twenty pounds sterling. He also left to another son, Edmund, thirty
acres of land in Bray, and there are other legacies; but it cannot be
doubted that the hundred pounds mentioned in this will is the same that
Major William Hathorne drew for five months later, and that we have
identified here the last English ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His
wife’s given name was Sarah, but her maiden name still remains unknown.
The family resided chiefly at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Park,
and evidently were in comfortable circumstances at that time. From
William Hathorne, senior, their genealogy has been traced back to John
Hathorne (spelled at that time Hothorne), who died in 1520, but little
is known of their affairs, or how they sustained themselves during
the strenuous vicissitudes of the Reformation. [Footnote: “Hawthorne
Centenary at Salem,” 81.]
Emmerton and Waters [Footnote: “English Records about New England
Families.”] state that William Hathorne came to Massachusetts Bay in
1630, and this is probable enough, though by no means certain, for
they give no authority for it. We first hear of him definitely as a
freeholder in the settlement of Dorchester in 1634, but his name is not
on the list of the first twenty-four Dorchester citizens, dated October
19, 1630. All accounts agree that he moved to Salem in 1636, or the year
following, and Nathaniel Hawthorne believed that he came to America at
that time. Upham, the historian of Salem witchcraft, who has made the
most thorough researches in the archives of old Salem families, says of
William Hathorne:
“William Hathorne appears on the church records as early as 1636. He
died in June, 1681, seventy-four years of age. No one in our annals
fills a larger space. As soldier, commanding important and difficult
expeditions, as counsel in cases before the courts, as judge on
the bench, and innumerable other positions requiring talent and
intelligence, he was constantly called to serve the public. He was
distinguished as a public speaker, and is the only person, I believe, of
that period, whose reputation as an orator has come down to us. He was
an Assistant, that is, in the upper branch of the Legislature, seventeen
years. He was a deputy twenty years. When the deputies, who before sat
with the assistants, were separated into a distinct body, and the House
of Representatives thus came into existence, in 1644, Hathorne was their
first Speaker. He occupied the chair, with intermediate services on
the floor from time to time, until raised to the other House. He was
an inhabitant of Salem Village, having his farm there, and a
dwelling-house, in which he resided when his legislative, military, and
other official duties permitted. His son John, who succeeded him in all
his public honors, also lived on his own farm in the village a great
part of the time.” [Footnote: “Salem Witchcraft,” i. 99.]
Evidently he was the most important person in the colony, next to
Governor Winthrop, and unequalled by any of his descendants, except
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and by him in a wholly different manner; for it is
in vain that we seek for traits similar to those of the great romance
writer among his ancestors. We can only say that they both possessed
exceptional mental ability, and there the comparison ends.
The attempt has been made to connect William Hathorne with the
persecution of the Quakers, [Footnote: Conway’s “Life of Hawthorne,”
15.] and it is true that he was a member of the Colonial Assembly during
the period of the persecution; it is likely that his vote supported the
measures in favor of it, but this is not absolutely certain. We do not
learn that he acted at any time in the capacity of sheriff; the most
diligent researches in the archives of the State House at Boston have
failed to discover any direct connection on the part of William Hathorne
with that movement; and the best authorities in regard to the events of
that time make no mention of him. [Footnote: Sewel, Hallowell, Ellis.]
It was the clergy who aroused public opinion and instigated the
prosecutions against both the Quakers and the supposed witches of Salem,
and the civil authorities were little more than passive instruments
in their hands. Hathorne’s work was essentially a legislative one,--a
highly important work in that wild, unsettled country,--to adapt English
statutes and legal procedures to new and strange conditions. He was
twice Speaker of the House between 1660 and 1671, and as presiding
officer he could exert less influence on measures of expediency than any
other person present, as he could not argue either for or against them.
And yet, after Charles II. had interfered in behalf of the Quakers,
William Hathorne wrote an elaborate and rather circuitous letter to the
British Ministry, arguing for non-intervention in the affairs of the
colony, which might have possessed greater efficacy if he had not
signed it with an assumed name. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne’s “Nathaniel
Hawthorne,” i. 24.] However strong a Puritan he may have been, William
Hathorne evidently had no intention of becoming a martyr to the cause of
colonial independence. Yet it may be stated in his favor, and in that of
the colonists generally, that the fault was not wholly on one side, for
the Quakers evidently sought persecution, and would have it, cost what
it might. [Footnote: Hallowell’s “Quaker Invasion of New England.”]
Much the same may be affirmed of his son John, who had the singular
misfortune to be judge in Salem at the time of the witchcraft epidemic.
The belief in witchcraft has always had its stronghold among the fogs
and gloomy fiords of the North. James I. brought it with him from
Scotland to England, and in due course it was transplanted to America.
Judge Hathorne appears to have been at the top of affairs at Salem in
his time, and it is more than probable that another in his place would
have found himself obliged to act as he did. Law is, after all, in
exceptional cases little more than a reflex of public opinion. “The
common law,” said Webster, “is common-sense,” which simply means the
common opinion of the most influential people. Much more to blame than
John Hathorne were those infatuated persons who deceived themselves into
thinking that the pains of rheumatism, neuralgia, or some similar malady
were caused by the malevolent influence of a neighbor against whom they
had perhaps long harbored a grudge. _They_ were the true witches and
goblins of that epoch, and the only ones, if any, who ought to have been
hanged for it.
What never has been reasoned up cannot be reasoned down. It seems
incredible in this enlightened era, as the newspapers call it, that any
woman should be at once so inhuman and so frivolous as to swear away the
life of a fellow-creature upon an idle fancy; and yet, even in regard
to this, there were slightly mitigating conditions. Consider only the
position of that handful of Europeans in this vast wilderness, as it
then was. The forests came down to the sea-shore, and brought with them
all the weird fancies, terrors and awful forebodings which the human
mind could conjure up. They feared the Indians, the wild beasts, and
most of all one another, for society was not yet sufficiently organized
to afford that repose and contentment of spirit which they had left
behind in the Old World. They had come to America to escape despotism,
but they had brought despotism in their own hearts. They could escape
from the Stuarts, but there was no escape from human nature.
It is likely that their immediate progenitors would not have carried
the witchcraft craze to such an extreme. The emigrating Puritans were a
fairly well-educated class of men and women, but their children did
not enjoy equal opportunities. The new continent had to be subdued
physically and reorganized before any mental growth could be raised
there. Levelling the forest was a small matter beside clearing the land
of stumps and stones. All hands were obliged to work hard, and there was
little opportunity for intellectual development or social culture. As a
logical consequence, an era ensued not unlike the dark ages of Europe.
But this was essential to the evolution of a new type of man, and for
the foundation of American nationality; and it was thus that the various
nationalities of Europe arose out of the ruins of the Roman Empire.
The scenes that took place in Judge Hathorne’s court-room have never
been equalled since in American jurisprudence. Powerful forces came into
play there, and the reports that have been preserved read like scenes
from Shakespeare. In the case of Rebecca Nurse, the Judge said to the
defendant:
“‘You do know whether you are guilty, and have familiarity with the
Devil; and now when you are here present to see such a thing as these
testify,--and a black man whispering in your ear, and devils about
you,--what do you say to it?’”
To which she replied:
“‘It is all false. I am clear.’ Whereupon Mrs. Pope, one of the
witnesses, fell into a grievous fit.” [Footnote: Upham’s “Salem
Witchcraft,” ii. 64.]
Alas, poor beleaguered soul! And one may well say, “What imaginations
those women had!” Tituba, the West Indian Aztec who appears in this
social-religious explosion as the chief and original incendiary,--verily
the root of all evil,--gave the following testimony:
“Q. ‘Did you not pinch Elizabeth Hubbard this morning?’
“A. ‘The man brought her to me, and made me pinch her.’
“Q. ‘Why did you go to Thomas Putnam’s last night and hurt his child?’
“A. ‘They pull and haul me, and make me go.’
“Q. ‘And what would they have you do?’
“A. ‘Kill her with a knife.’
“(Lieutenant Fuller and others said at this time, when the child saw
these persons, and was tormented by them, that she did complain of a
knife,--that they would have her cut her head off with a knife.)
“Q. ‘How did you go?’
“A. ‘We ride upon sticks, and are there presently.’
“Q. ‘Do you go through the trees or over them?’
“A. ‘We see nothing, but are there presently.’
“Q. ‘Why did you not tell your master?’
“A. ‘I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told.’
“Q. ‘Would you not have hurt others, if you could?’
“A. ‘They said they would hurt others, but they could not.’
“Q. ‘What attendants hath Sarah Good?’
“A. ‘A yellow-bird, and she would have given me one.’
“Q. ‘What meat did she give it?’
“A. ‘It did suck her between her fingers.’”.
This might serve as an epilogue to “Macbeth,” and the wonder is that an
unlettered Indian should have had the wit to make such apt and subtle
replies. It is also noteworthy that these strange proceedings took
place after the expulsion of the royal governor, and previous to the
provincial government of William III. If Sir Edmund Andros had remained,
the tragedy might have been changed into a farce.
After all, it appears that John Hathorne was not a lawyer, for he
describes himself in his last will, dated June 27, 1717, as a merchant,
and it is quite possible that his legal education was no better than
that of the average English squire in Fielding’s time. It is evident,
however, from the testimony given above, that he was a strong believer
in the supernatural, and here if anywhere we find a relationship between
him and his more celebrated descendant. Nathaniel Hawthorne was too
clear-sighted to place confidence in the pretended revelations of
trance mediums, and he was not in the least superstitious; but he
was remarkably fond of reading ghost stories, and would have liked to
believe them, if he could have done so in all sincerity. He sometimes
felt as if he were a ghost himself, gliding noiselessly in the walks of
men, and wondered that the sun should cast a shadow from him. However,
we cannot imagine him as seated in jurisdiction at a criminal tribunal.
His gentle nature would have recoiled from that, as it might from a
serpent.
In the Charter Street burial-ground there is a slate gravestone,
artistically carved about its edges, with the name, “Col. John Hathorne
Esq.,” upon it. It is somewhat sunken into the earth, and leans forward
as if wishing to hide the inscription upon it from the gaze of mankind.
The grass about it and the moss upon the stone assist in doing this,
although repeatedly cut and cleaned away. It seems as if Nature wished
to draw a kind of veil over the memory of the witch’s judge, himself the
sorrowful victim of a theocratic oligarchy. The lesson we learn from his
errors is, to trust our own hearts and not to believe too fixedly in the
doctrines of Church and State. It must be a dull sensibility that can
look on this old slate-stone without a feeling of pathos and a larger
charity for the errors of human nature.
It is said that one of the convicted witches cursed Judge
Hathorne,--himself and his descendants forever; but it is more than
likely that they all cursed him bitterly enough, and this curse took
effect in a very natural and direct manner. Every extravagant political
or social movement is followed by a corresponding reaction, even if the
movement be on the whole a salutary one, and retribution is sure to
fall in one shape or another on the leaders of it. After this time the
Hathornes ceased to be conspicuous in Salem affairs. The family was not
in favor, and the avenues of prosperity were closed to them, as commonly
happens in such cases. Neither does the family appear to have multiplied
and extended itself like most of the old New England families, who can
now count from a dozen to twenty branches in various places. Of John
Hathorne’s three sons only one appears to have left children. The name
has wholly disappeared from among Salem families, and thus in a manner
has the witch’s curse been fulfilled.
Joseph Hathorne, the son of the Judge, was mostly a farmer, and that
is all that we now know of him. His son Daniel, however, showed a more
adventurous spirit, becoming a shipmaster quite early in life. It has
also been intimated that he was something of a smuggler, which was no
great discredit to him in a time when the unfair and even prohibitory
measures of the British Parliament in regard to American commerce
made smuggling a practical necessity. Even as the captain of a trading
vessel, however, Daniel Hathorne was not likely to advance the social
interests of his family. It is significant that he should have left the
central portion of Salem, where his ancestors had lived, and have built
a house for himself close to the city wharves,--a house well built and
commodious enough, but not in a fashionable location.
But Daniel Hathorne had the advantage over fashionable society in Salem,
in being a thorough patriot. Boston and Salem were the two strongholds
of Toryism during the war for Independence, which was natural enough, as
their wealthy citizens were in close mercantile relations with English
houses, and sent their children to England to be educated. Daniel
Hathorne, however, as soon as hostilities had begun, fitted out his
bark as a privateer, and spent the following six years in preying upon
British merchantmen. How successful he was in this line of business
we have not been informed, but he certainly did not grow rich by it;
although he is credited with one engagement with the enemy, in which his
ship came off with honor, though perhaps not with a decisive victory.
This exploit was celebrated in a rude ballad of the time, which has been
preserved in “Griswold’s Curiosities of American Literature,” and has
at least the merit of plain unvarnished language. [Footnote: Also in
Lathrop’s “Hawthorne.”]
There is a miniature portrait of Daniel Hathorne, such as was common in
Copley’s time, still in the possession of the Hawthorne family, and
it represents him as rather a bullet-headed man, with a bright, open,
cheery face, a broad English chin and strongly marked brows,--an
excellent physiognomy for a sea-captain. He appears besides to have had
light brown or sandy hair, a ruddy complexion and bright blue eyes;
but we cannot determine how truthful the miniature may be in respect
to coloring. At all events, he was of a very different appearance from
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and if he resembled his grandson in any external
respect, it was in his large eyes and their overshadowing brows. He has
not the look of a dare-devil. One might suppose that he was a person of
rather an obstinate disposition, but it is always difficult to draw the
line between obstinacy and determination.
A similar miniature of his son Nathaniel, born in 1775, and who died at
Surinam in his thirty-fourth year, gives us the impression of a person
somewhat like his father, and also somewhat like his son Nathaniel.
He has a long face instead of a round one, and his features are more
delicate and refined than those of the bold Daniel. The expression is
gentle, dreamy and pensive, and unless the portrait belies him, he
could not have been the stern, domineering captain that he has been
represented. He had rather a slender figure, and was probably much more
like his mother, who was a Miss Phelps, than the race of Judge Hathorne.
He may have been a reticent man, but never a bold one, and we find in
him a new departure. His face is more amiable and attractive than his
father’s, but not so strong. In 1799 he was married to Miss Elizabeth
Clarke Manning, the daughter of Richard Manning, and then only nineteen
years of age. She appears to have been an exceptionally sensitive and
rather shy young woman--such as would be likely to attract the attention
of a chivalrous young mariner--but with fine traits of intellect and
character.
The maternal ancestry of a distinguished man is quite as important as
the paternal, but in the present instance it is much more difficult to
obtain information concerning it. The increasing fame of Hawthorne
has been like a calcium-light, illuminating for the past fifty years
everything to which that name attaches, and leaving the Manning family
in a shadow so much the deeper. All we can learn of them now is, that
they were descended from Richard Manning, of Dartmouth in Devonshire,
England, whose son Thomas emigrated to Salem with his widowed mother in
1679, but afterwards removed to Ipswich, ten miles to the north, whence
the family has since extended itself far and wide,--the Reverend Jacob
M. Manning, of the Old South Church, the fearless champion of practical
anti-slaveryism, having been among them. It appears that Thomas’s
grandson Richard started in life as a blacksmith, which was no strange
thing in those primitive times; but, being a thrifty and enterprising
man, he lived to establish a line of stage-coaches between Salem and
Boston, and this continued in the possession of his family until it
was superseded by the Eastern Railway. After this catastrophe, Robert
Manning, the son of Richard and brother of Mrs. Nathaniel Hathorne,
became noted as a fruit-grower (a business in which Essex County people
have always taken an active interest), and was one of the founders
of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The Mannings were always
respected in Salem, although they never came to affluent circumstances,
nor did they own a house about the city common. Robert Manning, Jr.,
was Secretary of the Horticultural Society in Boston for a long term
of years, a pleasant, kindly man, with an aspect of general culture.
Hawthorne’s maternal grandmother was Miriam Lord, of Ipswich, and his
paternal grandmother was Rachel Phelps, of Salem. His father was only
thirty-three when he died at Surinam.
In regard to the family name, there are at present Hawthornes and
Hathornes in England, and although the two names may have been identical
originally, they have long since become as distinct as Smith and Smythe.
I have discovered only two instances in which the first William Hathorne
wrote his own name, and in the various documents at the State House in
which it appears written by others, it is variously spelled Hathorn,
Hathorne, Hawthorn, Haythorne, and Harthorne,--from which we can only
conclude that the a was pronounced broadly. It was not until the reign
of Queen Anne, when books first became cheap and popular, that there was
any decided spelling of either proper or common names. Then the printers
took the matter into their own hands and made witch-work enough of it.
The word “sovereign,” for instance, which is derived from the old French
_souvrain_, and which Milton spelled “sovran,” they tortured into its
present form,--much as the clerks of Massachusetts Colony tortured the
name of William Hathorne. This, however, was spelled Hathorne oftener
than in other ways, and it was so spelled in the two signatures above
referred to, one of which was attached as witness to a deed for the
settlement of the boundary between Lynn and Salem, [Footnote: Also in
Lathrop’s “Hawthorne.”] and the other to a report of the commissioners
for the investigation of the French vessels coming to Salem and Boston
in 1651, the two other commissioners being Samuel Bradstreet and
David Denison. [Footnote: Massachusetts Archives, x. 171.]The name
was undoubtedly Hathorne, and so it continued with one or two slight
variations during the eighteenth century down to the time of Nathaniel
Hathorne, Jr., who entered and graduated at Bowdoin College under that
name, but who soon afterward changed it to Hawthorne, for reasons that
have never been explained.
All cognomens would seem to have been derived originally from some
personal peculiarity, although it is no longer possible to trace this
back to its source, which probably lies far away in the Dark Ages,--the
formative period of languages and of families. Sometimes, however, we
meet with individuals whose peculiarities suggest the origin of their
names: a tall, slender, long-necked man named Crane; or a timid,
retiring student named Leverett; or an over-confident, supercilious
person called Godkin In the name of Hawthorne also we may imagine a
curious significance: “When the may is on the thorn,” says Tennyson. The
English country people call the flowering of the hawthorn “the may.” It
is a beautiful tree when in full bloom. How sweet-scented and delicately
colored are its blossoms! But it seems to say to us, “Do not come too
close to me.”
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821
Salem treasures the memory of Hawthorne, and preserves everything
tangible relating to him. The house in which he was born, No. 27 Union
Street, is in much the same style and probably of the same age as the
Old Manse at Concord, but somewhat smaller, with only a single window on
either side of the doorway--five windows in all on the front, one large
chimney in the centre, and the roof not exactly a gambrel, for the true
gambrel has a curve first inward and then outward, but something like
it. A modest, cosy and rather picturesque dwelling, which if placed on
a green knoll with a few trees about it might become a subject for a
sketching class. It did not belong to Hawthorne’s father, after all, but
to the widow of the bold Daniel, It was the cradle of genius, and is
now a shrine for many pilgrims. Long may it survive, so that our
grandchildren may gaze upon it.
Here Nathaniel Hawthorne first saw daylight one hundred years ago
[Footnote: 1804.] on the Fourth of July, as if to make a protest against
Chauvinistic patriotism; here his mother sat at the window to see her
husband’s bark sail out of the harbor on his last voyage; and here she
watched day after day for its return, only to bring a life-long sorrow
with it. The life of a sea-captain’s wife is always a half-widowhood,
but Mrs. Hathorne was left at twenty-eight with three small children,
including a daughter, Elizabeth, older than Nathaniel, and another,
Louisa, the youngest. The shadow of a heavy misfortune had come upon
them, and from this shadow they never wholly escaped.
Lowell criticised a letter which John Brown wrote concerning his
boyhood to Henry L. Stearns, as the finest bit of autobiography of the
nineteenth century.[Footnote: _North American Review_, April 1860.] It
is in fact almost the only literature of the kind that we possess. A
frequent difficulty that parents find in dealing with their children is,
that they have wholly forgotten the sensations and impressions of their
own childhood. The instructor cannot place himself in the position of
the pupil. A naturalist will spend years with a microscope studying
the development of a plant from the seed, but no one has ever applied a
similar process to the budding of genius or even of ordinary intellect.
We have the autobiography of one of the greatest geniuses, written in
the calm and stillness of old age, when youthful memories come back to
us involuntarily; yet he barely lifts the veil from his own childhood,
and has much more to say of external events and older people than of
himself and his young companions. How valuable is the story of George
Washington and his hatchet, hackneyed as it has become! What do we know
of the boyhood of Franklin, Webster, Seward and Longfellow? Nothing, or
next to nothing.
[Illustration: WINDOW OF THIS CHAMBER]
Goethe says that the admirable woman is she who, when her husband dies,
becomes a father to his children; but in the case of Hawthorne’s mother,
this did not happen to be necessary. Her brother, Robert Manning, a
thrifty and fairly prosperous young man, immediately took Mrs. Hathorne
and her three children into his house on Herbert Street, and made it
essentially a home for them afterward. To the fatherless boy he was more
than his own father, away from home ten months of the year, ever could
have been; and though young Nathaniel must have missed that tenderness
of feeling which a man can only entertain toward his own child, there
was no lack of kindness or consideration on Robert Manning’s part, to
either the boy or his sisters.
It was Mrs. Hathorne who chiefly suffered from this change of domicile.
She would seem to have been always on good terms with her brother’s
wife, and on the whole they formed a remarkably harmonious family,--at
least we hear nothing to the contrary,--but she was no longer mistress
of her own household. She had her daughters to instruct, and to train up
in domestic ways, and she could be helpful in various matters, large
and small; but the mental occupation which comes from the oversight and
direction of household affairs, and which might have served to divert
her mind from sorrowful memories, was now gone from her. Her widowhood
separated her from the outside world and from all society, excepting
a few devoted friends, [Footnote: _Wide Awake_, xxxiii. 502.] so
that under these conditions it is not surprising that her life became
continually more secluded and reserved. It is probable that her
temperament was very similar to her son’s; but the impression which
has gone forth, that she indulged her melancholy to an excess, is by
no means a just one. The circumstances of her case should be taken into
consideration.
Rebecca Manning says:
“I remember aunt Hawthorne as busy about the house, attending to various
matters. Her cooking was excellent, and she was noted for a certain kind
of sauce, which nobody else knew how to make. We always enjoyed going to
see her when we were children, for she took great pains to please us and
to give us nice things to eat. Her daughter Elizabeth resembled her in
that respect. In old letters and in the journal of another aunt, which
has come into our possession, we read of her going about making visits,
taking drives, and sometimes going on a journey. In later years she was
not well, and I do not remember that she ever came here, but her friends
always received a cordial welcome when they visited her.”
This refers to a late period of Madam Hathorne’s life, and if she
absented herself from the table, as Elizabeth Peabody states, [Footnote:
Lathrop’s “Study of Hawthorne.”] there was good reason for it.
Hawthorne himself has left no word concerning his mother, of favorable
or unfavorable import, but it seems probable that he owed his genius to
her, if he can be said to have owed it to any of his ancestors. In after
life he affirmed that his sister Elizabeth, who appears to have been her
mother over again, could have written as well as he did, and although
we have no palpable evidence of this--and the letter which she wrote
Elizabeth Peabody does not indicate it,--we are willing to take his word
for it. With the shyness and proud reserve which he inherited from his
mother, there also came that exquisite refinement and feminine grace of
style which forms the chief charm of his writing. The same refinement
of feeling is noticeable in the letters of other members of the
Manning family. Where his imagination came from, it would be useless to
speculate; but there is no good art without delicacy.
Doctor Nathaniel Peabody lived near the house on Herbert Street, and his
daughter Elizabeth (who afterward became a woman of prodigious learning)
soon made acquaintance with the Hathorne children. She remembers the boy
Nathaniel jumping about his uncle’s yard, and this is the first picture
that we have of him. When we consider what a beautiful boy he must have
been, with his wavy brown hair, large wistful eyes and vigorous figure,
without doubt he was a pleasure to look upon. We do not hear of him
again until November 10, 1813, when he injured his foot in some unknown
manner while at play, and was made lame by it more or less for the
three years succeeding. After being laid up for a month, he wrote this
pathetic little letter to his uncle, Robert Manning, then in Maine,
which I have punctuated properly so that the excellence of its
composition may appeal more plainly to the reader.
“SALEM, Thursday, December, 1813.
“DEAR UNCLE:
“I hope you are well, and I hope Richard is too. My foot is no better.
Louisa has got so well that she has begun to go to school, but she did
not go this forenoon because it snowed. Mama is going to send for Doctor
Kitridge to-day, when William Cross comes home at 12 o’clock, and maybe
he will do some good, for Doctor Barstow has not, and I don’t know as
Doctor Kitridge will. It is about 4 weeks yesterday since I have been
to school, and I don’t know but it will be 4 weeks longer before I go
again. I have been out of the office two or three times and have set
down on the step of the door, and once I hopped out into the street.
Yesterday I went out in the office and had 4 cakes. Hannah carried me
out once, but not then. Elizabeth and Louisa send their love to you.
I hope you will write to me soon, but I have nothing more to write; so
good-bye, dear Uncle.
“Your affectionate Nephew,
“NATHANIEL HATHORNE.”
[Footnote: Elizabeth Manning in _Wide Awake_, Nov. 1891.]
This is not so precocious as Mozart’s musical compositions at the same
age, but how could the boy Hawthorne have given a clearer account of
himself and his situation at the time, without one word of complaint?
It is worth noting also that his prediction in regard to Doctor Kitridge
proved to be correct and even more.
It is evident that neither of his doctors treated him in a
physio-logical manner. Kitridge was a water-cure physician, and his
method of treatment deserves to be recorded for its novelty. He directed
Nathaniel to project his naked foot out of a sitting-room window, while
he poured cold water on it from the story above. This, however, does not
appear to have helped the case, and the infirmity continued so long that
it was generally feared that his lameness would be permanent.
Horatio Bridge considered this a fortunate accident for Nathaniel, since
it prevented him from being spoiled by his female relatives, as there is
always danger that an only son with two or more sisters will be spoiled.
But it was an advantage to the boy in a different manner from this. He
learned from it the lesson of suffering and endurance, which we all have
to learn sooner or later; and it compelled him, perhaps too young, to
seek the comfort of life from internal sources. There were excellent
books in the house,--Shakespeare and Milton, of course, but also Pope’s
“Iliad,” Thomson’s “Seasons,” the “Spectator,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,”
and the “Faerie Queene,” and the time had now come when these would be
serviceable to him. He was not the only boy that has enjoyed Shakespeare
at the age of ten, but that he should have found interest in Spenser’s
“Faerie Queene” is somewhat exceptional. Even among professed
_littérateurs_ there are few that read that long allegory, and still
fewer who enjoy it; and yet Miss Manning assures us that Hawthorne would
muse over it for hours. Its influence may be perceptible in some of his
shorter stories, but “Pilgrim’s Progress” evidently had an effect upon
him; and so had Scott’s novels, as we may judge from the first romance
that he published.
At the age of twelve years and seven months he composed a short poem, so
perfect in form and mature in judgment that it is difficult to believe
that so young a person could have written it. Not so poetic as it is
philosophical, it is valuable as indicating that the boy had already
formed a moral axis for himself,--a life principle from which he never
afterward deviated; and it is given herewith: [Footnote: A facsimile of
the original can be found in _Wide Awake_, November, 1891.]
“MODERATE VIEWS.
“With passions unruffled, untainted by pride,
By reason my life let me square;
The wants of my nature are cheaply supplied,
And the rest are but folly and care.
How vainly through infinite trouble and strife,
The many their labours employ,
Since all, that is truly delightful in life,
Is what all if they please may enjoy.
“NATHANIEL HATHORNE.
“SALEM, February 13, 1817.”
He wrote this with the greatest nicety, framing it in broad black lines,
and ornamenting the capitals in a manner that recalls the decoration of
John Hathorne’s gravestone. He composed a number of poems between his
thirteenth and seventeenth years, quite as good as those of Longfellow
at the same age; but after he entered Bowdoin College he dropped the
practice altogether and never resumed it, although one would suppose
that Longfellow’s example would have stimulated him to better efforts.
Neither does he appear to have tried his hand in writing tales, as boys
who have no thought of literary distinction frequently do. During the
years of his lameness he sometimes invented extemporaneous stories,
which invariably commenced with a voyage to some foreign country, from
which his hero never returned. This shows how continually his father’s
fate was in his mind, although he said nothing of it.
Robert Manning’s interest in the stage-company afforded the boy fine
opportunities for free rides, and he probably also frequented the
stables; although neither as youth nor as man did he take much interest
in driving or riding. He was more fond of playing upon the wharves,
a good healthy place,--and watching the great ships sailing forth to
far-off lands, and returning with their strange cargoes,--enough to
stimulate any boy’s imagination, if he has it in him. It is likely that
if Nathaniel’s father had lived, he would also have followed a seafaring
life, and would never have become useful to the world in the way that he
did.
Somewhere about the close of the eighteenth century, Richard Manning,
the father of Mrs. Hathorne, purchased a large tract of land in
Cumberland County, Maine, between Lake Sebago and the town of Casco; and
in 1813 Robert Manning built a house near the lake, in the township of
Raymond, and his brother Richard, who had become much of an invalid,
went to live there, partly for his health and partly to keep an
oversight on the property. In 1817 Mrs. Hathorne also went there, taking
her children with her, and remaining, with some intermissions, until
1822. Meanwhile the Mannings sold some thousands of acres of land,
although not, as we may suppose, at very good prices, and the name of
Elizabeth Hathorne was repeatedly attached to the deeds of conveyance.
The house that Robert built was the plainest sort of structure, of only
two stories, and with no appearance of having been painted; but the
farmers in the vicinity criticised it as “Manning’s folly,”--exactly
why, does not appear clearly, unless they foresaw what actually
happened, that the house could be neither sold nor rented after the
Mannings had left it. For many years, it served as a meeting-house,--one
could not call it a church,--and now it has become a Hawthorne museum,
the town of Raymond very laudably keeping it in repair.
Although none of the events in the early life of Hawthorne ought to be
considered positive misfortunes, as they all contributed to make him
what he was, yet upon general principles it is much to be regretted
that he should have passed the best years of his boyhood in this
out-of-the-way place. His good uncle supplied him with a boat and a gun,
and he enjoyed the small shooting, fishing, sailing and skating that the
place afforded; but in later years he wrote to Bridge, “It was at
Sebago that I learned my cursed habit of solitude,” and this pursued
him through life like an evil genius, placing him continually at a
disadvantage with his fellow-men. It has been supposed that this mode
of life assisted in developing his individuality, but quite as strong
individualities have been developed in the midst of large cities.
“Speech is more refreshing than light.”
When will parents learn wisdom in regard to their children? A
conscientious, tender-hearted boy will be sent to a rough country
school, to be scoffed at and maltreated there, before he is twelve years
old; while another of a coarser and harder nature will be kept at home,
to be petted and pampered until all the vigor and manliness are sapped
out of him. Parents who prefer to live in a modest, humble manner,
in order that their children may have better advantages, deserve the
highest commendation, but in this respect good instruction is less
important than favorable associations. From fourteen to twenty-one
is the formative period of character, and the influences which may be
brought to bear on the growing mind are of the highest importance. Lake
Sebago served as an excellent gymnasium for young Hawthorne, and may
have helped to develop his sense of the beautiful, but he found few
companions there, and those not of the most suitable kind. He was
exceedingly fond of skating--so much so that when the ice was smooth he
sometimes remained on the lake far into the night. This we can envy him,
for skating is the poetry of motion.
The captain of the “Hawthorne,” which plies back and forth across the
lake in summer, regularly points out to his passengers the house where
the Hathornes lived. It is easily seen from the steamer,--a severely
plain, unpainted building, in appearance much like the Manning house on
Herbert Street. Nearly in line with it a great cliff-like rock juts out
from the centre of the lake, on which the Indians centuries ago etched
and painted great warlike figures, whose significance is now known to
no one. It is said that Hawthorne frequently sailed or rowed to Indian
Rock, and to a sort of grotto there which was large enough for his
boat to enter. Both the rock and the Manning house are now difficult
of access. Longfellow wrote a pretty descriptive poem of a voyage on
Sebago, and it is remarkable how he has made use of every feature of the
landscape, every incident of the excursion, to fill his verses. The lake
has much the shape of an hour-glass, the northern and southern portions
being connected by a winding strait, so crooked that it requires the
constant effort of the pilot to prevent the little steamer from running
aground. There used to be fine fishing in it,--large perch, bass, and a
species of fresh-water salmon often weighing from six to eight pounds.
Strangely enough, one of Hawthorne’s acquaintances on the shores of
Sebago was a mulatto boy named William Symmes, the son of a Virginia
slave, foisted by his father upon a Maine sea-captain named Britton, who
lived in the half-wilderness around Raymond. Symmes afterwards became a
sailor, and continued in that vocation until the Civil War, when he
went to live in Alexandria, Va. In 1870 he published in the Portland
_Transcript_ what pretended to be a series of extracts from a diary
which young Hawthorne had kept while at Raymond, and which was found
there, after the departure of the Manning family, by a man named Small,
while moving a load of furniture which had been sold to another party.
Small preserved it until 1864, and then made a present of it to Symmes.
Doubts have been cast on the genuineness of this diary, as was natural
enough under the circumstances; for the original manuscript was never
produced by Symmes, who died the following year, and no one knows what
has become of it. It may also be asked, why should Small have disposed
so readily of this manuscript to Symmes after preserving it sedulously
for more than forty years? Why did he not return it to its rightful
owner; or, if he felt ashamed of his original abstraction, why did not
Symmes restore it to the Hawthorne family after Hawthorne’s death, when
every newspaper in the country was celebrating Hawthorne’s genius? It
also might have occurred to one of them that such property would have
a marketable value, and could be disposed of at a high price to some
collector of literary curiosities; but Symmes did not even ask to
be remunerated for the portion that he contributed to the Portland
Transcript. Neither did he harbor the slightest ill feeling toward
Hawthorne, whom he claimed to have met several times in the course of
his wanderings,--once at Salem, and again at Liverpool,--and was always
treated by him with exceptional kindness and civility.
The only answer that can be made to these queries is, that men in
Symmes’s position in life do not act according to any method that can
be previously calculated. In a case like the present, there could be
no predicting it; and it is possible that this mulatto valued the diary
above all price, as a souvenir of the one white man who had ever been
kind and good to him. Who knows what a heart there may have been in
William Symmes?
The internal evidence of this diary is so strongly in its favor as to be
almost conclusive. Lathrop, who made a special study of it, says:
“The fabrication of the journal by a person possessed of some literary
skill and familiar with the localities mentioned, at dates so long ago
as 1816 to 1819, might not be an impossible feat, but it is an extremely
improbable one.”
To which it might be added, that it could be only a Hawthorne that
could accomplish such a fabrication. Few things in literature are more
difficult than to make a boy talk _like_ a boy, and the tone of this
Sebago journal is not only boyish, but sweet and pleasant to the ear,
such as we might imagine the talk of the youthful Hawthorne. Not only
this, but there is a gradated improvement of intelligence in the course
of it,--rather too much so for entire credibility. It is quite possible
that there is more of it than Hawthorne ever wrote, but that does not
prevent us from having faith in the larger portion of it. The purity of
its diction, the nice adaptation of each word to its purpose, and the
accuracy of detail are much in its favor; besides which, the personal
reflections in it are exactly like Hawthorne. The published portion of
the diary in Mr. Pickard’s book makes about fifty rather small pages,
but no dates are given except at the close, and that is August, 1818;
and as Hawthorne went to Sebago for the first time the preceding year,
we may presume that this note-book represents a winter and summer
vacation, during which he would seem to have enjoyed himself in a
healthy boyish fashion. We have only space for a few extracts from this
publication, which serve both to exemplify Hawthorne’s mode of life at
Raymond and to illustrate the preceding statement concerning the book.
The first observation in the diary is quoted by Lathrop, and has a
decidedly youthful tone.
“Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the
mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know
about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great
pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that
flies from one to the other over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be
miserable cowards to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet
seen one turn to defend himself.”
Kingbirds are the knights-errant of the feathered tribes. They never
attack another bird unless it is three times their own size; but when a
few years older, the boy Hawthorne would probably have noticed that the
kingbirds’ powers of flight are so superior that all other birds are
practically at their mercy. This fixes the date of the entry in the
early summer of 1817, for kingbirds are not belligerent except during
the nesting season. Somewhat later in the year he writes:
“Went yesterday in a sail-boat on the Great Pond with Mr. Peter White,
of Windham. He sailed up here from White’s Bridge to see Captain
Dingley, and invited Joseph Dingley and Mr. Ring to take a boat-ride out
to the Dingley Islands and to the Images. He was also kind enough to
say that I might go, with my mother’s consent, which she gave after
much coaxing. Since the loss of my father, she dreads to have any one
belonging to her go upon the water. It is strange that this beautiful
body of water is called a ‘pond.’ The geography tells of many in
Scotland and Ireland, not near so large, that are called ‘Lakes.’”
Notice his objection to bad nomenclature, and his school-boy argument
against it. In his account of this excursion he says further:
“After we got ashore, Mr. White allowed me to fire his long gun at a
mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not sure that I saw it at the time
the gun went off, but believe rather that I was watching for the noise
that I was about to make.
“Mr. Ring said that with practice I could be a gunner, and that now,
with a very heavy charge, he thought I could kill a horse at eight
paces!”
Here or nowhere do we recognize the budding of Hawthorne’s genius. This
clear introspective analysis is the foundation of all true mental power,
and Hawthorne might have become a Platonic philosopher, if he had not
preferred to be a story-teller.
These sports came to an end in the autumn when he was sent to study with
the Reverend Caleb Bradley, a somewhat eccentric graduate of Harvard,
who resided at Stroudwater, Maine, and with whom he remained during the
winter. [Footnote: S. T. Pickard’s “Hawthorne’s First Diary.”]He refers
to this period of tuition in the short story of “The Vision of the
Fountain,” and whether or no any such vision appeared to him, we can
fairly believe that the tale was suggested by some pretty school-girl
who made an impression on him, only to disappear in a tantalizing
manner. It is to be presumed that he returned to his mother at Raymond,
for Christmas; and at that time he heard a story of how an Otisfield
man named Henry Turner had killed three hibernating bears which he
discovered in a cave near Moose Pond, not a difficult feat when one
comes upon them in that torpid condition. This would place the killing
of the bears at about the first of December, which would be probable
enough, and the fact itself has been substantiated by Samuel Pickard.
The next succeeding entry relates to the drowning of a boy while
swimming, which could only have happened the following June. Mrs.
Hathorne was greatly alarmed, and objected to Nathaniel’s going in
bathing with the other boys. He did not like the restriction, but writes
that he shall obey his mother.
There is a ghost story in the diary, quite original, and told with an
air of excellent credibility; and also a short anthropomorphic romance
concerning a badly treated horse, full of genuine pathos and kindly
sympathy,--more sympathetic, in fact, than Hawthorne’s later stories, in
which he is sometimes almost too reserved and unemotional:
“‘Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?’ ‘Good morning,
youngster,’ said he, just as plain as a horse can speak, and then said,
‘I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no
breakfast and stand here tied by the head while they are grinding the
corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the store,
and then drag him and the meal up the Ben Ham hill, and home, and am now
so weak that I can hardly stand. Oh, dear, I am in a bad way,’ and the
old creature cried,--I almost cried myself.”
The only difficulty in believing this diary to be genuine is the
question: If Hawthorne could write with such perspicuity at fourteen,
why are there no evidences of it during his college years? But it
sometimes happens so.
We cannot refrain from quoting one more extract from the last entry in
the Sebago diary, so beautifully tender and considerate as it is of his
mother’s position toward her only son. He had been invited by a party
of their neighbors to go on an all-day excursion, and though his mother
grants his request to be allowed to join them, he feels the reluctance
with which she does so and he writes:
“She said ‘Yes,’ but I was almost sorry, knowing that my day’s pleasure
would cost _her_ one of anxiety. However, I gathered up my hooks and
lines, with some white salted pork for bait, and with a fabulous
number of biscuit, split in the middle, the insides well buttered, then
skilfully put together again, and all stowed in sister’s large work-bag,
and slung over my shoulder, I started, making a wager with Enoch White,
as we walked down to the boat, as to which could catch the largest
number of fish.” [Footnote: Appendix A.]
This is the only entry that is dated (August, 1818), and as it was on
this same occasion that the black ducks were shot, it must have been on
one of the last days of August. We may presume that Nathaniel returned
to his studies at Stroudwater the following month, for we do not hear
of him again at Raymond--or in Salem, either--until March 24, when he
writes to his uncle, Robert Manning, who has evidently just returned
from Raymond to Salem, and speaks of expecting to go to Portland with
a Mr. Linch for the day. On May 16, 1819, he writes to his uncle Robert
again:
“The grass and trees are green, the fences finished and the garden
planted. Two of the goats are on the island and the other kept for the
milk. I have shot a partridge and a hen-hawk and caught eighteen large
trout [probably Sebago salmon]. I am sorry that my uncle intends sending
me to school again, for my mother can hardly spare me.”
From which it is easy to infer that he had not attended school very
regularly of late, and Uncle Robert would seem to have concluded that
it would be better to have his fine nephew where he could personally
supervise his goings and comings. Accordingly, on July 26 we find
Nathaniel attending school in Salem,--a most unusual season for it,--and
although his mother remained at Raymond two years longer, he was not
permitted to return there again, except possibly for short periods.
Emerson once pointed out to me on Sudbury Street, Boston, an extremely
old man with long white locks and the face of a devoted scholar,
advancing toward us with slow and cautious steps. “That,” said he,
“is Doctor Worcester, the lexicographer.” Hawthorne’s early education
remains much of a mystery. In 1819 he complains in a letter to his
mother that he has to go to a cheap school,--a good indication that he
did not intend to trust to fortune for his future welfare; soon after
this we hear that dictionary Worcester is his chief instructor. He could
not have found a more amiable or painstaking pedagogue; nor is it likely
that the fine qualities of his teacher were ever better appreciated.
Hawthorne himself says nothing of this, for it was not his way to
express admiration for man or woman, but we can believe that he felt
the same affection for the doctor that well-behaved boys commonly do for
their old masters. It was from Worcester that he derived his excellent
knowledge of Latin, the single study of which he was fond; and it is
his preference for words derived from the Latin which gives grace and
flexibility to Hawthorne’s style, as the force and severity of Emerson’s
style come from his partiality for Saxon words. During his last year
at school, Hawthorne took private lessons of a Salem lawyer, Benjamin
Oliver, and perhaps studied with him altogether at the finish.
Hawthorne’s life had been so irregular for years that it is creditable
to him that he should have succeeded in entering college at all. We hear
of him at Sebago in winter and at Salem in July. He writes to his Uncle
Robert to look out for the shot-gun which he left in a closet at Sebago,
and which has a rather heavy charge of powder in it. He appears to
have found as little companionship in Salem as he did in that
wilderness,--the natural effect of such a life. He may have been
acquainted with half the boys in Salem, but he did not make any warm
friends among them. His sister Louisa, who was a more vivacious person
than Elizabeth, was his chief companion and comfort. Seated at the
window with her on summer evenings, he elaborated the plan of an
imaginary society, a club of two, called the “Pin Society,” to which all
fees, assessments and fines were paid in pins,--then made by hand and
much more expensive than now. He constituted himself its secretary,
and wrote imaginary reports of its proceedings, in which Louisa is
frequently fined for absence from meetings. We do not hear of their
going to parties or dances with other children.
In August, 1820, he started an imaginary newspaper called the
_Spectator_, which he wrote himself with some help from Louisa, and of
which there was only one copy of each number. He continued this through
five successive issues, and we trace in its pages the commencement of
Hawthorne’s peculiar humor,--too quiet and gentle to make us laugh, but
with a penetrating tinge of pathos. Take for instance the following:
“There is no situation in life more irksome than that of an editor who
is obliged to find amusement for his Readers, from a head which is
too often (as is the present predicament with our own) filled
with emptiness. Since commencing this paper, we have received no
communication of any kind, so that the whole weight of the business
devolves upon our own shoulders, a load far too great for them to bear.
We hope the Public will reflect on these grievances.”
This is true fiction, and Nathaniel was not the first or the last editor
to whom the statement has applied. His difficulties are imaginary, but
he realizes what they might be in reality.
In another number he says:
“We know of no news, either domestic or foreign, and we hope our readers
will excuse our not inserting any. The law which prohibits paying debts
when a person has no money will apply in this case.”
Then he makes this quiet hit against the people of Maine for having
separated themselves and their territory from Massachusetts:
“By a gentleman in the state of Maine, we learn that a famine is
seriously apprehended owing to the want of rain. Potatoes could not be
procured in some places. When children break their leading strings,
and run away from their Parent, (as Maine has done) they may expect
sometimes to suffer hunger.” [Footnote: _Wide Awake_, xxxiii. 512.]
Of his religious instruction we hear nothing; but church-going in New
England during the first forty years of the nineteenth century was
wellnigh universal, and it makes little difference now to which of the
various forms of Calvinistic worship the Manning family subscribed. That
young Hawthorne was seriously impressed in this way is evident from
the following ode, which he may have composed as early as his fifteenth
year:
“Oh, I have roamed in rapture wild
Where the majestic rocks are piled
In lonely, stern, magnificence around
The troubled ocean’s steadfast bound;
And I have seen the storms arise
And darkness veil from mortal eyes
The Heavens that shine so fair and bright,
And all was solemn, silent night.
Then I have seen the storm disperse,
And Mercy hush the whirlwind fierce,
And all my soul in transport owned
There is a God, in Heaven enthroned.”
There is more of a rhetorical flourish than of serious religious feeling
in this; but genuine piety is hardly to be expected, and not greatly
to be desired, in a boy of that age. It represents the desire to be
religious, and to express something, he knows not what.
Nathaniel Hawthorne had already decided on his vocation in life before
he entered Bowdoin College,--a decision which he afterwards adhered
to with inflexible determination, in spite of the most discouraging
obstacles. In a memorable letter to his mother, written March 13, 1821,
he says:
“I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend my
vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a
great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I
shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I
shall not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of
life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place,
and to live and die as tranquil as--a puddle of water. As to lawyers,
there are so many of them already that one-half of them (upon a moderate
calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then,
seems to be ‘Hobson’s choice’; but yet I should not like to live by the
diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And it would weigh
very hardly on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I
should chance to send any unlucky patient ‘_ad infernum_,’ which, being
interpreted, is ‘to the realms below.’ Oh that I was rich enough to
live without profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and
relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my
hand is very author-like.” [Footnote: Conway, 24.]
Such were the Ides of March for Hawthorne. It was no boyish ambition
for public distinction, nor a vain grasping at the laurel wreath, but a
calmly considered and clear-sighted judgment.
CHAPTER III
BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825.
The life of man is not like a game of chess, in which the two players
start upon equal terms and can deliberate sufficiently over every move;
but more like whist, in which the cards we hold represent our fortunes
at the beginning, but the result of the game depends also on the skill
with which we play it. Life also resembles whist in this, that we are
obliged to follow suit in a general way to those who happen to have the
lead.
Why Hawthorne should have entered Bowdoin College instead of Harvard
has not been explained, nor is it easily explained. The standard of
scholarship maintained at Harvard and Yale has always been higher than
that at what Doctor Holmes designated as the “freshwater colleges,” and
this may have proved an unfavorable difference to the mind of a young
man who was not greatly inclined to his studies; but Harvard College is
only eighteen miles from Salem, and he could have returned to his home
once a week if he had chosen to do so, and this is a decided moral and
social advantage to a young man in those risky years. If Hawthorne had
entered Harvard in the next class to Emerson, he could not well have
escaped the latter’s attention, and would have come in contact with
other vigorous and stimulating minds; but it is of little use to
speculate on what might have been.
Boys are encouraged to study for college by accounts of the rare
enjoyment of university life, but they commonly find the first term of
Freshman year both dismal and discouraging. Their class is a medley of
strangers, their studies are a dry routine, and if they are not hazed by
the Sophomores, they are at least treated by them with haughtiness and
contempt. It is still summer when they arrive, but the leaves soon fall
from the trees, and their spirits fall with them.
Hawthorne may have felt this more acutely than any other member of his
class, and in addition to the prevailing sense of discomfort he was
seized early in November with that disgusting malady, the measles, which
boys usually go through with before they are old enough to realize how
disagreeable it is. It appears to have been a light attack, however,
and in three weeks he was able to attend recitations again. He made no
complaint of it, only writing to his uncle for ten dollars with which
to pay the doctor. He likes his chum, Mason, of Portsmouth, and does not
find his studies so arduous as at Salem before entering. Neither are the
college laws so strict as he anticipated.
In the following May he received the present of his first watch,
presumably from Uncle Robert, and he writes to his mother, who is still
at Sebago, that he is mightily pleased with it, and that it enables him
“to cut a great dash” at college. His letters to his relatives are not
brilliant, but they indicate a healthful and contented mind.
We will now consider some of the distinguished personages who were
Hawthorne’s friends and associates during these four years of his
apprenticeship to actual life; and there were rare characters among
them.
In the same coach in which Hawthorne left Portland for Brunswick, in
the summer of 1821, were Franklin Pierce and Jonathan Cilley. [Footnote:
Bridge’s Memoir of Hawthorne, 3.] Two men seated together in a modern
railway-carriage will often become better acquainted in three hours than
they might as next-door neighbors in three years; and this was still
more likely to happen in the old days of coach journeys, when the very
tedium of the occasion served as an inducement to frank and friendly
conversation. Pierce was the right man to bring Hawthorne out of his
hard shell of Sebago seclusion. He had already been one year at Bowdoin,
and at that time there was not the same caste feeling between Sophomores
and Freshmen--or at least very little of it--that has since arisen in
American colleges. He was amiable and kindly, and possessed the rare
gift of personal magnetism. Nature sometimes endows men and women with
this quality in lieu of all other advantages, and such would seem to
have been the case with Franklin Pierce. He was not much above the
average in intellect, and, as Hawthorne afterward confessed, not
particularly attractive in appearance; with a stiff military neck,
features strong but small, and opaque gray eyes,--a rather unimpressive
face, and one hardly capable of a decided expression. Yet with such
abilities as he had, aided by personal magnetism and the lack of
conspicuous faults, he became United States Senator at the age of
thirty-five, and President fifteen years later. The best we can say of
him is, that he was always Hawthorne’s friend. From the first day that
they met he became Hawthorne’s patron and protector--so far as he may
have required the latter. There must have been some fine quality in
the man which is not easily discernible from his outward acts; a
narrow-minded man, but of a refined nature.
Jonathan Cilley was an abler man than Pierce, and a bold party-leader,
but not so attractive personally. He always remained Hawthorne’s friend,
but the latter saw little of him and rarely heard from him after they
had graduated. The one letter of his which has been published gives
the impression of an impulsive, rough-and-tumble sort of person, always
ready to take a hand in whatever might turn up.
On the same day, Horatio Bridge, who lived at Augusta, was coming down
the Kennebec River to Brunswick. Hawthorne did not make his acquaintance
until some weeks later, but he proved to be the best friend of them
all, and Hawthorne’s most constant companion during the four years they
remained together. Pierce, Cilley and Bridge were all born politicians,
and it was this class of men with whom it would seem that Hawthorne
naturally assimilated.
On the same day, or the one previous, another boy set out from Portland
for Brunswick, only fourteen years old, named Henry W. Longfellow,--a
name that is now known to thousands who never heard of Franklin Pierce.
Would it have made a difference in the warp and woof of Hawthorne’s
life, if he had happened to ride that day in the same coach with
Longfellow? Who can tell? Was there any one in the breadth of the land
with whom he might have felt an equal sympathy, with whom he could have
matured a more enduring fellowship? It might have been a friendship like
that of Beaumont and Fletcher, or, better still, like that of Goethe and
Schiller,--but it was not written in the book of Fate. Longfellow also
had tried his hand on the Sebago region, and was fond of the woods and
of a gun; but he was too precocious to adapt himself easily to persons
of his own age, or even somewhat older. He had no sooner arrived at
Bowdoin than he became the associate and favorite of the professors. In
this way he missed altogether the storm-and-stress period of youthful
life, which is a useful experience of its kind; and if we notice in his
poetry a certain lack, the absence of a close contact with reality,--as
if he looked at his subject through a glass casement,--this may be
assigned as the reason for it.
[Illustration: HORATIO BRIDGE. FROM THE PORTRAIT BY EASTMAN JOHNSON]
During the four years they went back and forth to their instruction
together, Hawthorne and Longfellow never became cordially acquainted.
They also belonged to rival societies. There were only two principal
societies at Bowdoin, which continued through the college course--the
Peucinian and the Athenæan, and the difference between them might be
described by the words “citified” and “countrified,” without taking
either of those terms in an objectionable sense. Pierce was already
a leading character in the Athenæan, and was soon followed by Cilley,
Bridge and Hawthorne. The Peucinian suffered from the disadvantage of
having members of the college faculty on its active list, and this must
have given a rather constrained and academic character to its meetings.
There was much more of the true college spirit and classmate feeling in
the Athenæan.
Horatio Bridge is our single authority in regard to Bowdoin College at
this time, and his off-hand sketches of Hawthorne, Pierce and Longfellow
are invaluable. Never has such a group of distinguished young men been
gathered together at an American college. He says of Hawthorne:
“Hawthorne was a slender lad, having a massive head, with dark,
brilliant, and most expressive eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion
of dark hair. For his appearance at that time the inquirers must rely
wholly upon the testimony of friends; for, I think, no portrait of him
as a lad is extant. On one occasion, in our senior years, the class
wished to have their profiles cut in silhouette by a wandering artist
of the scissors, and interchanged by all the thirty-eight. Hawthorne
disapproved the proposed plan, and steadily refused to go into the
Class Golgotha, as he styled the dismal collection. I joined him in this
freak, and so our places were left vacant. I now regret the whim, since
even a moderately correct outline of his features as a youth would, at
this day, be interesting.
“Hawthorne’s figure was somewhat singular, owing to his carrying his
head a little on one side; but his walk was square and firm, and his
manner self-respecting and reserved. A fashionable boy of the present
day might have seen something to amuse him in the new student’s
appearance; but had he indicated this he would have rued it, for
Hawthorne’s clear appreciation of the social proprieties and his
great physical courage would have made it as unsafe to treat him with
discourtesy then as at any later time.
“Though quiet and most amiable, he had great pluck and determination. I
remember that in one of our convivial meetings we had the laugh upon him
for some cause, an occurrence so rare that the bantering was carried too
far. After bearing it awhile, Hawthorne singled out the one among us
who had the reputation of being the best pugilist, and in a few words
quietly told him that he would not permit the rallying to go farther.
His bearing was so resolute, and there was so much of danger in his eye,
that no one afterward alluded to the offensive subject in his presence.”
[Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 5.]
Horatio Bridge is a veracious witness, but we have to consider that he
was nearly ninety years of age at the time his memoirs were given to the
public. It is difficult to imagine Hawthorne as a slender youth, for his
whole figure was in keeping with the structure of his head. It is more
likely that he had a spare figure. Persons of a lively imagination have
always been apt to hold their heads on one side, but not commonly while
they are walking. It is for this reason that phrenologists have supposed
that the organ of ideality is located on the side of the head,--if there
really is any such organ.
Bridge says of Longfellow precisely what one might expect:
“He had decided personal beauty and most attractive manners. He was
frank, courteous, and affable, while morally he was proof against the
temptations that beset lads on first leaving the salutary restraints
of home. He was diligent, conscientious, and most attentive to all his
college duties, whether in the recitation-room, the lecture-hall, or the
chapel. The word ‘student’ best expresses his literary habit, and in his
intercourse with all he was conspicuously the gentleman.”
In addition to those already mentioned, James W. Bradbury of Portland,
afterwards United States Senator, and the Reverend Dr. George B.
Cheever, the vigorous anti-slavery preacher, were members of this class.
Three others, Cilley, Benson and Sawtelle, were afterward members of
the United States House of Representatives. Surely there must have been
quite a fermentation of youthful intellect at Bowdoin between 1821 and
1825.
Franklin Pierce was so deeply interested in military affairs that it was
a pity he should not have had a West Point cadetship. He was captain of
the college militia company, in which Hawthorne and Bridge drilled and
marched; a healthy and profitable exercise, and better than a gymnasium,
if rather monotonous. Pierce was the popular hero and _magnus Apollo_ of
his class, as distinguished foot-ball players are now; but just at this
time he was neglecting his studies so badly that at the close of his
second year he found himself at the very foot of the rank list. The fact
became known through the college, and Pierce was so chagrined that he
concluded to withdraw from Bowdoin altogether, and it was only by the
urgent persuasion of his friends that he was induced to continue his
course. “If I remain, however,” he said, “you will witness a change in
me.” For months together he burned midnight oil in order to recover
lost ground. During his last two years at college, he only missed
two recitations, both for sufficient reasons. His conduct was
unexceptionable, he incurred no deductions, and finally graduated third
in his class. It is an uncommon character that can play fast-and-loose
with itself in this manner. The boy Franklin had departed, and Pierce
the man had taken his place. [Footnote: Professor Packard’s “History of
Bowdoin College.”] Horatio Bridge gives a rather more idealized portrait
of him than he does of Hawthorne. He says:
“In person Pierce was slender, of medium height, with fair complexion
and light hair, erect, with a military bearing, active, and always
bright and cheerful. In character he was impulsive, not rash; generous,
not lavish; chivalric, courteous, manly, and warm-hearted,--and he was
one of the most popular students in the whole college.”
The instruction in American colleges during the first half of
the nineteenth century was excellent for Greek, Latin and
mathematics,--always the groundwork of a good education,--but the modern
languages were indifferently taught by French and German exiles, and
other subjects were treated still more indifferently. The two noble
studies of history and philosophy were presented to the young aspiring
soul in narrow, prejudiced text-books, which have long since been
consigned to that bourn from which no literary work ever returns.
As already stated, Hawthorne’s best study was Latin, and in that he
acquired good proficiency; but he was slow in mathematics, as artistic
minds usually are, and in his other studies he only exerted himself
sufficiently to pass his examinations in a creditable manner. We may
presume that he took the juice and left the rind; which was the sensible
thing to do. As might be expected, his themes and forensics were
beautifully written, although the arguments in them were not always
logical; but it is significant that he never could be prevailed upon
to make a declamation. There have been sensitive men, like Sumner and
George W. Curtis, who were not at all afraid of the platform, but they
were not, like Hawthorne, bashful men. The college faculty would seem
to have realized the true difficulty in his case, and treated him in a
kindly and lenient manner. No doubt he suffered enough in his own mind
on account of this deficiency, and it may have occurred to him what
difficulties he might have to encounter in after-life by reason of it.
If a student at college cannot bring himself to make a declamation, how
can the mature man face an audience in a lecture-room, command a ship,
or administer any important office? Such thoughts must have caused
Hawthorne no slight anxiety, at that sensitive age.
The out-door sports of the students did not attract Hawthorne greatly.
He was a fast runner and a good leaper, but seemed to dislike violent
exercise. He much preferred walking in the woods with a single
companion, or by the banks of the great river on which Brunswick is
situated. There were fine trout-brooks in the neighborhood, and formerly
the woods of Maine were traversed by vast flocks of passenger pigeons,
which with the large gray squirrels afforded excellent shooting.
How skilful Hawthorne became with his fowling-piece we have not been
informed, but it is evident from passages in “Fanshawe” that he learned
something of trout-fishing; and on the whole he enjoyed advantages at
Bowdoin which the present student at Harvard or Oxford might well envy,
him. The fish we catch in the streams and lakes of Maine only represent
a portion of our enjoyment there. Horatio Bridge says:
“There was one favorite spot in a little ravine, where a copious spring
of clear, cold water gushed out from the sandy bank, and joined the
larger stream. This was the Paradise Spring, which deserves much more
than its present celebrity for the absolute purity of its waters. Of
late years the brook has been better known as a favorite haunt of the
great romance writer, and it is now often called the Hawthorne Brook.
“Another locality, above the bridge, afforded an occasional stroll
through the fields and by the river. There, in spring, we used to linger
for hours to watch the giant pine-logs (for there were giants in those
days) from the far-off forests, floating by hundreds in the stream until
they came to the falls; then, balancing for a moment on the brink, they
plunged into the foamy pool below.”
At the lower end of the town there was an old weather-beaten cot, where
the railroad track now runs, inhabited by a lone woman nearly as old and
time-worn as the dwelling itself. She pretended to be a fortune-teller,
and to her Hawthorne and Bridge sometimes had recourse, to lift the veil
of their future prospects; which she always succeeded in doing to their
good entertainment. The old crone knew her business well, especially the
art of giving sufficient variety of detail to the same old story. For a
nine-pence she would predict a beautiful blond wife for Hawthorne, and
an equally handsome dark-complexioned one for Bridge. Riches were of
course thrown in by the handful; and Bridge remarks that although these
never came to pass they both happened to be blessed with excellent
wives. It is not surprising that the handsome Hawthorne and his tall,
elegant-looking companion should have stimulated the old woman’s
imagination in a favorable manner. The small coin they gave her may have
been the least happiness that their visits brought into her life.
Close by the college grounds there was a miserable little inn, which
went by the name of Ward’s Tavern, and thither the more uproarious class
of students consorted at intervals for the purpose of keeping care at a
distance, and singing, “Landlord, fill your flowing bowls.” Strange
to say, the reserved, thoughtful Hawthorne was often to be found
among them. It does not seem quite consistent with the gravity of his
customary demeanor, but youth has its period of reckless ebullition.
Punch-bowl societies exist in all our colleges, and many who disapprove
of them join them for the sake of popularity. Hawthorne may have been as
grave and well-behaved on these occasions as he was customarily. We have
Bridge’s word for this; and the matter would hardly be worth mentioning
if it had not led to more serious proceedings. May 29, 1822, President
Allen wrote to Mrs. Hathorne at Salem that her son had been fined fifty
cents for gaming at cards. [Footnote: In 1864 a Harvard student
was fined three dollars for writing on the woodwork with a
lead-pencil--erased with a sponge.] Certainly this was not very severe
treatment; and if the Bowdoin faculty, being on the spot, concluded that
young Hawthorne had only injured his moral nature fifty cents’ worth,
I think we shall do well to agree with their decision. At the same time
Nathaniel wrote his mother the following manly letter:
“BRUNSWICK, May 30th, 1822.
“MY DEAR MOTHER:--I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have
nothing particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in
college have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number.
One has been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest,
with myself, have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President
intends to write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be
the case, you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I
shall have the honor of being suspended. When the President asked what
we played for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents,
although it happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of
that, he would probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no
untruth in the case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at
all this term. I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term,
and shall not till the last week.” [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 118.]
The clemency with which the college authorities treated Bridge and
Hawthorne is a plain indication of the confidence which they felt in
them, and speaks more highly for their respective characters than if
they had been patterns of good behavior. Some of the others were not so
fortunate. One young man, whose name is properly withheld from us,
was expelled from the institution. He was supposed to have been the
ringleader in this dubious business, but Hawthorne manfully resented
the supposition that any one could have influenced him, or did influence
him, in this matter. It is more likely that he was influenced by the
spirit of investigation, and wished to know what the sensation was like
from personal experience.
“Letters home” from college are not commonly interesting to the general
public, and those which Hawthorne wrote to his mother and sisters do
not differ essentially from such as other young men write under similar
conditions. At the age when it is so difficult to decide whether we
have become men or are still boys, all our actions partake of a similar
uncertainty, and the result of what we do and say is likely to be a
rather confused impression. Though college students appear different
enough to one another, they all seem alike to the outside world.
University towns always contain more or less cultivated society, and
young Hawthorne might have been welcome to the best of it if he had felt
so inclined; but he was as shy of the fair sex as Goldsmith’s bashful
lover. M. D. Conway, who knew him, doubts if he ever became well
acquainted with a young lady until his engagement to Miss Peabody.
Considering this, it seems as if Jonathan Cilley made rather a hazardous
wager with Hawthorne, before leaving Bowdoin,--a wager of a cask of
Madeira, that Hawthorne would become a married man within the next
twelve years. Papers to that effect were duly signed by the respective
parties, sealed, and delivered for safe-keeping to Horatio Bridge,
who preserved them faithfully until the appointed time arrived. Under
ordinary conditions the chances of this bet were in Cilley’s favor, for
in those primitive days it was much easier for educated young men to
obtain a start in life than it is at present, and early marriages were
in consequence much more common.[Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 47. The
contract was dated November 14, 1824.]
The year 1824 was a serious one in American politics. The
Republican-Democratic party, having become omnipotent, broke to pieces
of its own weight. The eastern interest nominated John Quincy Adams
for the Presidency; the western interest nominated Henry Clay; and the
frontier interest nominated Andrew Jackson. Unfortunately the frontier
interest included all the unsettled and continually shifting elements in
the country, so that Jackson had nearly as strong a support in the East
as in the West. Bridge says, “We were all enthusiastic supporters of old
Hickory.” It was evidently Pierce who led them into this, and although
it proved in a material sense for Hawthorne’s benefit, it separated
him permanently from the class to which he properly belonged--the
enlightened men of culture of his time; and Cilley’s tragical fate can
be directly traced to it. The Jackson movement was in its essence a
revolt against _civility_,--and it seems as if Hawthorne and Bridge
might have recognized this.
Hawthorne was well liked in his class in spite of his reserved manners,
but he held no class offices that we hear of, except a place on a
committee of the Athenæan Society with Franklin Pierce. Class days
and class suppers, so prolific of small honors, were not introduced at
Bowdoin until some years later. He graduated eighteenth in a class of
thirty-eight, but this was not sufficient to give him a part in the
commencement exercises. [Footnote: The President informed him that his
rank in the class would have entitled him to a part if it had not been
for his neglect of declamations; and Hawthorne wrote to his mother that
he was perfectly satisfied with this, for it saved him the mortification
of appearing in public.] Accordingly Hawthorne, Bridge, and others who
were in a like predicament, organized a mock Commencement celebration
at Ward’s Tavern, where they elected officers of a comical sort, such
as boatswain and sea-cook, and concluded their celebration in a manner
suitable to the occasion.
Hawthorne was commonly known among his classmates, as “Hath,” and his
friends addressed him in this manner long after he had graduated. His
degree was made out in the name of Nathaniel Hathorne, above which he
subsequently wrote “Hawthorne,” in bold letters.
The question may well be raised here, how it happened that America
produced so many men of remarkable intellect with such slight
opportunities for education in former times, while our greatly improved
universities have not graduated an orator like Webster, a poet like
Longfellow, or a prose-writer equal to Hawthorne during the past forty
years. There have been few enough who have risen above mediocrity.
It is the same, more or less, all over the civilized world. We have
entered into a mechanical age, which is natural enough considering the
rapid advances of science and the numerous mechanical inventions, but
which is decidedly unfavorable to the development of art and literature.
Everything now goes by machinery, from Harvard University to Ohio
politics and the gigantic United States Steel Company; and every man has
to find his place in some machine or other, or he is thrown out of line.
Individual effort, as well as independence of thought and action, is
everywhere frowned upon; but without freedom of thought and action there
can be no great individualities, which is the same as saying that there
can be no poets like Longfellow, or writers like Hawthorne and Emerson.
Spontaneity is the life of the true artist, and in a mechanical
civilization there can be neither spontaneity nor the poetic material
which is essential to artistic work of a high order. There can be no
great orators, for masses of men are no longer influenced by oratory,
but by newspapers. Genius is like a plant of slow growth, which requires
sunshine and Mother Earth to nourish it, not chemicals and electric
lights.
CHAPTER IV
LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835
During the War of the American Revolution, the officers of the French
fleet, which was stationed at Newport, invented a game of cards, called
“Boston,” of which one peculiarity was, that under certain conditions,
whoever held the lowest hand would win the count. This was called
“Little Misery,” and this was the kind of hand which Nathaniel Hawthorne
had to play for fifteen years after leaving Bowdoin College. Only his
indomitable will could have carried him through it.
A college graduate who lacks the means to study a profession, and who
has no influential relative to make a place for him in the world,
finds himself in a most discouraging position. The only thing that his
education has fitted him to do is, to teach school, and he may not be
adapted to this, on account of some personal peculiarity. There was,
and I suppose is still, a prejudice among mercantile men against college
graduates, as a class of proud, indolent, neglectful persons, very
difficult to instruct. Undoubtedly there are many such, but the innocent
have to suffer with the guilty. It is natural that a man who has not had
a liberal education should object to employing a subordinate who knows
Latin and Greek. Whether Hawthorne’s Uncle Robert, who had thus
far proved to be his guardian genius, would have educated him for a
profession, we have no means of knowing. This would mean of course a
partial support for years afterward, and it is quite possible that Mr.
Manning considered his duties to his own children paramount to it. What
he did for Nathaniel may have been the best he could, to give him
the position of book-keeper for the stage-company. This was of course
Pegasus in harness (or rather at the hitching-post), but it is excellent
experience for every young man; although the compensation in Hawthorne’s
case was small and there could be no expectation of future advancement.
In this dilemma he decided to do the one thing for which Nature
intended him,--to become a writer of fiction,--and he held fast to this
determination in the face of most discouraging obstacles. He composed
a series of short stories,--echoes of his academic years,--which he
proposed to publish under the title of Wordsworth’s popular poem, “We
Are Seven.” One of these is said to have been based on the witchcraft
delusion, and it is a pity that it should not have been preserved,
but their feminine titles afford no indication of their character. He
carried them to a publisher, who received him politely and promised to
examine them, but one month passed after another without Hawthorne’s
hearing from him, so that he concluded at length to make inquiries.
[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 124.] The publisher confessed that he had
not even undertaken to read them, and Nathaniel carried them back,
with a sinking heart, to his little chamber in the house on Herbert
Street,--where he may have had melancholy thoughts enough for the next
few weeks.
Youth, however, soon outgrows its chagrins. In less than two years
Hawthorne was prepared to enter the literary lists, equipped with a
novelette, called “Fanshawe”; but here again he was destined to meet
with a rebuff. After tendering it to a number of publishers without
encouragement, he concluded to take the risk of publishing it
himself. This only cost him a few hundred dollars, but the result was
unsatisfactory, and he afterward destroyed all the copies that he could
regain possession of.
Hawthorne’s genius was of slow development. He was only twenty-four when
he published this rather immature work, and it might have been better if
he had waited longer. It was to him what the “Sorrows of Werther” was
to Goethe, but while the “Sorrows of Werther” made Goethe famous in many
countries, “Fanshawe” fell still-born. The latter was not more imitative
of Scott than the “Sorrows of Werther” is of Rousseau, and now that
we consider it in the cool critical light of the twentieth century,
we cannot but wonder that the “Sorrows of Werther” ever produced such
enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to see why “Fanshawe” should not
have proved a success. It lacks the grace and dignity of Hawthorne’s
mature style, but it has an ingenious plot, a lively action, and is
written in sufficiently good English. One would suppose that its faults
would have helped to make it popular, for portions of it are so exciting
as to border closely on the sensational. It may be affirmed that when
a novel becomes so exciting that we wish to turn over the pages and
anticipate the conclusion, either the action of the story is too heated
or its incidents are too highly colored. The introduction of pirates in
a work of fiction is decidely sensational, from Walter Scott downward,
and, though Hawthorne never fell into this error, he approaches closely
to it in “Fanshawe.” There is some dark secret between the two villains
of the piece, which he leaves to the reader as an exercise for the
imagination. This is a characteristic of all his longer stories. There
is an unknown quantity, an insoluble point, in them, which tantalizes
the reader.
What we especially feel in “Fanshawe” is the author’s lack of social
experience. His heroine at times behaves in a truly feminine manner, and
at others her performances make us shiver. Her leaving her guardian’s
house at midnight to go off with an unknown man, whom her maidenly
instinct should have taught her to distrust, even if Fanshawe had not
warned her against him, might have been characteristic of the Middle
Ages, but is certainly not of modern life. Bowdoin College evidently
served Hawthorne as a background to his plot, although removed some
distance into the country, and it is likely that the portrait of the
kindly professor might have been recognized there. Ward’s Tavern serves
for the public-house where the various characters congregate, and
there is a high rocky ledge in the woods, or what used to be woods at
Brunswick, where the students often tried their skill in climbing, and
which Hawthorne has idealized into the cliff where the would-be abductor
met his timely fate. The trout-brook where Bridge and Hawthorne used to
fish is also introduced.
Fanshawe himself seems like a house of which only two sides have been
built. There are such persons, and it is no wonder if they prove to be
short-lived. Yet the scene in which he makes his noble renunciation of
the woman who is devoted to him, purely from a sense of gratitude, is
finely and tenderly drawn, and worthy of Hawthorne in his best years.
The story was republished after its author’s death, and fully deserves
its position in his works.
It was about this time (1827) that Nathaniel Hathorne changed his name
to Hawthorne. No reason has ever been assigned for his doing so, and he
had no legal right to do it without an act of the Legislature, but
he took a revolutionary right, and as his family and fellow-citizens
acquiesced in this, it became an established fact. His living relatives
in the Manning family are unable to explain his reason for it. It may
have been for the sake of euphony, or he may have had a fanciful notion,
that such a change would break the spell which seemed to be dragging his
family down with him. Conway’s theory that it was intended to serve him
as an incognito is quite untenable. His name first appears with a _w_ in
the Bowdoin Triennial Catalogue of 1828.
There are very few data existing as to Hawthorne’s life during his first
ten years of manhood, but it must have been a hard, dreary period for
him. The Manning children, Robert, Elizabeth and Rebecca, were now
growing up, and must have been a source of entertainment in their way,
and his sister Louisa was always a comfort; but Horatio Bridge, who made
a number of flying visits to him, states that he never saw the
elder sister, even at table,--a fact from which we may draw our own
conclusions. Hawthorne had no friends at this time, except his college
associates, and they were all at a distance,--Pierce and Cilley both
flourishing young lawyers, one at Concord, New Hampshire, and the other
at Thomaston, Maine,--while Longfellow was teaching modern languages at
Bowdoin. He had no lady friends to brighten his evenings for him, and
if he went into society, it was only to be stared at for his personal
beauty, like a jaguar in a menagerie. He had no fund of the small
conversation which serves like oil to make the social machinery run
smoothly. Like all deep natures, he found it difficult to adapt himself
to minds of a different calibre. Salem people noticed this, and his
apparent lack of an object in life,--for he maintained a profound
secrecy in regard to his literary efforts,--and concluded that he was
an indolent young man without any faculty for business, and would never
come to good in this world. No doubt elderly females admonished him for
neglecting his opportunities, and small wits buzzed about him as they
have about many another under similar conditions. It was Hans Andersen’s
story of the ugly duck that proved to be a swan.
No wonder that Hawthorne betook himself to the solitude of his own
chamber, and consoled himself like the philosopher who said, “When I am
alone, then I am least alone.” He had an internal life with which only
his most intimate friends were acquainted, and he could people his room
with forms from his own fancy, much more real to him than the palpable
_ignota_ whom he passed in the street. Beautiful visions came to him,
instead of sermonizing ladies, patronizing money-changers, aggressive
upstarts, grimacing wiseacres, and that large class of amiable,
well-meaning persons that makes up the bulk of society. We should not be
surprised if angels sometimes came to hover round him, for to the pure
in heart heaven descends upon earth.
There is a passage in Hawthorne’s diary under date of October 4, 1840,
which has often been quoted; but it will have to be quoted again, for
it cannot be read too often, and no biography of him would be adequate
without it. He says:
“Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber where I used to sit in days
gone by....This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands
upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few
of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a
biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my
memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my
mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful,
and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time,
waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why
it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,--at
least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were
already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed.
But oftener I was happy,--at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or
was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out
in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not indeed, with a loud roar
of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went,
but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my solitude
till now ... and now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many
years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the
viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the
world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly
dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the
multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come,
I still kept the dew of my youth, and the freshness of my heart.”
During these dismal years Horatio Bridge was Hawthorne’s good genius.
The letters that Hawthorne wrote to him have not been preserved, but we
may judge of their character by Bridge’s replies to him--always frank,
manly, sympathetic and encouraging. Hawthorne evidently confided his
troubles and difficulties to Bridge, as he would to an elder brother.
Bridge finally destroyed Hawthorne’s letters, not so much on account
of their complaining tone as for the personalities they contained;
[Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 69.] and this suggests to us that there was
still another side to Hawthorne’s life at this epoch concerning which
we shall never be enlightened. A man could not have had a better friend
than Horatio Bridge. He was to Hawthorne what Edward Irving was to
Carlyle; and the world is more indebted to them both than it often
realizes.
There is in fact a decided similarity between the lives of Carlyle and
Hawthorne, in spite of radical differences in their work and characters.
Both started at the foot of the ladder, and met with a hard, long
struggle for recognition; both found it equally difficult to earn their
living by their pens; both were assisted by most devoted friends, and
both finally achieved a reputation among the highest in their own time.
If there is sometimes a melancholy tinge in their writings, may we
wonder at it? Pericles said, “We need the theatre to chase away the
sadness of life,” and it might have benefited the whole Hawthorne
family to have gone to the theatre once a fortnight; but there were few
entertainments in Salem, except of the stiff conventional sort, or
in the shape of public dances open to firemen and shop-girls. Long
afterward, Elizabeth Hawthorne wrote of her brother:
“His habits were as regular as possible. In the evening after tea he
went out for about an hour, whatever the weather was; and in winter,
after his return, he ate a pint bowl of thick chocolate--(not cocoa, but
the old-fashioned chocolate) crumbed full of bread: eating never
hurt him then, and he liked good things. In summer he ate something
equivalent, finishing with fruit in the season of it. In the evening we
discussed political affairs, upon which we differed in opinion; he being
a Democrat, and I of the opposite party. In reality, his interest in
such things was so slight that I think nothing would have kept it
alive but my contentious spirit. Sometimes, when he had a book that he
particularly liked, he would not talk. He read a great many novels.”
[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 125.]
If Elizabeth possessed the genius which her brother supposed, she
certainly does not indicate it in this letter; but genius in the ore is
very different from genius smelted and refined by effort and experience.
The one important fact in her statement is that Hawthorne was in the
habit of taking solitary rambles after dark,--an owlish practice,
but very attractive to romantic minds. Human nature appears in a more
pictorial guise by lamplight, after the day’s work is over. The groups
at the street corners, the glittering display in the watchmaker’s
windows, the carriages flashing by and disappearing in the darkness, the
mysterious errands of foot-passengers, all served as object-lessons for
this student of his own kind.
Jonathan Cilley once said:
“I love Hawthorne; I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a
mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to
enter.” [Footnote: Packard’s “Bowdoin College,” 306.]
Long-continued thinking is sure to take effect at last, either in words
or in action, and Hawthorne’s mind had to disburden itself in some
manner. So, after the failure of “Fanshawe,” he returned to his original
plan of writing short stories, and this time with success. In January,
1830, the well-known tale of “The Gentle Boy” was accepted by S. G.
Goodrich, the editor of a Boston publication called the _Token_, who was
himself better known in those days under the _nom de plume_ of “Peter
Parley.” “The Wives of the Dead,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” and “Major
Molineaux” soon followed. In 1833 he published the “Seven Vagabonds,”
and some others. The New York _Knickerbocker_ published the “Fountain of
Youth” and “Edward Fayne’s Rosebud.” After 1833 the _Token_ and the
_New England Magazine_ [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 175.] stood ready to
accept all the short pieces that Hawthorne could give them, but they
did not encourage him to write serial stories. However, it was not the
custom then for writers to sign their names to magazine articles,
so that Hawthorne gained nothing in reputation by this. Some of his
earliest pieces were printed over the signature of “Oberon.”
An autumn expedition to the White Mountains, Lake Champlain and Lake
Ontario, and Niagara Falls, in 1832, raised Hawthorne’s spirits and
stimulated his ambition. He wrote to his mother from Burlington,
Vermont, September 16:
“I have arrived in safety, having passed through the White Hills,
stopping at Ethan Crawford’s house, and climbing Mt. Washington. I have
not decided as to my future course. I have no intention of going into
Canada. I have heard that cholera is prevalent in Boston.”
It was something to have stood on the highest summit east of the Rocky
Mountains, and to have seen all New England lying at his feet. A hard
wind in the Crawford Notch, which he describes in his story of “The
Ambitious Guest,” must have been in his own experience, and as he passed
the monument of the ill-fated Willey family he may have thought that
he too might become celebrated after his death, even as they were
from their poetic catastrophe. This expedition provided him with the
materials for a number of small plots.
The ice was now broken; but a new class of difficulties arose before
him. American literature was then in the bud and promised a beautiful
blossoming, but the public was not prepared for it. Monthly magazines
had a precarious existence, and their uncertainty of remuneration
reacted on the contributors. Hawthorne was poorly paid, often obliged to
wait a long time for his pay, and occasionally lost it altogether. For
his story of “The Gentle Boy,” one of the gems of literature, which
ought to be read aloud every year in the public schools, he received the
paltry sum of thirty-five dollars. Evidently he could not earn even a
modest maintenance on such terms, and his letters to Bridge became more
despondent than ever.
Goodrich, who was a writer of the Andrews Norton class, soon perceived
that Hawthorne could make better sentences than his own, and engaged him
to write historical abstracts for his pitiful Peter Parley books, paying
him a hundred dollars for the whole work, and securing for himself all
the credit that appertained to it. Everybody knew who Peter Parley was,
but it has only recently been discovered that much of the literature
which passed under his name was the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The editor of a New York magazine to which Hawthorne contributed a
number of sketches repeatedly deferred the payment for them, and finally
confessed his inability to make it,--which he probably knew or intended
beforehand. Then, with true metropolitan assurance, he begged of
Hawthorne the use of certain unpublished manuscripts, which he still
had in his possession. Hawthorne with unlimited contempt told the fellow
that he might keep them, and then wrote to Bridge:
“Thus has this man, who would be considered a Mæcenas, taken from a
penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can
supply.” [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 68, 69.]
Whether this New York periodical was the _Knickerbocker_ or some
other, we are not informed; neither do we know what Bridge replied
to Hawthorne, who had closed his letter with a malediction, on the
aforesaid editor, but elsewhere in his memoirs he remarks:
“Hawthorne received but small compensation for any of this literary
work, for he lacked the knowledge of business and the self-assertion
necessary to obtain even the moderate remuneration vouchsafed to writers
fifty years ago.” [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 77.]
If Horatio Bridge had been an author himself, he would not have written
this statement concerning his friend. Magazine editors are like men in
other professions: some of them are honorable and others are less so;
but an author who offers a manuscript to the editor of a magazine
is wholly at his mercy, so far as that small piece of property is
concerned. The author cannot make a bargain with the editor as he can
with the publisher of his book, and is obliged to accept whatever the
latter chooses to give him. Instances have been known where an editor
has destroyed a valuable manuscript, without compensation or explanation
of any kind. Hawthorne was doing the best that a human being could under
the conditions that were given him. Above all things, he was true to
himself; no man could be more so.
Yet Bridge wrote to him on Christmas Day, 1836:
“The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back
for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would long ago
have given you what you must now wait a long time for. It may be for the
best, but I doubt it.”
Nothing is more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of
well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect
Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop
the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker,
was unreasonable. In the phraseology of Sir William Hamilton, the
two vocations are “non-compossible.” Bridge himself was undertaking
a grandly unpractical project about this time: nothing less than an
attempt to dam the Androscoggin, a river liable to devastating floods;
and in this enterprise he was obliged to trust to a class of men who
were much more uncertain in their ways and methods than those with whom
Hawthorne dealt. Horatio Bridge had not studied civil engineering,
and the result was that before two years had elapsed the floods on the
Androscoggin swept the dam away, and his fortune with it.
In the same letter we also notice this paragraph concerning another
Bowdoin friend:
“And so Frank Pierce is elected Senator. There is an instance of what a
man can do by trying. With no very remarkable talents, he at the age
of thirty-four fills one of the highest stations in the nation. He is a
good fellow, and I rejoice at his success.” [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i.
148.]
Pierce certainly possessed the cap of Fortunatus, and it seems as if
there must have been some magic faculty in the man, which enabled him to
win high positions so easily; and he continued to do this, although he
had not distinguished himself particularly as a member of Congress, and
he appeared to still less advantage among the great party leaders in the
United States Senate. He illustrated the faculty for “getting elected.”
In October, 1836, the time arrived for settling the matrimonial wager
between Hawthorne and Jonathan Cilley, which they had made at college
twelve years before. Bridge accordingly examined the documents which
they had deposited with him, and notified Cilley that he was under
obligation to provide Hawthorne with an octavo of Madeira.
Cilley’s letter to Hawthorne on this occasion does not impress one
favorably. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 144.] It is familiar and jocose,
without being either witty or friendly, and he gives no intimation in
it of an intention to fulfil his promise. Hawthorne appears to have sent
the letter to Bridge, who replied:
“I doubt whether you ever get your wine from Cilley. His inquiring of
you whether he had really lost the bet is suspicious; and he has written
me in a manner inconsistent with an intention of paying promptly; and if
a bet grows old it grows cold. He wished me to propose to you to have
it paid at Brunswick next Commencement, and to have as many of our
classmates as could be mustered to drink it. It may be Cilley’s idea to
pay over the balance after taking a strong pull at it; if so, it is well
enough. But still it should be tendered within the month.”
In short, Cilley behaved in this matter much in the style of a tricky
Van Buren politician, making a great bluster of words, and privately
intending to do nothing. He was running for Congress at the time on
the Van Buren ticket, and it is quite likely that the expenses of the
campaign had exhausted his funds. That he should never have paid the bet
was less to Hawthorne’s disadvantage than his own.
It was now that Horatio Bridge proved himself a true friend, and equally
a man. In the spring of 1836 Goodrich had obtained for Hawthorne
the editorship of the _American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge_, with a salary of five hundred dollars; [Footnote: Conway,
45.]but he soon discovered that he had embarked on a ship with a rotten
hulk. He started off heroically, writing the whole of the first number
with the help of his sister Elizabeth; but by midsummer the concern was
bankrupt, and he retired to his lonely cell, more gloomy and despondent
than before. There are few sadder spectacles then that of a man seeking
work without being able to obtain it; and this applies to the man of
genius as well as to the day laborer.
Horatio Bridge now realized that the time had come for him to interfere.
He recognized that Hawthorne was gradually lapsing into a hypochondria
that might terminate fatally; that he was Goethe’s oak planted in a
flowerpot, and that unless the flower-pot could be broken, the oak
would die. He also saw that Hawthorne would never receive the public
recognition that was due to his ability, so long as he published
magazine articles under an assumed name. He accordingly wrote to
Goodrich--fortunately before his mill-dam gave way--suggesting the
publication of a volume of Hawthorne’s stories, and offered to guarantee
the publisher against loss. This proposition was readily accepted, but
Bridge might have made a much better bargain. What it amounted to was,
the half-profit system without the half-profit. The necessary papers
were exchanged and Hawthorne gladly acceded to Goodrich’s terms. Bridge,
however, had cautioned Goodrich not to inform Hawthorne of his share in
the enterprise, and the consequence of this was that he shortly received
a letter from Hawthorne, informing him of the good news--which he knew
already--and praising Goodrich, to whom he proposed to dedicate his new
volume. Bridge’s generosity had come back to him, dried and salted,--as
it has to many another.
What could Bridge do, in the premises? Goodrich had written to Hawthorne
that the publisher, Mr. Howes, was confident of making a favorable
arrangement _with a man of capital who would edit the book_; but Bridge
did not know this, and he suspected Goodrich of sailing into Hawthorne’s
favor under a false flag. He therefore wrote to Hawthorne, November 17,
1836:
“I fear you will hurt yourself by puffing Goodrich _undeservedly_,--for
there is no doubt in my mind of his selfishness in regard to your work
and yourself. I am perfectly aware that he has taken a good deal of
interest in you, but when did he ever do anything for you without a
_quid pro quo_? The magazine was given to you for $100 less than it
should have been. The _Token_ was saved by your writing. Unless you
are already committed, do not mar the prospects of your _first_ book by
hoisting Goodrich into favor.”
This prevented the dedication, for which Hawthorne was afterward
thankful enough. The book, which was the first volume of “Twice Told
Tales” came from the press the following spring, and proved an immediate
success, although not a highly lucrative one for its author. With
the help of Longfellow’s cordial review of it in the _North American_
it established Hawthorne’s reputation on a firm and irrefragable basis.
All honor to Horatio.
As if Hawthorne had not seen a sufficiently long “winter of discontent”
already, his friends now proposed to obtain the position of secretary
and chronicler for him on Commodore Jones’s exploring expedition to the
South Pole! Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge
interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no doubt
that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for Hawthorne,
but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a Congressional
appropriation. The following year, 1838, the project was again brought
forward by the administration, and Congress being in a more amiable
frame of mind granted the requisite funds; but Hawthorne had now
contracted new ties in his native city, bound, as it were, by an
inseparable cord stronger than a Manila hawser, and Doctor Nathaniel
Peabody’s hospitable parlors were more attractive to him than anything
the Antarctic regions could offer.
We have now entered upon the period where Hawthorne’s own diary
commences, the autobiography of a pure-minded, closely observing man;
an invaluable record, which began apparently in 1835, and was continued
nearly until the close of his life; now published in a succession of
American, English and Italian note-books. In it we find records of what
he saw and thought; descriptive passages, afterward made serviceable
in his works of fiction, and perhaps written with that object in view;
fanciful notions, jotted down on the impulse of the moment; records
of his social life; but little critical writing or personal
confessions,--although the latter may have been reserved; from
publication by his different editors. It is known that much of his diary
has not yet been given to the public, and perhaps never will be.
In July, 1837, Hawthorne went to Augusta, to spend a month with his
friend Horatio Bridge; went fishing with him, for what they called
white perch, probably the saibling; [Footnote: The American saibling, or
golden trout, is only indigenous to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, and
to a small lake near Augusta.] and was greatly entertained with the
peculiarities of an idiomatic Frenchman, an itinerant teacher of that
language, whom Bridge, in the kindness of his heart, had taken into his
own house. The last of July, Cilley also made his appearance, but did
not bring the Madeira with him, and Hawthorne has left this rather
critical portrait of him in his diary:
“Friday, July 28th.--Saw my classmate and formerly intimate friend,
----, for the first time since we graduated. He has met with good
success in life, in spite of circumstances, having struggled upward
against bitter opposition, by the force of his abilities, to be a member
of Congress, after having been for some time the leader of his party in
the State Legislature. We met like old friends, and conversed almost as
freely as we used to do in college days, twelve years ago and more. He
is a singular person, shrewd, crafty, insinuating, with wonderful tact,
seizing on each man by his manageable point, and using him for his own
purpose, often without the man’s suspecting that he is made a tool of;
and yet, artificial as his character would seem to be, his conversation,
at least to myself, was full of natural feeling, the expression of which
can hardly be mistaken, and his revelations with regard to himself had
really a great deal of frankness. A man of the most open nature might
well have been more reserved to a friend, after twelve years separation,
than ---- was to me. Nevertheless, he is really a crafty man,
concealing, like a murder-secret, anything that it is not good for him
to have known. He by no means feigns the good feeling that he professes,
nor is there anything affected in the frankness of his conversation; and
it is this that makes him so fascinating. There is such a quantity of
truth and kindliness and warm affections, that a man’s heart opens
to him, in spite of himself. He deceives by truth. And not only is
he crafty, but, when occasion demands, bold and fierce like a tiger,
determined, and even straightforward and undisguised in his measures,--a
daring fellow as well as a sly one.”
This can be no other than Jonathan Cilley; like many of his class, a
man of great good humor but not over-scrupulous, so far as the means he
might make use of were concerned. He did not, however, prove to be as
skilful a diplomat as Hawthorne seems to have supposed him. The
duel between Cilley and Graves, of Kentucky, has been so variously
misrepresented that the present occasion would seem a fitting
opportunity to tell the plain truth concerning it.
President Jackson was an honest man, in the customary sense of the term,
and he would have scorned to take a dollar that was not his own; but he
suffered greatly from parasites, who pilfered the nation’s money,--the
natural consequence of the spoils-of-office system. The exposure of
these peculations gave the Whigs a decided advantage, and Cilley, who
had quickly proved his ability in debate, attempted to set a back-fire
by accusing Watson Webb, the editor of the _Courier and Enquirer_, of
having been bribed to change the politics of his paper. The true facts
of the case were, that the paper had been purchased by the Whigs, and
Webb, of course, had a right to change his politics if he chose to;
and the net result of Cilley’s attack was a challenge to mortal combat,
carried by Representative Graves, of Kentucky. Cilley, although a man of
courage, declined this, on the ground that members of Congress ought
not to be called to account outside of the Capitol, for words spoken in
debate. “Then,” said Graves, “you will at least admit that my friend is
a gentleman.”
This was a fair offer toward conciliation, and if Cilley had been
peaceably inclined he would certainly have accepted it; but he
obstinately refused to acknowledge that General Webb was a gentleman,
and in consequence of this he received a second challenge the next day
from Graves, brought by Henry A. Wise, afterward Governor of Virginia.
Cilley still objected to fighting, but members of his party urged him
into it: the duel took place, and Cilley was killed.
It may be said in favor of the “code of honor” that it discourages
blackguardism and instructs a man to keep a civil tongue; but it is
not always possible to prevent outbursts of temper, especially in hot
climates, and a man’s wife and children should also be considered.
Andrew Jackson said at the close of his life, that there was nothing he
regretted so much as having killed a human being in a duel. Man rises by
humility, and angels fall from pride.
Hawthorne wrote a kindly and regretful notice of the death of his old
acquaintance, which was published in the _Democratic Review_, and which
closed with this significant passage:
“Alas, that over the grave of a dear friend, my sorrow for the
bereavement must be mingled with another grief--that he threw away such
a life in so miserable a cause! Why, as he was true to the Northern
character in all things else, did he swerve from his Northern principles
in this final scene?” [Footnote: Conway, 63.]
It will be well to bear this in mind in connection with a somewhat
similar incident, which we have now to consider.
An anecdote has been repeated in all the books about Hawthorne published
since 1880, which would do him little credit if it could be proved,--a
story that he challenged one of his friends to a duel, at the
instigation of a vulgar and unprincipled young woman. Horatio Bridge
says in reference to it:
“This characteristic was notably displayed several years later, when a
lady incited him to quarrel with one of his best friends on account of
a groundless pique of hers. He went to Washington for the purpose of
challenging the gentleman, and it was only after ample explanation had
been made, showing that his friend had behaved with entire honor, that
Pierce and Cilley, who were his advisers, could persuade him to be
satisfied without a fight.” [Footnote: Bridge, 5.]
How the good Horatio could have fallen into this pit is unimaginable,
for a double contradiction is contained in his statement. “Some time
after this,” that is after leaving college, would give the impression
that the affair took place about 1830, whereas Pierce and Cilley were
not in Washington together till five or six years later--probably seven
years later. Moreover, Hawthorne states in a letter to Pierce’s friend
O’Sullivan, on April 1, 1853, that he had never been in Washington up to
that time. The Manning family and Mrs. Hawthorne’s relatives never heard
of the story previous to its publication.
The internal evidence is equally strong against it. What New England
girl would behave in the manner that Hawthorne’s son represents this
one to have done? What young gentleman would have listened to such a
communication as he supposes, and especially the reserved and modest
Hawthorne? One can even imagine the aspect of horror on his face at such
an unlady-like proceeding. The story would be an ignominious one
for Hawthorne, if it were credible, but there is no occasion for our
believing it until some tangible evidence is adduced in its support.
There was no element of Quixotism in his composition, and it is quite
as impossible to locate the identity of the person whom Hawthorne is
supposed to have challenged.
CHAPTER V
EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839
It was fortunate for Hawthorne that there was at this time a periodical
in the United States, the _North American Review_, which was generally
looked upon as an authority in literature, and which in most instances
deserved the confidence that was placed in it, for its reviews were
written by men of distinguished ability. It was the _North American
Review_ which made the reputation of L. Maria Child, and which enrolled
Hawthorne in the order of geniuses.
There is not much literary criticism in Longfellow’s review, and he does
not “rise to the level of the accomplished essayist” of our own time,
[Footnote: Who writes so correctly and says so little to the purpose.]
but he goes to the main point with the single-mindness of the true
poet. “A new star,” he says, “has appeared in the skies”--a veritable
prediction. “Others will gaze at it with telescopes, and decide whether
it is in the constellation of Orion or the Great Bear. It is enough for
us to gaze at it, to admire it, and welcome it.”
“Although Hawthorne writes in prose, he belongs among the poets. To
every subject he touches he gives a poetic personality which emanates
from the man himself. His sympathies extend to all things living, and
even to the inanimates. Another characteristic is the exceeding beauty
of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed he uses words
as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful bound, his
spirit crosses and re-crosses the bright and rushing stream of thought.”
Again he says:
“A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page;
with now a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its
features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a
strange and painful expression, as, in the German romance, the bronze
knocker of the Archivarius Lindhorst makes up faces at the Student
Anselmus.”
Here we have a portrait of Hawthorne, by one who knew him, in a few
simple words; and behind a calm thoughtful face there is that mysterious
unknown quantity which puzzles Longfellow here, and always perplexed
Hawthorne’s friends. It may have been the nucleus or tap-root of his
genius.
Longfellow seems to have felt it as a dividing line between them. He
probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject.
Hawthorne’s superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted essentially
in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked upon human
nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in it where none
existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great moral movement
which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as all reformers
do, to the opposite extreme,--to that scepticism of evil which, as
George Brandes says, is greatly to the advantage of hypocrites and
sharpers. This was justifiable in Doctor Channing, but among his
followers it has often degenerated into an inverted or homoeopathic
kind of Puritanism,--a habit of excusing the faults of others, or
of themselves, on the score of good intentions--a habit of
self-justification, and even to the perverse belief that, as everything
is for the best, whatever we do in this world must be for good. To
this class of sentimentalists the most serious evil is truth-seeing and
truth-speaking. It is an excellent plan to look upon the bright side of
things, but one should not do this to the extent of blinding oneself
to facts. Doctor Johnson once said to Boswell, “Beware, my friend, of
mixing up virtue and vice;” but there is something worse than that,
and it is, to stigmatize a writer as a pessimist or a hypochondriac for
refusing to take rainbow-colored views. This, however, would never apply
to Longfellow.
Hawthorne, with his eye ever on the mark, pursued a middle course. He
separated himself from the Puritans without joining their opponents, and
thus attained the most independent stand-point of any American writer
of his time; and if this alienated him from the various humanitarian
movements that were going forward, it was nevertheless a decided
advantage for the work he was intended to do. In this respect he
resembled Scott, Thackeray and George Eliot.
What we call evil or sin is merely the negative of civilization,--a
tendency to return to the original savage condition. In the light of
history, there is always progress or improvement, but in individual
cases there is often the reverse, and so far as the individual is
concerned evil is no imaginary metaphor, but as real and absolute as
what we call good. The Bulgarian massacres of 1877 were a historical
necessity, and we console ourselves in thinking of them by the fact that
they may have assisted the Bulgarians in obtaining their independence;
but this was no consolation to the twenty or thirty thousand human
beings who were ground to powder there. To them there was no comfort, no
hope,--only the terrible reality. Neither can we cast the responsibility
of such events on the mysterious ways of Providence. The ways of
Providence are not so mysterious to those who have eyes to read with.
Take for instance one of the most notable cases of depravity, that of
Nero. If we consider the conditions under which he was born and brought
up, the necessity of that form of government to hold a vast empire
together, and the course of history for a hundred years previous, it is
not difficult to trace the genesis of Nero’s crimes to the greed of the
Roman people (especially of its merchants) for conquest and plunder; and
Nero was the price which they were finally called on to pay for this.
Marcus Aurelius, a noble nature reared under favorable conditions for
its development, became the Washington of his time.
It is the same in private life. In many families there are evil
tendencies, which if they are permitted to increase will take permanent
hold, like a bad demon, of some weak individual, and make of him a
terror and a torment to his relatives--fortunate if he is not in a
position of authority. He may serve as a warning to the general public,
but in the domestic circle he is an unmitigated evil,--he or she, though
it is not so likely to be a woman. When a crime is committed within the
precincts of good society, we are greatly shocked; but we do not often
notice the debasement of character which leads down to it, and still
more rarely notice the instances in which fear or some other motive
arrests demoralization before the final step, and leaves the delinquent
as it were in a condition of moral suspense.
It was in such tragic situations that Hawthorne found the material which
was best suited to the bent of his genius.
In the two volumes, however, of “Twice Told Tales,”--the second
published two years later,--the tragical element only appears as an
undercurrent of pathos in such stories as “The Gentle Boy,” “Wakefield,”
“The Maypole of Merry-mount,” and “The Haunted Mind,” but reaches a
climax in “The Ambitious Guest” and “Lady Eleanor’s Mantle.” There are
others, like “Lights from a Steeple,” and “Little Annie’s Ramble,” that
are of a more cheerful cast, but are also much less serious in their
composition. “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Great Carbuncle,” and
“The Ambitious Guest,” are Dantean allegories. We notice that each
volume begins with a highly patriotic tale, the “Gray Champion,” and
“Howe’s Masquerade,” but the patriotism is genuine and almost fervid.
When I first looked upon the house in which Hawthorne lived at Sebago, I
was immediately reminded of these earlier studies in human nature, which
are of so simple and quiet a diction, so wholly devoid of rhetoric,
that Elizabeth Peabody thought they must be the work of his sister, and
others supposed them to have been written by a Quaker. They resemble
Dürer’s wood-cuts,--gentle and tender in line, but unswerving in their
fidelity. We sometimes wish that they were not so quiet and evenly
composed, and then repent of our wish that anything so perfect should be
different from what it is. His “Twice Told Tales” are a picture-gallery
that may be owned in any house-hold. They stand alone in English, and
there is not their like in any other language.
Yet Hawthorne is not a word-painter like Browning and Carlyle, but
obtains his pictorial effect by simple accuracy of description, a more
difficult process than the other, but also more satisfactory. His eyes
penetrate the masks and wrappings which cover human nature, as the
Röntgen rays penetrate the human body. He sees a man’s heart through
the flesh and bones, and knows what is concealed in it. He ascends a
church-steeple, and looking down from the belfry the whole life of the
town is spread out before him. Men and women come and go--Hawthorne
knows the errands they are on. He sees a militia company parading
below, and they remind him from that elevation of the toy soldiers in a
shop-window,--which they turned out to be, pretty much, at Bull Run. A
fashionable young man comes along the street escorting two young ladies,
and suddenly at a crossing encounters their father, who takes them away
from him; but one of them gives him a sweet parting look, which amply
compensates him in its presage of future opportunities. How plainly that
consolatory look appears between our eyes and the printed page!
Then Hawthorne describes the grand march of a thunder-storm,--as in
Rembrandt’s “Three Trees,”--with its rolling masses of dark vapor,
preceded by a skirmish-line of white feathery clouds. The militia
company is defeated at the first onset of this, its meteoric enemy, and
driven under cover. The artillery of the skies booms and flashes about
Hawthorne himself, until finally: “A little speck of azure has widened
in the western heavens; the sunbeams find a passage and go rejoicing
through the tempest, and on yonder darkest cloud, born like hallowed
hopes of the glory of another world and the trouble and tears of this,
brightens forth the rainbow.” All this may have happened just as it is
set down.
“Lady Eleanor’s Mantle” exemplifies the old proverb, “Pride goeth before
destruction,” in almost too severe a manner, but the tale is said to
have a legendary foundation; and “The Minister’s Black Veil” is an
equally awful symbolism for that barrier between man and man, which we
construct through suspicion and our lack of frankness in our dealings
with one another. We all hide ourselves behind veils, and, as Emerson
says, “Man crouches and blushes, absconds and conceals.”
“The Ambitious Guest” allegorizes a vain imagination, and is the
most important of these three. A young man suffers from a craving for
distinction, which he believes will only come to him after this life is
ended. He is walking through the White Mountains, and stops overnight at
the house of the ill-fated Willey family. He talks freely on the subject
of his vain expectations, when Destiny, in the shape of an avalanche,
suddenly overtakes him, and buries him so deeply that neither his body
nor his name has ever been recovered. Hawthorne might have drawn another
allegory from the same source, for if the Willey family had trusted to
Providence, and remained in their house, instead of rushing out into the
dark, they would not have lost their lives.
In the _Democratic Review_ for 1834, Hawthorne published the account of
a visit to Niagara Falls, one of the fruits of his expedition thither
in September, 1832, by way of the White Mountains and Burlington, the
journey from Salem to Niagara in those days being fully equal to
going from New York to the cataracts of the Nile in our own time. “The
Ambitious Guest” was published in the same volume with it, and “The
Ontario Steamboat” first appeared in the _American Magazine of Useful
and Entertaining Knowledge_, in 1836. Hawthorne may have made other
expeditions to the White Mountains, but we do not hear of them.
In addition to the three studies already mentioned, Hawthorne drew from
this source the two finest of his allegories, “The Great Carbuncle” and
“The Great Stone Face.”
“The Great Carbuncle” is not only one of the most beautiful of
Hawthorne’s tales, but the most far-reaching in its significance. The
idea of it must have originated in the Alpine glow, an effect of the
rising or setting sun on the icy peaks of a mountain, which looks at a
distance like a burning coal; an appearance only visible in the White
Mountains during the winter, and there is no reason why Hawthorne should
not have seen it at that season from Lake Sebago. At a distance of
twenty miles or more it blazes wonderfully, but on a nearer approach it
entirely disappears. Hawthorne could not have found a more fascinating
subject, and he imagines it for us as a great carbuncle located in the
upper recesses of the mountains.
A number of explorers for this wonderful gem meet together at the foot
of the mountain beyond the confines of civilization, and build a hut
in which to pass the night. They are recognizable, from Hawthorne’s
description, as the man of one idea, who has spent his whole life
seeking the gem; a scientific experimenter who wishes to grind it up for
the benefit of his crucible; a cynical sceptic who has come to disprove
the existence of the great gem; a greedy speculator who seeks the
carbuncle as he would prospect for a silver-mine; an English lord who
wishes to add it to his hereditary possessions; and finally a young
married couple who want to obtain it for an ornament to their new
cottage. The interest of the reader immediately centres on these last
two, and we care much more concerning their fortunes and adventures than
we do about the carbuncle.
The conversation that evening between these ill-assorted companions is
in Hawthorne’s most subtle vein of irony, and would have delighted old
Socrates himself. Meanwhile the young bride weaves a screen of twigs and
leaves, to protect herself and her husband from the gaze of the curious.
The following morning they all set out by different paths in search of
the carbuncle; but our thoughts accompany the steps of the young bride,
as she makes one toilsome ascent after another until she feels ready to
sink to the ground with fatigue and discouragement. They have already
decided to return, when the rosy light of the carbuncle bursts upon them
from beneath the lifting clouds; but they now feel instinctively that it
is too great a prize for their possession. The man of one idea also sees
it, and his life goes out in the exultation over his final success. The
skeptic appears, but cannot discover it, although his face is illumined
by its light, until he takes off his large spectacles; whereupon,
he instantly becomes blind. The English nobleman and the American
speculator fail to discover it; the former returns to his ancestral
halls, as wise as he was before; and the latter is captured by a party
of Indians and obliged to pay a heavy ransom to regain freedom. The
scientific pedant finds a rare specimen of primeval granite, which
serves his purpose quite as well as the carbuncle; and the two young
doves return to their cot, having learned the lesson of contentment.
How fortunate was Hawthorne at the age of thirty thus to anatomize the
chief illusions of life, which so many others follow until old age!
It is an erroneous notion that Hawthorne found the chief material
for his work in old New England traditions. There are some half-dozen
sketches of this sort, but they are more formally written than the
others, and remind one of those portraits by Titian which were painted
from other portraits,--better than the originals, but not equal to those
which he painted from Nature.
In the “Sights from a Steeple” Hawthorne exposes his methods of study
and betrays the active principle of his existence. He says:
“The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized
Paul Pry hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds,
searching into their hearths, borrowing brightness from their felicity
and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to
himself.”
There are those who would dislike this busybody occupation, and
others, such as Emerson perhaps, might not consider it justifiable; but
Hawthorne is not to be censured for it, for his motive was an elevated
one, and without this close scrutiny of human nature we should have
had neither a Hawthorne nor a Shakespeare. There is no quality more
conspicuous in “Twice Told Tales” than the calm, evenly balanced mental
condition of the author, who seems to look down on human life not so
much from a church steeple as from the blue firmament itself.
Such was the _Eos_ or dawn of Hawthorne’s literary art.
Hawthorne returned thanks to Longfellow in a gracefully humorous letter,
to which Longfellow replied with a cordial wish to see Hawthorne in
Cambridge, and by advising him to dive into deeper water and write
a history of the Acadians before and after their expulsion from Nova
Scotia; but this was not practicable for minds like Hawthorne’s,
surcharged with poetic images, and the attempt might have proved a
disturbing influence for him. He had already contributed the substance
to Longfellow of “Evangeline,” and he now wrote a eulogium on the
poem for a Salem newspaper, which it must be confessed did not differ
essentially from other reviews of the same order. He does not give us
any clear idea of how the poem actually impressed him, which is after
all the best that one can do in such cases. Poetry is not like a problem
in mathematics, which can be marked right or wrong according to its
solution.
When a young man obtains a substantial footing in his profession or
business, he looks about him for a wife--unless he happens to be already
pledged in that particular; and Hawthorne was not an exception to this
rule. He was not obliged to look very far, and yet the chance came
to him in such an exceptional manner that it seems as if some special
providence were connected with it. His position in this respect was a
peculiar one. He does not appear to have been much acquainted in Salem
even now; and the only son of a widow with two unmarried sisters may be
said to have rather a slim chance for escaping from those strong ties
which have grown up between them from childhood. Many a mother has
prevented her son from getting married until it has become too late for
him to change his bachelor habits. His mother and his sisters realize
that he ought to be married, and that he has a right to a home of
his own; but in their heart of hearts they combat the idea, and their
opposition takes the form of an unsparing criticism of any young lady
whom he follows with his eyes. This frequently happens also in a family
of girls: they all remain unmarried because, if one of them shows an
inclination in that direction, the others unite in a conspiracy against
her. On the other hand, a family of four or five boys will marry early,
if they can obtain the means of doing so, simply from the need of
feminine cheer and sympathy. A devoted female friend will sometimes
prevent a young woman from being married. Love affairs are soft earth
for an intriguing and unprincipled woman to work in, but, fortunately,
Mrs. Hawthorne did not belong in that category.
It was stout, large-hearted Elizabeth Peabody who broke the spell of the
enchanted castle in which Hawthorne was confined. The Peabodys were a
cultivated family in Salem, who lived pretty much by themselves, as the
Hawthornes and Mannings did. Doctor Nathaniel Peabody was a respectable
practitioner, but he had not succeeded in curing the headaches of his
daughter Sophia, which came upon her at the close of her girlhood and
still continued intermittently until this time. The Graces had not
been bountiful the Peabody family, so, to compensate for this, they all
cultivated the Muses, in whose society they ascended no little distance
on the way to Parnassus. Elizabeth Peabody was quite a feminine pundit.
She learned French and German, and studied history and archaeology; she
taught history on a large scale at Sanborn’s Concord School and at many
others; she had a method of painting dates on squares, which fixed them
indelibly in the minds of her pupils; she talked at Margaret Fuller’s
transcendental club, and was an active member of the Radical or Chestnut
Street Club, thirty years later; but her chief distinction was the
introduction of Froebel’s Kindergarten teaching, by which she
well-nigh revolutionized primary instruction in America. She was a most
self-forgetful person, and her scholars became devotedly attached to
her.
Her sister Mary was as much like Elizabeth mentally as she differed
from her in figure and general appearance, but soon after this she was
married to Horace Mann and her public activity became merged in that of
her husband, who was the first educator of his time. Sophia Peabody
read poetry and other fine writings, and acquired a fair proficiency in
drawing and painting. They lived what was then called the “higher life,”
and it certainly led them to excellent results.
Shortly before the publication of “Twice Told Tales,” Elizabeth Peabody
learned that the author of “The Gentle Boy,” and other stories which
she had enjoyed in the _Token_, lived in Salem, and that the name was
Hawthorne. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were the
work of Miss Elizabeth Hawthorne, whom she had known somewhat in earlier
days, and she concluded to call upon her and offer her congratulations.
When informed by Louisa Hawthorne, who came to her in the parlor,
instead of the elder sister, that “The Gentle Boy” was written by
Nathaniel, Miss Peabody made the significant remark, “If your brother
can do work like that, he has no right to be idle” [Footnote: Lathrop,
168. Miss Peabody would seem to have narrated this to him.]--to which
Miss Louisa retorted, it is to be hoped with some indignation, that her
brother never was idle.
It is only too evident from this that public opinion in Salem had
already decided that Hawthorne was an idle fellow, who was living on his
female relatives. That is the way the world judges--from external facts
without any consideration of internal causes or conditions. It gratifies
the vanity of those who are fortunate and prosperous, to believe that
all men have an equal chance in the race of life. Emerson once blamed
two young men for idleness, who were struggling against obstacles such
as he could have had no conception of. Those who have been fortunate
from the cradle never learn what life is really like.
The spell, however, was broken and the friendliness of Elizabeth
Peabody found a deeply sympathetic response in the Hawthorne household.
Nathaniel at last found a person who expressed a genuine and heartfelt
appreciation of his work, and it was like the return of the sun to the
Arctic explorer after his long winter night. Rather to Miss Peabody’s
surprise he and his sisters soon returned her call, and visits between
the two families thereafter became frequent.
Sophia Peabody belonged to the class of young women for whom
Shakespeare’s Ophelia serves as a typical example. She was gentle,
affectionate, refined, and amiable to a fault,--much too tender-hearted
for this rough world, if her sister Elizabeth had not always stood like
a barrier between her and it.
How Hawthorne might have acted in Hamlet’s place it is useless
to surmise, but in his true nature he was quite the opposite of
Hamlet,--slow and cautious, but driven onward by an inexorable will. If
Hamlet had possessed half of Hawthorne’s determination, he might have
broken through the network of evil conditions which surrounded him, and
lived to make Ophelia a happy woman. It was only necessary to come into
Hawthorne’s presence in order to recognize the force that was in him.
Sophia Amelia Peabody was born September 21, 1811, so that at the time
of which we are now writing she was twenty-five years of age. Hawthorne
was then thirty-two, when a man is more attractive to the fair sex than
at any other time of life, for then he unites the freshness and vigor
of youth with sufficient maturity of judgment to inspire confidence and
trust. Yet her sister Elizabeth found it difficult to persuade her to
come into the parlor and meet the handsomest man in Salem. When she
did come she evidently attracted Nathaniel Hawthorne’s attention, for,
although she said little, he looked at her repeatedly while conversing
with her sister. It may not have been an instance of love at first
sight,--which may happen to any young man at a dancing party, and be
forgotten two days later,--but it was something more than a casual
interest. On his second or third call she showed him a sketch she had
made of “the gentle boy,” according to her idea of him, and the subdued
tone with which he received it plainly indicated that he was already
somewhat under her influence. Julian Hawthorne writes of this:
[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 179.]
“It may be remarked here, that Mrs. Hawthorne in telling her children,
many years afterwards, of these first meetings with their father, used
to say that his presence, from the very beginning, exercised so strong a
magnetic attraction upon her, that instinctively, and in self-defence as
it were, she drew back and repelled him. The power which she felt in him
alarmed her; she did not understand what it meant, and was only able to
feel that she must resist.”
Every true woman feels this reluctance at first toward a suitor for
her hand, but a sensitive young lady might well have a sense of awe
on finding that she had attracted to herself such a mundane force
as Hawthorne, and it is no wonder that this first impression was
recollected throughout her life. There are many who would have refused
Hawthorne’s suit, because they felt that he was too great and strong
for them, and it is to the honor of Sophia Peabody that she was not only
attracted by the magnetism of Hawthorne, but finally had the courage to
unite herself to such an enigmatical person.
We also obtain a glimpse of Hawthorne’s side of this courtship from a
letter which he wrote to Longfellow in June, 1837, and in which he says,
“I have now, or shall soon have a sharper spur to exertion, which I
lacked at an earlier period;” [Footnote: Conway, 75.] and this is
all the information he has vouchsafed us on the subject. If there is
anything more in his diary, it has not been given to the public, and
probably never will be. A number of letters which he wrote to Miss
Sophia from Boston, or Brook Farm, have been published by his son, but
it would be neither right nor judicious to introduce them here.
It is, however, evident from the above that Hawthorne was already
engaged in June, 1837, but his engagement long remained a secret,
for three excellent reasons; viz., his slender means of support, the
delicate health of his betrothed, and the disturbance which it might
create in the Hawthorne family. The last did not prove so serious a
difficulty as he seems to have imagined; but his apprehensiveness
on that point many another could justify from personal experience.
[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 196.]
From this time also the health of Sophia Peabody steadily improved, nor
is it necessary to account for it by any magical influence on the part
of her lover. Her trouble was plainly some recondite difficulty of the
circulation. The heart is supposed to be the seat of the affections
because mental emotion stimulates the nervous system and acts upon
the heart as the centre of all organic functions. A healthy natural
excitement will cause the heart to vibrate more firmly and evenly; but
an unhealthy excitement, like fear or anger, will cause it to beat in a
rapid and uneven manner. Contrarily, despondency, or a lethargic state
of mind, causes the movement of the blood to slacken. The happiness of
love is thus the best of all stimulants and correctives for a torpid
circulation, and it expands the whole being of a woman like the
blossoming of a flower in the sunshine. From the time of her betrothal,
Sophia Peabody’s headaches became less and less frequent, until they
ceased altogether. The true seat of the affections is in the mind. The
first consideration proved to be a more serious matter. If Hawthorne had
not succeeded in earning his own livelihood by literature so far, what
prospect was there of supporting a wife and family in that manner? What
should he do; whither should he turn? He continually turned the subject
over in his mind, without, however, reaching any definite conclusion.
Nor is this to be wondered at. If the ordinary avenues of human
industry were not available to him as a college graduate, they were now
permanently closed. A man in his predicament at the present time might
obtain the position of librarian in one of our inland cities; but
such places are few and the applications are many. Bronson Alcott once
offered his services as teacher of a primary school, a position he might
have filled better than most, for its one requisite is kindliness, but
the Concord school committee would not hear of it. If Hawthorne had
attempted to turn pedagogue he might have met with a similar experience.
Conway remarks very justly that an American author could not be expected
to earn his own living in a country where foreign books could be pirated
as they were in the United States until 1890, and this was especially
true during the popularity of Dickens and George Eliot. Dickens was the
great humanitarian writer of the nineteenth century, but he was also
a caricaturist and a bohemian. He did not represent life as it is, but
with a certain comical oddity. As an author he is to Hawthorne what a
peony is to a rose, or a garnet is to a ruby; but ten, persons would
purchase a novel of Dickens when one would select the “Twice Told
Tales.” Scott and Tennyson are exceptional instances of a high order
of literary work which also proved fairly remunerative; but they do
not equal Hawthorne in grace of diction and in the rare quality of
his thought,--whatever advantages they may possess in other respects.
Thackeray earned his living by his pen, but it was only in England that
he could have done this.
CHAPTER VI
PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841
Horatio Bridge’s dam was washed away in the spring of 1837, by a
sudden and unprecedented rising of the Androscoggin River. Bridge was
financially ruined, but like a brave and generous young man he did not
permit this stroke of evil fortune, severe as it was, to oppress him
heavily, and Hawthorne seems to have felt no shadow of it during his
visit to Augusta the following summer. He returned to Salem in August
with pleasanter anticipations than ever before,--to enjoy the society of
his _fiancée_, and to prepare the second volume of “Twice Told Tales.”
The course of Hawthorne’s life during the next twenty months is mostly
a blank to us. He would seem to have exerted himself to escape from
the monotone in which he had been living so long, but of his efforts,
disappointments, and struggles against the giant coils of Fate, there is
no report. He wrote the four Province House tales as a send-off to his
second volume, as well as “The Toll-Gatherer’s Day,” “Footprints on the
Seashore,” “Snow-Flakes,” and “Chippings with a Chisel,” which are to
be found in it. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 176.] There is a long blank in
Hawthorne’s diary during the winter of 1837-38 which may be owing to his
indifference to the outer world at that time, but more likely because
its contents have not yet been revealed to us. It was the period of
Cilley’s duel, and what Hawthorne’s reflections were on that subject,
aside from the account which he wrote for the _Democratic Review_, would
be highly interesting now, but the absence of any reference to it
is significant, and there is no published entry in his diary between
December 6, 1837, and May 11, 1838.
Horatio Bridge obtained the position of paymaster on the United States
warship “Cyane,” which arrived at Boston early in June, and on the 16th
of the month Hawthorne went to call on his friend in his new quarters,
which he found to be pleasant enough in their narrow and limited way.
Bridge returned with him to Boston, and they dined together at the
Tremont House, drinking iced champagne and claret in pitchers,--which
latter would seem to have been a fashion of the place. Hawthorne’s
description of the day is purely external, and he tells us nothing of
his friend,--concerning whom we were anxious to hear,--or of the new
life on which he had entered.
On July 4, his thirty-fifth birthday, he wrote a microscopic account
of the proceedings on Salem Common, which is interesting now, but will
become more valuable as time goes on and the customs of the American
people change with it. The object of these detailed pictorial studies,
which not only remind one of Dürer’s drawings but of Carlyle’s local
descriptions (when he uses simple English and does not fly off into
recondite comparisons), is not clearly apparent; but the artist has
instincts of his own, like a vine which swings in the wind and seizes
upon the first tree that its tendrils come into contact with. We
sometimes wish that, as in the case of Bridge and his warship, they were
not so objective and external, and that, like Carlyle, he would throw
more of himself into them.
On July 27, Hawthorne started on an expedition to the Berkshire Hills,
by way of Worcester, remaining there nearly till the first of September,
and describing the scenery, the people he met by the way, and the
commencement at Williams College, which then took place in the middle
of August, in his customary accurate manner. He has given a full and
connected account of his travels; so full that we wonder how he found
time to write to Miss Sophia Peabody. He would seem to have been
entirely alone, and to have travelled mainly by stage. On the route from
Pittsfield to North Adams he notices the sunset, and describes it in
these simple terms: [Footnote: American Note-book, 130.]
“After or about sunset there was a heavy shower, the thunder rumbling
round and round the mountain wall, and the clouds stretching from
rampart to rampart. When it abated the clouds in all parts of the
visible heavens were tinged with glory from the west; some that hung
low being purple and gold, while the higher ones were gray. The slender
curve of the new moon was also visible, brightening amidst the fading
brightness of the sunny part of the sky.”
At North Adams he takes notice of one of the Select-men, and gives this
account of him: [Footnote: American Note-book, 153.]
“One of the most sensible men in this village is a plain, tall, elderly
person, who is overseeing the mending of a road,--humorous, intelligent,
with much thought about matters and things; and while at work he had a
sort of dignity in handling the hoe or crow-bar, which shows him to be
the chief. In the evening he sits under the stoop, silent and observant
from under the brim of his hat; but, occasion suiting, he holds an
argument about the benefit or otherwise of manufactories or other
things. A simplicity characterizes him more than appertains to most
Yankees.”
He did not return to Salem until September 24. A month later he was at
the Tremont House in Boston, looking out of the windows toward Beacon
Street, which may have served him for an idea in “The Blithedale
Romance.” After this there are no entries published from his diary till
the following spring, so that the manner in which he occupied himself
during the winter of 1838-39 will have to be left to the imagination. On
April 27, 1839, he wrote a letter to Miss Sophia Peabody from Boston, in
which he says:
“I feel pretty secure against intruders, for the bad weather will defend
me from foreign invasion; and as to Cousin Haley, he and I had a bitter
political dispute last evening, at the close of which he went to bed in
high dudgeon, and probably will not speak to me these three days. Thus
you perceive that strife and wrangling, as well as east winds and rain,
are the methods of a kind Providence to promote my comfort,--which would
not have been so well secured in any other way. Six or seven hours of
cheerful solitude! But I will not be alone. I invite your spirit to be
with me,--at any hour and as many hours as you please, but especially at
the twilight hour before I light my lamp. I bid you at that particular
time, because I can see visions more vividly in the dusky glow of
firelight than either by daylight or lamplight. Come, and let me renew
my spell against headache and other direful effects of the east wind.
How I wish I could give you a portion of my insensibility! and yet
I should be almost afraid of some radical transformation, were I to
produce a change in that respect. If you cannot grow plump and rosy and
tough and vigorous without being changed into another nature, then I
do think, for this short life, you had better remain just what you are.
Yes; but you will be the same to me, because we have met in eternity,
and there our intimacy was formed. So get well as soon as you possibly
can.”
This statement deserves consideration under two headings; and the last
shall be first, and the first shall be last.
It will be noticed that the accounts in Hawthorne’s diary are for the
most part of a dispassionate objective character, as if he had come down
from the moon to take an observation of mundane affairs. His letters to
Miss Peabody were also dispassionate, but strongly subjective, and, like
the one just quoted, mainly evolved from his imagination, like orchids
living in the air. It was also about this time that Carlyle wrote to
Emerson concerning the _Dial_ that it seemed “like an unborn human
soul.” The orchid imagination was an influence of the time, penetrating
everywhere like an ether.
In the opening sentences in this letter, Hawthorne comes within an inch
of disclosing his political opinions, and yet provokingly fails to do
so. There is nothing about the man concerning which we are so much in
the dark, and which we should so much like to know, as this; and it is
certain from this letter that he held very decided opinions on political
subjects and could defend them with a good deal of energy. On one
occasion when Hawthorne was asked why he was a Democrat, he replied,
“Because I live in a democratic country,” which was, of course, simply
an evasion; and such were the answers which he commonly gave to all
interrogatories. His proclivities were certainly not democratic; but
the greater the tenacity with which a man holds his opinions, the less
inclined he feels to discuss them with others. The Boston aristocracy
now vote the Democratic ticket out of opposition to the dominant party
in Massachusetts, and Hawthorne may have done so for a similar reason.
Hawthorne was now a weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House,
one of the most laborious positions in the government service. The
defalcation of Swartwout with over a million dollars from the New York
customs’ receipts had forced upon President Van Buren the importance of
filling such posts with honorable men, instead of political shysters,
and Bancroft, though a rather narrow historian, was a gentleman and a
scholar. He was the right man to appreciate Hawthorne, but whether he
bestowed this place upon him of his own accord, or through the ulterior
agency of Franklin Pierce, we are not informed. It is quite possible
that Elizabeth Peabody had a hand in the case, for she was always
an indefatigable petitioner for the benefit of the needy, and had
opportunities for meeting Bancroft in Boston society. His kindness to
Hawthorne was at least some compensation for having originated the most
ill-favored looking public building in the city. [Footnote: The present
Boston Custom House. George S. Hillard called it an architectural
monstrosity.]
Hawthorne’s salary was twelve hundred dollars a year,--fully equal to
eighteen hundred at the present time,--and his position appears to have
been what is now called a store-keeper. He fully earned his salary. He
had charge and oversight of all the dutiable imports that came to
Long Wharf, the most important in the city, and was obliged to keep an
account of all dutiable articles which were received there. He had to
superintend personally the unloading of vessels, and although in some
instances this was not unpleasant, he was constantly receiving shiploads
of soft coal,--Sidney or Pictou coal,--which is the dirtiest stuff in
the world; it cannot be touched without raising a dusty vapor which
settles in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and inside the shirt-collar. He
counted every basketful that was brought ashore, and his position on
such occasions was to be envied only by the sooty laborers who handled
that commodity. We wonder what the frequenters of Long Wharf thought of
this handsome, poetic-looking man occupied in such a business.
Yet he appreciated the value of this Spartan discipline,--the
inestimable value of being for once in his life brought down to hard-pan
and the plain necessities of life. The juice of wormwood is bitter, but
it is also strengthening. On July 3, 1839, he wrote: [Footnote: American
Note-book.]
“I do not mean to imply that I am unhappy or discontented, for this is
not the case. My life only is a burden in the same way that it is to
every toilsome man, and mine is a healthy weariness, such as needs only
a night’s sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be
entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to
sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn,
and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps
homeward till eventide. Years hence, perhaps, the experience that my
heart is acquiring now will flow out in truth and wisdom.”
This is one of the noblest passages in his writings.
On August 27 he notices the intense heat in the centre of the city,
although it is somewhat cooler on the wharves. At this time Emerson
may have been composing his “Wood Notes” or “Threnody” in the cool pine
groves of Concord. Such is the difference between inheriting twenty
thousand dollars and two thousand. Hawthorne lived in Boston at such
a boarding-place as Doctor Holmes describes in the “Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table,” and for all we know it may have been the same one. He
lived economically, reading and writing to Miss Peabody in the evening,
and rarely going to the theatre or other entertainments,--a life like
that of a store clerk whose salary only suffices for his board and
clothing. George Bancroft was kindly disposed toward him, and would
have introduced Hawthorne into any society that he could have wished
to enter; but Hawthorne, then and always, declined to be lionized.
Hawthorne made but one friend in Boston during this time, and that one,
George S. Hillard, a most faithful and serviceable friend,--not only to
Hawthorne during his life, but afterwards as a trustee for his family,
and equally kind and helpful to them in their bereavement, which is more
than could be said of all his friends,--especially of Pierce. Hillard
belonged to the brilliant coterie of Cambridge literary men, which
included Longfellow, Sumner and Felton. He was a lawyer, politician,
editor, orator and author; at this time, or shortly afterward, Sumner’s
law partner; one of the most kindly sympathetic men, with a keen
appreciation of all that is finest in art and literature, but somewhat
lacking in firmness and independence of character. His “Six Months in
Italy,” written in the purest English, long served as a standard work
for American travellers in that ideal land, and his rather unsymmetrical
figure only made the graces of his oratory more conspicuous.
Hawthorne kept at his work through summer’s heat and winter’s cold. On
February 11, 1840, he wrote to his fiancée:
“I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British
schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the
time I paced the deck to keep myself warm....
“... Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner,
and warmed myself by a red-hot stove among biscuit barrels, pots
and kettles, sea chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,--my
olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe,
which the captain or some of his crew was smoking.”
[Illustration: HAWTHORNE. FROM THE PORTRAIT BY CHARLES OSGOOD IN 1840.
IN THE POSSESSION OF MRS. RICHARD C. MANNING, SALEM, MASS. FROM NEGATIVE
IN POSSESSION OF AND OWNED BY FRANK COUSIN, SALEM]
One would have to go to Dante’s “Inferno” to realize a situation more
thoroughly disagreeable; yet the very pathos of Hawthorne’s employment
served to inspire him with elevated thoughts and beautiful reflections.
His letters are full of aërial fancies. He notices what a beautiful day
it was on April 18, 1840, and regrets that he cannot “fling himself on
a gentle breeze and be blown away into the country.” April 30 is
another beautiful day,--“a real happiness to live; if he had been a mere
vegetable, a hawthorn bush, he would have felt its influence.” He goes
to a picture gallery in the Athenaeum, but only mentions seeing two
paintings by Sarah Clarke. He returns to Salem in October, and writes
in his own chamber the passage already quoted, in which he mourns the
lonely years of his youth, and the long, long waiting for appreciation,
“while he felt the life chilling in his veins and sometimes it seemed as
if he were already in the grave;” but an early return to his post gives
him brighter thoughts. He takes notice of the magnificent black and
yellow butterflies that have strangely come to Long Wharf, as if seeking
to sail to other climes since the last flower had faded. Mr. Bancroft
has appointed him to suppress an insurrection among the government
laborers, and he writes to Miss Sophia Peabody:
“I was not at the end of Long Wharf to-day, but in a distant region,--my
authority having been put in requisition to quell a rebellion of the
captain and ‘gang’ of shovellers aboard a coal-vessel. I would you
could have beheld the awful sternness of my visage and demeanor in the
execution of this momentous duty. Well,--I have conquered the rebels,
and proclaimed an amnesty; so to-morrow I shall return to that paradise
of measurers, the end of Long Wharf,--not to my former salt-ship, she
being now discharged, but to another, which will probably employ me
well-nigh a fortnight longer.”
A month later we meet with this ominous remark in his diary:
“I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft’s yesterday with Miss Margaret
Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was
very thankful.”
Had Hawthorne already encountered this remarkable woman with the
feminine heart and masculine mind, and had he already conceived that
aversion for her which is almost painfully apparent in his Italian
diary? Certainly in many respects they were antipodes.
The Whig party came into power on March 4, 1841, with “Tippecanoe” for
a figure-head and Daniel Webster as its conductor of the “grand
orchestra.” A month later Bancroft was removed, and Hawthorne went with
him, not at all regretful to depart. In fact, he had come to feel that
he could not endure the Custom House, or at least his particular share
of it, any longer. One object he had in view in accepting the position
was, to obtain practical experience, and this he certainly did in
a rough and unpleasant manner. The experience of a routine office,
however, is not like that of a broker who has goods to sell and who must
dispose of them to the best advantage, in order to keep his reputation
at high-water mark; nor is it like the experience of a young doctor or a
lawyer struggling to obtain a practice. Those are the men who know what
life actually is; and it is this thoroughness of experience which makes
the chief difference between a Dante and a Tennyson.
These reflections lead directly to Hawthorne’s casual and oft-repeated
commentary on American politicians. He wrote March 15:
“I do detest all offices--all, at least, that are held on a political
tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither
away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to
india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will
stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my custom-house
experience,--to know a politician.” [Footnote: American Notebook, i.
220.]
This seems rather severe, but at the time when Hawthorne wrote it,
American politics were on the lowest plane of demagogism. It was the
inevitable result of the spoils-of-office system, and the meanest
species of the class were the ward politicians who received small
government offices in return for services in canvassing ignorant foreign
voters. They were naturally coarse, hardened adventurers, and it
was such that Hawthorne chiefly came in contact with in his official
business. Cleon, the brawling tanner of Athens, has reappeared in every
representative government since his time, and plays his clownish part
with multifarious variations; but it is to little purpose that we deride
the men who govern us, for they are what we and our institutions have
made them. If we want better representatives, we must mend our own
ways and especially purge ourselves of political cant and national
vanity,--which is the food that ward politicians grow fat on. The
profession of a politician is based on instability, and he cannot
acquire, as matters now stand, the solidity of character that we look
for in other professions.
So far, however, was Hawthorne at this juncture from considering men and
things critically, that he closes the account of his first government
experience in this rather optimistic manner:
“Old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily than is his wont
when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom-house. My breath had
never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the ocean....
“... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the
waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal
of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me. It pleased me to think
that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of
this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone
on without my presence.” [Footnote: American Note-book, i. 230.]
When Hawthorne philosophizes it is not in old threadbare proverbs or
Orphic generalities, but always specifically and to the point.
CHAPTER VII
HAWTHORNE AS A SOCIALIST: 1841-1842
Who can compute the amount of mischief that Fourier has done, and those
well-meaning but inexperienced dreamers who have followed after him? A
Fourth-of-July firecracker once consumed the half of a large city. The
boy who exploded it had no evil intentions; neither did Fourier and
other speculators in philanthropy contemplate what might be the effect
of their doctrines on minds actuated by the lowest and most inevitable
wants. Wendell Phillips, in the most brilliant of his orations, said:
“The track of God’s lightning is a straight line from justice to
iniquity,” and one might have said to Phillips, in his later years,
that there is in the affairs of men a straight line from infatuation to
destruction. In what degree Fourier was responsible for the effusion of
blood in Paris in the spring of 1871 it is not possible to determine;
but the relation of Rousseau to the first French revolution is not more
certain. _Fate_ is the spoken word which cannot be recalled, and who can
tell the good and evil consequences that lie hidden in it? The proper
cure for socialism, in educated minds, would be a study of the law.
There we discover what a wonderful mechanism is the present organization
of society, and how difficult it would be to reconstruct this, if it
once were overturned.
As society is constituted at present, the honest and industrious are
always more or less at the mercy of the vicious and indolent, and the
only protection against this lies in the right of individual ownership.
In a general community of goods, there might be some means of preventing
or punishing flagrant misdemeanors, but what protection could there be
against indolence? Those who were ready and willing to work would have
to bear all the burdens of society.
In order that an idea should take external or concrete form it has to
be married, as it were, to some desire or tendency in the individual.
Reverend George Ripley had become imbued with Fourierism through his
studies of French philosophy, but he had also been brought up on a farm,
and preferred the fresh air and vigorous exercise of that mode of
life to city preaching. He was endowed with a strong constitution and
possessed of an independent fortune, and his aristocratic wife, more
devoted than women of that class are usually, sympathized with his
plans, and was prepared to follow him to the ends of the earth. He not
only felt great enthusiasm for the project but was capable of inspiring
others with it. There were many socialistic experiments undertaken about
that time, but George Ripley’s was the only one that has acquired a
historical value. It is much to his credit that he gave the scheme a
thorough trial, and by carrying it out to a logical conclusion proved
its radical impracticability.
Such a failure is more valuable than the successes of a hundred men who
merely make their own fortunes and leave no legacy of experience that
can benefit the human race.
It must have been Elizabeth Peabody who persuaded Hawthorne to enlist in
the Brook Farm enterprise. She wrote a paper for the _Dial_ [Footnote:
_Dial_, ii. 361.] on the subject, explaining the object of the West
Roxbury community and holding forth the prospect of the “higher
life” which could be enjoyed there. Hawthorne was in himself the very
antipodes of socialism, and it was part of the irony of his life that he
should have embarked in such an experiment; but he invested a thousand
dollars in it, which he had saved from his Custom House salary, and was
one of the first on the ground. What he really hoped for from it--as we
learn by his letters to Miss Sophia Peabody--was a means of gaining his
daily bread, with leisure to accomplish a fair amount of writing, and
at the same time to enter into such society as might be congenial to his
future consort. It seemed reasonable to presume this, and yet the result
did not correspond to it. He went to West Roxbury on April 12, 1841,
and as it happened in a driving northeast snowstorm,--an unpropitious
beginning, of which he has given a graphic account in “The Blithedale
Romance.”
At first he liked his work at the Farm. The novelty of it proved
attractive to him. On May 3 he wrote a letter to his sister Louisa,
which reflects the practical nature of his new surroundings; and it
must be confessed that this is a refreshing change from the sublunary
considerations at his Boston boarding-house. He has already “learned to
plant potatoes, to milk cows, and to cut straw and hay for the
cattle, and does various other mighty works.” He has gained
strength wonderfully, and can do a day’s work without the slightest
inconvenience; wears a tremendous pair of cowhide boots. He goes to bed
at nine, and gets up at half-past four to sound the rising-horn,--much
too early for a socialistic paradise, where human nature is supposed
to find a pleasant as well as a salutary existence. George Ripley
would seem to be driving the wedge in by the larger end. Hawthorne is
delighted with the topographical aspect, and writes:
“This is one of the most beautiful places I ever saw in my life, and as
secluded as if it were a hundred miles from any city or village. There
are woods, in which we can ramble all day without meeting anybody or
scarcely seeing a house. Our house stands apart from the main road, so
that we are not troubled even with passengers looking at us. Once in
a while we have a transcendental visitor, such as Mr. Alcott; but
generally we pass whole days without seeing a single face save those of
the brethren. The whole fraternity eat together; and such a delectable
way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early
Christians.” [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 228.]
From Louisa Hawthorne’s reply, it may be surmised that his family did
not altogether approve of the Brook Farm venture, perhaps because it
withdrew him from his own home at a time when they had looked with
fond expectation for his return; and here we have a glimpse into the
beautiful soul of this younger sister, otherwise so little known to us.
Elizabeth is skeptical of its ultimate success, but Louisa is fearful
that he may work too hard and wants him to take good care of himself.
She is delighted with the miniature of him, which they have lately
received: “It has one advantage over the original,--I can make it go
with me where I choose!”
Louisa wrote another warm and beautiful letter on June 11, recalling the
days when they used to go fishing together on Lake Sebago, and adds:
“Elizabeth Cleveland says she saw Mr. George Bradford in Lowell last
winter, and he told her he was going to be associated with you; but they
say his mind misgave him terribly when the time came for him to go to
Roxbury, and whether to make such a desperate step or not he could not
tell.” [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 232.]
George P. Bradford was the masculine complement to Elizabeth
Peabody--flitting across the paths of Emerson and Hawthorne throughout
their lives. His name appears continually in the biographies of that
time, but future generations would never know the sort of man he was,
but for Louisa’s amiable commentary. He appeared at Brook Farm a
few days later, and became one of George Ripley’s strongest and most
faithful adherents. He is the historian of the West Roxbury community,
and late in life the editor of the _Century_ asked him to write a
special account of it for that periodical. Bradford did so, and received
one hundred dollars in return for his manuscript; but it never was
published, presumably because it was too original for the editor’s
purpose.
Is it possible that Hawthorne put on a good face for this letter to
his sister, in order to keep up appearances; or was it like the common
experience of music and drawing teachers that the first lessons are the
best performed; or did he really have some disagreement with Ripley,
like that which he represents in “The Blithedale Romance”? The last is
the more probable, although we do not hear of it otherwise. Spring
is the least agreeable season for farming, with its muddy soil, its
dressing the ground, its weeds to be kept down and its insects to
be kept off. After the first week of June, the work becomes much
pleasanter; and the harvesting is delightful,--stacking the grain,
picking the fruit,--with the cheery wood fires, so restful to mind and
body. Yet we find on August 12 that Hawthorne had become thoroughly
disenchanted with his Arcadian life, although he admits that the labors
of the farm were not so pressing as they had been. Ten days later,
he refers to having spent the better part of a night with one of his
co-workers, “who was quite out of his wits” and left the community next
day. He then continues in his diary: [Footnote: American Notebook, ii.
15.]
“It is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Ripley will succeed in locating
his community on the farm. He can bring Mr. E---- to no terms, and the
more they talk about the matter, the further they appear to be from a
settlement. We must form other plans for ourselves; for I can see few
or no signs that Providence purposes to give us a home here. I am weary,
weary, thrice weary, of waiting so many ages. Whatever may be my gifts,
I have not hitherto shown a single one that may avail to gather gold.”
Here are already three disaffected personages, desirous of escaping from
an earthly paradise. Mr. Ripley has by no means an easy row to hoe.
Yet he keeps on ploughing steadily through his difficulties, as he
did through the soil of his meadows. In September we find Hawthorne at
Salem, and on the third he writes: [Footnote: American Notebook, ii.
16.]
“But really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook
Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was unnatural
and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a
dre
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7170