head-quarters," we have lodgings near the place of his on the Main
Street and in the domicile of one who, as a lad of fourteen years, had
known Hawthorne during his stay here. Apparently he did not attempt to
carry out his plan of concealing his identity; he certainly was known to
some of the villagers as the author of "Twice-Told Tales," and a
descendant of one of Hawthorne's "seven doctors of the place" recalls
his delight on being told that the "Whig Tavern boarder" was the creator
of "The Gentle Boy;" and he remembers his subsequent and consequent
worshipful espionage of the wonderful being. To this espionage we are
indebted for some edifying details of Hawthorne's sojourn in upper
Berkshire. The world has known few handsomer men than Hawthorne was at
this period of his life,--he had been styled Oberon at college,--and our
informant recollects him as "the most brilliantly handsome person he
ever beheld," tall, dark, with an expressive mobile face and a lustrous
eye which held something "indescribably more than keenness" in its quick
glances. (Charles Reade said Hawthorne's eye was "like a violet with a
soul in it.") As remembered here, his expression was often abstracted,
sometimes despondent. He would sit for hours at a time on the broad
porch of the old "North Adams House," or in a corner of the bar-room,
silently smoking and apparently oblivious to his surroundings, yet, as
we know, vigilant to note the oddities of character and opinion he
encountered. It is certain that he did not drink immoderately at this
time. There were a few persons--_not_ the model men of the community--to
whom he occasionally unbent and whom he admitted to a sort of
comradeship, which, as his diary shows, often became confessionary upon
their part. With these he held prolonged converse upon the tavern
porch,--his part in the conversations being mainly suggestions
calculated to elicit the whimsical conceits or experiences of his
companions,--sitting the while in the posture of the venerable
custom-house officials, described in the sketch introductory to the
"Scarlet Letter," with "chair tipped on its hind legs" and his feet
elevated against a pillar of the porch. Among those remembered to have
been thus favored was Captain C----, called Captain Gavett in the
"Note-Books," who dispensed metaphysics and maple sugar from the tavern
steps, and a jolly blacksmith named Wetherel, described by Hawthorne as
"big in the paunch and enormous in the rear," who came regularly to the
bar for his stimulant. Another was the "lath-like, round-backed,
rough-bearded, thin-visaged" stage-driver, Platt, whom Hawthorne honors
as "a friend of mine" in the diary, and whose acquaintance he made
during the ride from Pittsfield. In later years Platt's pride in having
known Hawthorne eclipsed even his sense of distinction in being "the
first and only man to drive an ox-team to the top of Graylock, sir." He
had once been employed to haul the materials for an observatory up that
mountain's steep inclines. Of the other "hangers-on" who were wont to
infest the bar-room and porch fifty years ago and whom Hawthorne depicts
in his journal and his fiction, few of the present generation of
loungers in the place have ever heard. Orrin ----, the sportive widower
whose peccadilloes are hinted at in the "Note-Books," is remembered by
older residents of the town, and the "fellow who refused to pay six
dollars for the coffin in which his wife was buried" may still be named
as the personification of meanness. The maimed and dissolute Daniel
Haines--nicknamed "Black Hawk"--was then a familiar figure in the
village streets, and his unique history and appearance could not escape
the notice of the great romancer nor be soon forgotten by the
towns-people. As Hawthorne says, "he had slid down by degrees from law
to the soap-vat." Once a reputable lawyer, his bibulous habits and an
accident--his hand being "torn away by the devilish grip of a
steam-engine"--had so reduced him that at the time Hawthorne saw him he
maintained himself by boiling soap and practising phrenology. It is
remembered that he used to "feel of bumps" for the price of a drink, and
that, Hawthorne's head being submitted to his manipulation, he gravely
assured the tavern company, "This man was created to shine as a bank
president," and then privately advised the landlord to "make that chap
pay in advance for his board." A resident tells us that this dirty and
often drunken Haines used to make biweekly visits to his father's house,
with a cart drawn by disreputable-looking dogs, to receive fat in
exchange for soap. The novelist touches this odd character many times in
his journal, and utilizes it in the romance of "Ethan Brand," where it
is the "Lawyer Giles, the elderly ragamuffin," who, with the rest of the
lazy regiment from the village tavern, came in response to the summons
of the "boy Joe" to see poor Brand returned from his long search after
the Unpardonable Sin. This "boy Joe," son of "Bertram the lime-burner,"
was also a bar-room character, noted here by Hawthorne, but obviously
for a different use than that made of him in "Ethan Brand,"--a reference
to him in the "Note-Books" being supplemented by this memorandum: "take
this boy as the germ of a tavern-haunter, a country _roue_, to spend a
wild and brutal youth, ten years of his prime in prison and his old age
in the poor-house." This sketch may have been written in the spirit of
prophecy, so exactly has the life of one bar-room boy coincided with
Hawthorne's outline; the career of another lad whom he here saw and
possibly had in mind was happier.
[Sidenote: Characters and Scenes]
A modern hotel has replaced the "Whig Tavern" of Hawthorne's time, and a
new set of _habitues_ now frequent its bar-room; another generation of
fat men has succeeded the individuals whose breadth of back was a marvel
to the novelist, and in the increased population of the place the "many
obese" would no longer provoke comment. The lapsing decades have
expanded the pretty and busy factory-village he found into a prettier
and busier factory-city without materially changing its prevailing air.
The vigorous young city has not wholly out-grown the "hollow vale"
walled in by towering mountains; the aspect of its grand environment is
therefore essentially unaltered, and it chances that there is scarcely a
spot, in or about the town, which received the notice of Hawthorne which
may not still be identified. It is our crowning pleasure in the
resplendent autumn days to follow his thoughtful step and dreamy vision
through town and country-side to the spots he frequented and described,
thus sharing, in a way, his companionship and beholding through his eyes
the beauties which he has depicted of mountain and vale, forest and
stream. On the summit of a hill in the village cemetery, where white
gravestones gleam amid the evergreens, the grave of a child at whose
burial Hawthorne assisted is pointed out by one who was present with
him. The well-known author-divine Washington Gladden, sometime preached
in a near-by church. The ever-varying phases of the heights which look
down upon the town--the wondrous play of light and shade upon the great
sweeps of foliage which clothe the mountain-sides, the shadows chasing
each other along the slopes and changing from side to side as the day
declines, until the vale lies in twilight while the near summits are
gilded with sunset gold, the exquisite cloud-effects as the fleecy
masses drift above the ridges or cling to the higher peaks--were a
never-failing source of pleasure to Hawthorne, as they are to the
loiterer of this day. Every shifting of the point of view as we stroll
in the town reveals a new aspect of its mountain ramparts and arouses
fresh delight. Hawthorne thought the village itself most beautiful when
clouds deeply shaded the mountains while sunshine flooded the valley
and, by contrast, made streets and houses a bright, rich gold.
[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Rambles]
The investing mountains give to the place the "snug and insular" air
which Hawthorne observed; from many points it seems completely severed
from the rest of the world. On some dark days sombre banks of cloud
settle along the ridges and apparently so strengthen and heighten the
beleaguering walls that we recall Hawthorne's fancy that egress is
impossible save by "climbing above the clouds." However, the railways
tunnel the base of one mountain and curve around the flanks of others,
while
"Old roads winding, as old roads will,"
find easy grades about and over the ramparts, so that the bustling
"Tunnel-city" is by no means isolated from the outside world.
The rambles among and beyond these investing mountains, by which
Hawthorne made himself and "Eustace Bright" of "Wonder-Book" and
"Tanglewood Tales" familiar with "rough, rugged, broken, headlong"
Berkshire, were usually solitary. The before-mentioned admirer of the
"Gentle Boy" sometimes offered to guide the novelist to places of
interest in the vicinage, but he usually preferred to be alone with
nature and his own reveries. Once when the lad proposed to pilot him to
the peak of Graylock, Hawthorne replied he "did not care to soar so
high; the Bellows-Pipe was sightly enough for him." He visited the
latter point many times; it is a long walk from the village, and once he
returned so late that the hotel was closed for the night and our lad
pommelled the door for him until the landlord descended, in wrath and
confidentially scant attire, to admit the novelist.
[Sidenote: Ethan Brand]
One starless night we were guided to the kiln of "Bertram the
lime-burner" which Hawthorne visited with Mr. Leach,--one of several
kilns high up on the steep slope without the town, where the marble of
the mountain is converted into snow-white lime. The graphic imagery of
the tale may all be realized here upon the spot where it is laid. Amid
the darkness, the iron door which encloses the glowing limestone
apparently opens into the mountain-side, and seems a veritable entrance
to the infernal regions whose lurid flames escape by every crevice. The
dark and silent figure, revealed to us by the weird light, sitting and
musing before the kiln, is surely "Ethan Brand" on his solitary vigil,
intent on perilous thoughts as he looks into the flame, or mutely
listening to the fiend he has evoked from the fire to tell him of the
Unpardonable Sin; or it is the same Brand returned to the foot of
Graylock after eighteen years of weary searching abroad, to find the Sin
in his own heart and to burn that heart into snowy whiteness and purity
in the kiln he had watched so long. As we ponder the scene we would
scarce be surprised to witness the approach of the village rabble led by
Joe, the old Jew exhibiting his "peep-show" at the foot of the kiln, and
the self-pursuing cur violently chasing his own shortened tail, or to
hear the demoniac laughter of Brand which scattered the terror-stricken
rabble in the surrounding darkness. Certain it is that, thirteen years
before he wrote the tale, Hawthorne saw here, at a kiln on the foot-hill
of Graylock, his "Bertram," and heard the legend of a demented creature
who threw himself into the midst of the circle of fire. The name "Ethan
Brand" was that of an old resident of Hawthorne's Salem.
[Sidenote: Graylock]
The summit of Graylock, whose rugged beauty has been sung by Holmes,
Thoreau, Bryant, and Fanny Kemble, had for Hawthorne a sort of
fascination. From the streets of the village, from all the ways by which
he sauntered through the country-side, his eyes were continually
turning to that lofty height, observant of its ever-changing aspects.
His diary of the time abounds with records of its phases, presented in
varying conditions of cloud and sunshine and from different places of
prospect, and of the fanciful impressions suggested to his subtile
thought by each fresh and unfamiliar appearance. A walk repeatedly
enjoyed by him is along a primitive road on the mountain-side to the
southern end of The Notch,--"where it slopes upward to the
skies,"--whence he could see most of the enchanting valley of
Berkshire--with its lakes, embowered villages, and billowy expanses of
upland and mead--extending between mountain-borders to the great Dome
which looms across it sixty miles away. In the distance he could see the
crags of Bryant's Monument Mountain--the "headless sphinx" of his own
"Wonder-Book"--rising above the gleaming lake whose margin was to be his
later home.
Our route to the peak of Graylock is that taken by Hawthorne and Thoreau
through the savage cleft of The Notch. We follow up a dashing
mountain-stream past a charming cascade beneath darkening hemlocks, then
along a rough road by the houses whose inhabitants Hawthorne thought
"ought to be temperance people" from the quality of the water they gave
him to drink. In the remoter parts of the glen a stranger-pedestrian is
still a wonder, and will be regarded as curiously as was the romancer.
From the extremity of The Notch, Graylock rises steeply, his sides
clothed with forests, through which we climb to the summit and our
reward. From the site of Thoreau's bivouac, where Fanny Kemble once
declaimed Romeo and Juliet to a picnic party, we behold a scene of
unrivalled vastness and beauty,--on every side peak soaring beyond peak
until the shadowy outlines blend with the distant sky. The view ranges
from Grand Monadnock and the misty Adirondacks to the Catskills, the
Dome of Mount Washington, and the far-away hills of Connecticut, while
at our feet smiles the bright valley, as beautiful as that in which
Rasselas dwelt.
[Sidenote: Natural Bridge]
A mile from the town we find one of the most picturesque spectacles in
New England, the Natural Bridge, to which Hawthorne came again and again
during his sojourn in this region. Amid a grove of pines apparently
rooted in the solid rock, a tributary of the Hoosac has, during
measureless eons of time, worn in the white marble a chasm sixty feet
deep and fifteen feet wide, spanned at one point by a beautifully arched
mass which forms a bridge high above the stream which frets along the
rock-strewn floor of the canyon. Within the ravine the brook falls in a
rainbow-crowned cascade, and below this is a placid pool with margins of
polished marble, where Hawthorne once meditated a bath, but, alarmed by
the approach of visitors, he hastily resumed his habiliments, "not
caring to be to them the most curious part of the spectacle."
From the deep bed of the brook the gazer looks heavenward between lofty
walls of crystalline whiteness which seem to converge as they rise,
whose surmounting crags jutting from the verge are crowned by sombre
evergreens which overhang the chasm and almost shut out the sky. As we
traverse the gorge whose wildness so impressed Hawthorne and listen to
the re-echoing roar of the now diminished stream, we are reminded of his
conceit that the scene is "like a heart that has been rent asunder by a
torrent of passion which has raged and left ineffaceable traces, though
now there is but a rill of feeling at the bottom."
Our way back to the town is along a riotous stream which took strong
hold upon the liking of the novelist, by which he often walked and in
whose cool depths he bathed. His brief descriptions of its secluded and
turbulent course, through resounding hollows, amid dark woods, under
pine-crowned cliffs,--"talking to itself of its own wild fantasies in
the voice of solitude and the wilderness,"--although written at the time
but for his own perusal, are among the gems of the language. Farther
down, the boisterous stream is now subdued and harnessed by man and made
to turn wheels of factories; its limpid waters are discolored by
dye-stuffs; its beauty is lost with its freedom; it becomes useful
and--ugly.
[Sidenote: Incidents and Characters of Tales]
One day our excursion is into the romantic valley of the Deerfield by
the old stage-road over the Hoosac range, the route which Hawthorne took
with his friends Birch and Leach. The many turns by which the road
accomplishes the ascent afford constantly varying vistas of the valley
out of which we rise, and progressively widening prospects of the
forest-clad mountains beyond. At the summit we are in the centre of the
magnificent panorama of mountains--glowing now with autumnal crimson and
gold--which extorted from Henry Clay the declaration that he had "never
beheld anything so beautiful."
On the bare and wind-swept plain which lies along the summit are a few
farm-dwellings. Among these at the time of Hawthorne's visit--before
the great tunnel had pierced the mountain and superseded the
stage-route--was a homely wayside inn, afterward a farm-house, at whose
bar passengers were wont to "wet their whistles." It may be assumed that
the romancer and his companions failed not to conform to this
time-honored custom, for it was in that rude bar-room--since a
farm-kitchen--that Hawthorne met the itinerant Jew with a diorama of
execrable scratchings which he carried upon his back and exhibited as
"specimens of the fine arts;" in that room also the novelist witnessed
the whimsical performance of the usually sensible and sedate old dog,
who periodically broke out in an infuriated pursuit of his own tail, "as
if one half of his body were at deadly enmity with the other." These
incidents were carefully noted at the time for possible future use, and
in such choice diction that when, many years afterward, he wove them
into the fabric of a tale of "The Snow Image" volume, he transcribed
them from his diary to his manuscript essentially unchanged. This
instance illustrates the method of this consummate literary artist and
his alertness to perceive and utilize the details of real life. His
journals abundantly show that he was by no means the aphelxian dreamer
he has been adjudged.
[Sidenote: Deerfield Arch]
As we descend into the deep valley we find a wild gulf where a brooklet
from the top of Hoosac falls a hundred feet into a rock-bordered pool,
whence it hastens to lose itself in the river; and a mile or two farther
along the Deerfield we come to the Natural Arch which Hawthorne visited.
It is in one of the wildest parts of the picturesque valley, where
mountain-walls rise a thousand feet on either side. Through a mass of
rock projecting from the margin the stream has wrought for itself a
symmetrically arched passage as large as and very like the door-way of
an Old-World cathedral. The summit of the arch and the water-worn
pillars upon either side display "pot-holes" and other evidences of
erosion, and in the bed of the current lie fragments of similarly
attrite rocks which seem to indicate that at some period a series of
arches spanned the entire space from mountain to mountain. Hawthorne's
pleasing fancy makes this arch the entrance to an enchanted palace which
has all vanished except the door-way that "now opens only into
nothingness and empty space."
[Sidenote: Williamstown]
On other days our saunterings follow Hawthorne's to beautiful
Williamstown and through the picturesque scenery which environs it.
Within the park-like village the alma mater of Bryant, Garfield, and
Hawthorne's "Eustace Bright" stands embowered in noble elms and
overlooked by mighty Graylock. Viewed from here, Emerson thought
Graylock "a serious mountain." Thoreau considered its proximity worth at
least "one endowed professorship; it were as well to be educated in the
shadow of a mount as in more classic shades. Some will remember not only
that they went to the college but that they went to the mountain."
Hawthorne visited both. At the college commencement we find him more
attentive to the eccentric characters in the assemblage without the
church than to the literary exercises within, as evidenced by his
piquant description of the enterprising pedler with the "heterogeny" of
wares, the gingerbread man, the negroes, and other oddities of the
out-door company.
[Sidenote: Bryant--Emerson]
About us here lie the scenes which stirred in William Cullen Bryant that
intense love of nature which inspired his best stanzas. A winsome walk
brings us to a sequestered glen where a brooklet winds amid moss-covered
rocks and dainty ferns, and mirrors in its clear pools the overhanging
boughs and the patches of azure; this was a favorite haunt of the
youthful Bryant, and here he pondered or composed his earlier poems,
including some portion of the matchless
"Thanatopsis." Here Emerson, lingering under the spell of the spot, was
moved to recite Wordsworth's "Excursion" to a companion, who must
evermore feel an enviable thrill when he recalls the exquisite lines
falling from the lips of the "great evangel and seer" amid the
loveliness of such a scene.
II
LENOX AND MIDDLE BERKSHIRE
_Beloved of the Litterateurs--La Maison Rouge--Where The House of the
Seven Gables was written--Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Scenes--The
Bowl--Beecher's Laurel Lake--Kemble--Bryant's Monument Mountain--
Stockbridge--Catherine Sedgwick--Melville's Piazza and Chimney--
Holmes--Longfellow--Pittsfield._
We have only to accompany Eustace Bright of "Wonder-Book" from Williams
College to his home, where Catherine Sedgwick's "Stockbridge Bowl"
nestles among the summer-enchanted hills of central Berkshire, to find
the abode of Hawthorne during the most fertile period of his life. This
region of inspiring landscapes has long been a favorite residence of
_litterateurs_. Here Jonathan Edwards compiled his predestined
treatises; here Catherine Sedgwick wrote the romances which charmed her
generation; here Elihu Burritt "the Learned Blacksmith," wrought out the
"Sparks" that made him famous; here Bryant composed his best stanzas and
made Monument Mountain and Green River classic spots; here Henry Ward
Beecher indited many "Star Papers;" here Herman Melville produced his
sea-tales and brilliant essays; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and
Longfellow, Curtis and James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and
Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederika Bremer, the gifted sisters
Goodale, and many other shining spirits, have had home or haunt and have
invested the scenery with the splendors of their genius. Half a score of
this galaxy were in Berkshire at the time of Hawthorne's residence
there.
After his sojourn in northern Berkshire he returned to Salem, where he
married the lovely Sophia Peabody, endured some years of custom-house
drudgery, and wrote the "Scarlet Letter," which made him famous: he then
sought again the seclusion of the mountains.
[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Return to Berkshire]
Poverty, which he had long and bravely endured, has been assigned as the
cause of his removal to the humble Berkshire abode in 1850; one writer
refers to the slenderness of his larder here, another says the rent for
his poor dwelling was paid by his friends, another that the rent was
remitted by the owner, who was his friend. But the success of the
"Scarlet Letter" had relieved the necessitous condition of its author;
and his landlord here--Tappan of "Tanglewood"--testifies and Hawthorne's
letters show that he was able to pay his rent. His motive in returning
to Berkshire is stated in a letter to Bridge: "I have taken a house in
Lenox--I long to get into the country, for my health is not what it has
been. An hour or two of labor in a garden and a daily ramble in country
air would keep me all right." Doubtless, too, he hoped to find the quiet
and seclusion of the place favorable for his work.
[Sidenote: His Home and Study]
The habitation to which he brought his family he describes as "the very
ugliest little bit of an old red farm-house you ever saw," "the most
inconvenient and wretched hovel I ever put my head in." His wife's
letters characterize it, "the reddest and smallest of houses," with such
a low stud that she "fears to be crushed."