The traveller by the Eastern Railroad, from Boston, reaches in less than
an hour the old town of Salem, Massachusetts. It is chiefly composed
of plain wooden houses, but it has a quaint air of past provincial
grandeur, and has indeed been an important commercial town. The first
American ship for Calcutta and China sailed from this port; and Salem
ships opened our trade with New Holland and the South Seas. But its
glory has long since departed, with that of its stately and respectable
neighbors, Newburyport and Portsmouth. There is still, however, a
custom-house in Salem, there are wharves and chandlers' shops and a
faint show of shipping and an air of marine capacity which no apparent
result justifies. It sits upon the shore like an antiquated sea-captain,
grave and silent, in tarpaulin and duck trousers, idly watching the
ocean upon which he will never sail again.
But this touching aspect of age and lost prosperity merely serves to
deepen the peculiar impression of the old city, which is not derived
from its former commercial importance, but from other associations.
Salem village was a famous place in the Puritan annals. The tragedy of
the witchcraft tortures and murders has cast upon it a ghostly spell,
from which it seems never to have escaped; and even the sojourner of
to-day, as he loiters along the shore in the sunniest morning of June,
will sometimes feel an icy breath in the air, chilling the very marrow
of his bones. Nor is he consoled by being told that it is only the east
wind; for he cannot help believing that an invisible host of Puritan
spectres have breathed upon him, revengeful, as he poached upon their
ancient haunts.
The Puritan spirit was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer
than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan
character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were
very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount
Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were
better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is
doubtless the moral influence of modern civilization, both in Old and
New England. By the fruit let the seed be judged. The State to whose
rough coast the _Mayflower_ came, and in which the Pilgrim spirit
has been most active, is to-day the chief of all human societies,
politically, morally, and socially. It is the community in which the
average of well-being is higher than in any State we know in history.
Puritan though it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any large
community in the world. But it had bleak beginnings. The icy shore,
the sombre pines, the stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending
religious austerity, the Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the
angry intolerance of contradiction--they all made a narrow strip of sad
civilization between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The
moral and physical tenacity which is wrestling with the Rebellion
was toughened among these flinty and forbidding rocks. The fig, the
pomegranate, and the almond would not grow there, nor the nightingale
sing; but nobler men than its children the sun never shone upon, nor has
the heart of man heard sweeter music than the voices of James Otis and
Samuel Adams. Think of Plymouth in 1620, and of Massachusetts to-day!
Out of strength came forth sweetness.
With some of the darkest passages in Puritan history this old town of
Salem, which dozes apparently with the most peaceful conscience in the
world, is identified, and while its Fourth of July bells were joyfully
ringing sixty years ago Nathaniel Hathorne was born. He subsequently
chose to write the name Hawthorne, because he thought he had discovered
that it was the original spelling. In the introduction to _The Scarlet
Letter_, Hawthorne speaks of his ancestors as coming from Europe in the
seventeenth century, and establishing themselves in Salem, where they
served the State and propitiated Heaven by joining in the persecution
of Quakers and witches. The house known as the Witch House is still
standing on the corner of Summer and Essex streets. It was built in 1642
by Captain George Corwin, and here in 1692 many of the unfortunates who
were palpably guilty of age and ugliness were examined by the Honorable
Jonathan Curwin, Major Gedney, Captain John Higginson, and John Hathorn,
Esquire.
The name of this last worthy occurs in one of the first and most famous
of the witch trials, that of "Goodwife Gory", in March, 1692, only a
month after the beginning of the delusion at the house of the minister
Parris. Goodwife Gory was accused by ten children, of whom Elizabeth
Parris was one; they declared that they were pinched by her and
strangled, and that she brought them a book to sign. "Mr. Hathorn,
a magistrate of Salem", says Robert Calef, in _More Wonders of the
Invisible World_, "asked her why she afflicted these children. She said
she did not afflict them. He asked her who did then. She said, I do not
know; how should I know? She said they were poor, distracted creatures,
and no heed ought to be given to what they said. Mr. Hathorn and Mr.
Noyes replied, that it was the judgment of all that were there present
that they were bewitched, and only she (the accused) said they were
distracted. She was accused by them that the _black man_ whispered to
her in her ear now (while she was upon examination), and that she had a
yellow bird that did use to suck between her fingers, and that the said
bird did suck now in the assembly." John Hathorn and Jonathan
Curwin were "the Assistants" of Salem village, and held most of the
examinations and issued the warrants. Justice Hathorn was very swift in
judgment, holding every accused person guilty in every particular.
When poor Jonathan Gary of Charlestown attended his wife charged with
witchcraft before Justice Hathorn, he requested that he might hold one
of her hands, "but it was denied me. Then she desired me to wipe the
tears from her eyes and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she
desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint.
Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment these
persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking
something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be
silent, or else I should be turned out of the room". What a piteous
picture of the awful colonial inquisition and the village Torquemada!
What a grim portrait of an ancestor to hang in your memory, and to trace
your kindred to!
Hawthorne's description of his ancestors in the Introduction to _The
Scarlet Letter_ is very delightful. As their representative, he declares
that he takes shame to himself for their sake, on account of these
relentless persecutions; but he thinks them earnest and energetic.
"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea;
a gray-headed ship-master, in each generation, retiring from the
quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the
hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the
gale, which had blustered against his sire and grand-sire. The boy
also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a
tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow
old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Not all,
however, for the last of the line of sailors, Captain Nathaniel
Hathorne, who married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, died at Calcutta after
the birth of three children, a boy and two girls. The house in which
the boy was born is still standing upon Union Street, which leads to the
Long Wharf, the chief seat of the old foreign trade of Salem. The next
house, with a back entrance on Union Street, is the Manning house, where
many years of the young Hawthorne's life were spent in the care of his
uncle, Robert Manning. He lived often upon an estate belonging to his
mother's family, in the town of Raymond, near Sebago Lake, in Maine. The
huge house there was called Manning's Folly, and is now said to be used
as a meeting-house. His uncle sent Hawthorne to Bowdoin College, where
he graduated in 1825. A correspondent of the Boston _Daily Advertiser_,
writing from Bowdoin at the late commencement, says that he had recently
found "in an old drawer" some papers which proved to be the manuscript
"parts" of the students at the Junior exhibition of 1824; among them was
Hawthorne's "De Patribus Conscriptis Romanorum". "It is quite brief,"
writes the correspondent, "but is really curious as perhaps the only
college exercise in existence of the great tragic writer of our day
(has there been a greater since Shakespeare?). The last sentence is
as follows (note the words which I put in italics): 'Augustus equidem
antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, _sed fulgor tantum fuit
sine fervore_. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestas recuperata,
postremum species etiam amissa est.' On the same occasion Longfellow had
the salutatory oration in Latin--'Oratio Latina; Anglici Poetae.'"
Hawthorne has given us a charming glimpse of himself as a college boy
in the letter to his fellow-student, Horatio Bridge, of the Navy, whose
_Journal of an African Cruiser_ he afterwards edited. "I know not whence
your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college,
gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under those tall academic pines;
or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the
Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or
bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy
little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the
forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it again--two idle
lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred
things that the faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse
for us,--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he
was to be a writer of fiction." From this sylvan university Hawthorne
came home to Salem; "as if," he wrote later, "Salem were for me the
inevitable centre of the universe."
The old witch-hanging city had no weirder product than this dark-haired
son. He has certainly given it an interest which it must otherwise have
lacked; but he speaks of it with small affection, considering that his
family had lived there for two centuries. "An unjoyous attachment," he
calls it. And, to tell the truth, there was evidently little love lost
between the little city and its most famous citizen. Stories still float
in the social gossip of the town, which represent the shy author
as inaccessible to all invitations to dinner and tea; and while
the pleasant circle awaited his coming in the drawing-room, the
impracticable man was--at least so runs the tale--quietly hobnobbing
with companions to whom his fame was unknown. Those who coveted him as
a phoenix could never get him, while he gave himself freely to those
who saw in him only a placid barn-door fowl. The sensitive youth was a
recluse, upon whose imagination had fallen the gloomy mystery of Puritan
life and character. Salem was the inevitable centre of his universe
more truly than he thought. The mind of Justice Hathorn's descendant
was bewitched by the fascination of a certain devilish subtlety working
under the comeliest aspects in human affairs. It overcame him with
strange sympathy. It colored and controlled his intellectual life.
Devoted all day to lonely reverie and musing upon the obscurer spiritual
passages of the life whose monuments he constantly encountered, that
musing became inevitably morbid. With the creative instinct of the
artist, he wrote the wild fancies into form as stories, many of which,
when written, he threw into the fire. Then, after nightfall, stealing
out from his room into the silent streets of Salem, and shadowy as the
ghosts with which to his susceptible imagination the dusky town was
thronged, he glided beneath the house in which the witch-trials were
held, or across the moonlit hill upon which the witches were hung, until
the spell was complete. Nor can we help fancying that, after the murder
of old Mr. White in Salem, which happened within a few years after
his return from college, which drew from Mr. Webster his most famous
criminal plea, and filled a shadowy corner of every museum in New
England, as every shivering little man of that time remembers, with an
awful reproduction of the scene in wax-figures, with real sheets on the
bed, and the murderer, in a glazed cap, stooping over to deal the fatal
blow--we cannot help fancying that the young recluse who walked by
night, the wizard whom as yet none knew, hovered about the house, gazing
at the windows of the fatal chamber, and listening in horror for the
faint whistle of the confederate in another street.
Three years after he graduated, in 1828, he published anonymously a
slight romance with the motto from Southey, "Wilt thou go with me?"
Hawthorne never acknowledged the book, and it is now seldom found; but
it shows plainly the natural bent of his mind. It is a dim, dreamy tale,
such as a Byron-struck youth of the time might have written, except for
that startling self-possession of style and cold analysis of passion,
rather than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation, but remarkable
original power. The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his
works. It is uncanny; the figures of the romance are not persons, they
are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations. So the _Twice-told
Tales_ that seem at first but the pleasant fancies of a mild recluse,
gradually hold the mind with a Lamia-like fascination; and the author
says truly of them, in the Preface of 1851, "Even in what purport to be
pictures of actual life, we have allegory not always so warmly dressed
in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's
mind without a shiver." There are sunny gleams upon the pages, but a
strange, melancholy chill pervades the book. In "The Wedding Knell",
"The Minister's Black Veil", "The Gentle Boy", "Wakefield", "The
Prophetic Pictures", "The Hollow of the Three Hills", "Dr. Heidegger's
Experiment", "The Ambitious Guest", "The White Old Maid", "Edward
Fane's Rose-bud", "The Lily's Quest"--or in the "Legends of the Province
House", where the courtly provincial state of governors and ladies
glitters across the small, sad New England world, whose very baldness
jeers it to scorn--there is the same fateful atmosphere in which Goody
Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which
the startled heart stands still with unspeakable terror.
The spell of mysterious horror which kindled Hawthorne's imagination
was a test of the character of his genius. The mind of this child
of witch-haunted Salem loved to hover between the natural and the
supernatural, and sought to tread the almost imperceptible and doubtful
line of contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that have the
figures of men, but are not human; the elusive, shadowy scenery which,
like that of Gustave Doré's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her
forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale
excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria
of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend
with ghostly doubts and wonders.
But from its poisonous flowers what a wondrous perfume he distilled!
Through his magic reed, into what penetrating melody he blew that
deathly air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was
hopeless, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naïve
and well-poised genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered into
the pit with the steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind of
the reader follows him with an aching wonder and admiration, as the
bewildered old mother forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne
describes Miriam in _The Marble Faun_, so may the character of his
genius be most truly indicated. Miriam, the reader will remember, turns
to Hilda and Kenyon for sympathy. "Yet it was to little purpose that
she approached the edge of the voiceless gulf between herself and them.
Standing on the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might stretch out
her hand and never clasp a hand of theirs; she might strive to call out
'Help, friends! help!' but, as with dreamers when they shout, her voice
would perish inaudibly in the remoteness that seemed such a little way.
This perception of an infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot
come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they
turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results
of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that
puts an individual ajar with the world."
Thus it was because the early New England life made so much larger
account of the supernatural element than any other modern civilized
society, that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively
turned to it. But beyond this alluring spell of its darker and obscurer
individual experience, it seems neither to have touched his imagination
nor even to have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the romance of
feudalism was precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in which
he believed with all his soul, and for that of the heroic old feudal
figures which he honored. He was a Tory in every particle of his
frame, and his genius made him the poet of Toryism. But Hawthorne had
apparently no especial political, religious, or patriotic affinity
with the spirit which inspired him. It was solely a fascination of the
intellect. And although he is distinctively the poet of the Puritans,
although it is to his genius that we shall always owe that image of them
which the power of The Scarlet Letter has imprinted upon literature,
and doubtless henceforth upon historical interpretation, yet what an
imperfect picture of that life it is! All its stern and melancholy
romance is there--its picturesque gloom and intense passion; but upon
those quivering pages, as in every passage of his stories drawn from
that spirit, there seems to be wanting a deep, complete, sympathetic
appreciation of the fine moral heroism, the spiritual grandeur, which
overhung that gloomy life, as a delicate purple mist suffuses in summer
twilights the bald crags of the crystal hills. It is the glare of the
scarlet letter itself, and all that it luridly reveals and weirdly
implies, which produced the tale. It was not beauty in itself nor
deformity, not virtue nor vice, which engaged the author's deepest
sympathy. It was the occult relation between the two. Thus while the
Puritans were of all men pious, it was the instinct of Hawthorne's
genius to search out and trace with terrible tenacity the dark and
devious thread of sin in their lives.
Human life and character, whether in New England two hundred years ago
or in Italy to-day, interested him only as they were touched by this
glamour of sombre spiritual mystery; and the attraction pursued him in
every form in which it appeared. It is as apparent in the most perfect
of his smaller tales, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, as in _The Scarlet
Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables_, and _The
Marble Faun_. You may open almost at random, and you are as sure to find
it as to hear the ripple in Mozart's music, or the pathetic minor in a
Neapolitan melody. Take, for instance, The _Birth-Mark_, which we might
call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not just said the
same thing of _Rappaccini's Daughter_--for so even and complete is
Hawthorne's power, that, with few exceptions, each work of his, like
Benvenuto's, seems the most characteristic and felicitous. In this
story, a scholar marries a beautiful woman, upon whose face is a mark
which has hitherto seemed to be only a greater charm. Yet in one so
lovely the husband declares that, although it is the slightest possible
defect, it is yet the mark of earthly imperfection, and he proceeds to
lavish all the resources of science to procure its removal. But it
will not disappear; and at last he tells her that the crimson hand "has
clutched its grasp" into her very being, and that there is mortal danger
in trying the only means of removal that remains. She insists that
it shall be tried. It succeeds; but it removes the stain and her life
together. So in _Rappaccini's Daughter_. The old philosopher nourishes
his beautiful child upon the poisonous breath of a flower. She loves,
and her lover is likewise bewitched. In trying to break the spell,
she drinks an antidote which kills her. The point of interest in both
stories is the subtile connection, in the first, between the beauty
of Georgiana and the taint of the birth-mark; and, in the second, the
loveliness of Beatrice and the poison of the blossom.
This, also, is the key of his last romance, _The Marble Faun_, one of
the most perfect works of art in literature, whose marvellous spell
begins with the very opening words: "Four individuals, in whose fortunes
we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one
of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome." When
these words are read, the mind familiar with Hawthorne is already
enthralled. "What a journey is beginning, not a step of which is
trodden, and yet the heart palpitates with apprehension! Through what
delicate, rosy lights of love, and soft, shimmering humor, and hopes and
doubts and vanishing delights, that journey will proceed, on and on into
utter gloom." And it does so, although "Hilda had a hopeful soul, and
saw sunlight on the mountain-tops". It does so, because Miriam and
Donatello are the figures which interest us most profoundly, and they
are both lost in the shadow. Donatello, indeed, is the true centre of
interest, as he is one of the most striking creations of genius. But the
perplexing charm of Donatello, what is it but the doubt that does not
dare to breathe itself, the appalled wonder whether, if the breeze
should lift those clustering locks a little higher, he would prove to be
faun or man? It never does lift them; the doubt is never solved, but
it is always suggested. The mystery of a partial humanity, morally
irresponsible but humanly conscious, haunts the entrancing page. It
draws us irresistibly on. But as the cloud closes around the lithe
figure of Donatello, we hear again from its hidden folds the words of
"The Birth-Mark": "Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in
its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this dim
sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher state".
Or still more sadly, the mysterious youth, half vanishing from our
sympathy, seems to murmur, with Beatrice Rappaccini, "And still as she
spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart,--'Wherefore didst thou inflict
this miserable doom upon thy child?'"
We have left the story of Hawthorne's life sadly behind. But his
life had no more remarkable events than holding office in the Boston
Customhouse under Mr. Bancroft as collector; working for some time
with the Brook--Farmers, from whom he soon separated, not altogether
amicably; marrying and living in the Old Manse at Concord; returning
to the Custom-house in Salem as surveyor; then going to Lenox, in
Berkshire, where he lived in what he called "the ugliest little old
red farm-house that you ever saw", and where the story is told of his
shyness, that, if he saw anybody coming along the road whom he must
probably pass, he would jump over the wall into the pasture, and so give
the stranger a wide berth; back again to Concord; then to Liverpool as
consul; travelling in Europe afterwards, and home at last and forever,
to "The Wayside" under the Concord hill. "The hillside," he wrote to a
friend in 1852, "is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into
luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly,
intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,
the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is
some very good shade to be found there; I spend delectable hours there
in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length with
a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost
always a breeze stirring along the side or the brow of the hill."
It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described, of
a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of
the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely
psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial,
and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his
intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest
passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather
than sympathizing. You cannot help feeling constantly that the author is
looking askance both at his characters and you, the reader; and many a
young and fresh mind is troubled strangely by his books, as if it
were aware of a half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is this
impression altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of his
personal disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly retiring,
yet surely never was an author more naively frank. He is willing that
you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of himself. The great
interior story he does not tell, of course, but the Introduction to the
_Mosses from an Old Manse_, the opening chapter of _The Scarlet Letter_,
and the _Consular Experiences_, with much of the rest of _Our Old Home_,
are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can be found.
Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a more perfect idyl than that
introductory chapter of the _Mosses_. Its charm is perennial and
indescribable; and why should it not be, since it was written at a
time in which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is, perhaps, the most
softly-hued and exquisite work of his pen. So the sketch of "The
Custom-house", although prefatory to that most tragically powerful of
romances,
_The Scarlet Letter_, is an incessant play of the shyest and most airy
humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst. How
many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely to
dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of Fra
Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and with
whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the port of
Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and discharged his
daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as vague and remote
a spot as the town of which he was about to treat in the story. He
commented upon the place and the people as modern travellers in Pompeii
discuss the ancient town. It made a great scandal. He was accused of
depicting with unpardonable severity worthy folks, whose friends were
sorely pained and indignant. But he wrote such sketches as he wrote his
stories. He treated his companions as he treated himself and all the
personages in history or experience with which he dealt, merely as
phenomena to be analyzed and described, with no more private malice or
personal emotion than the sun, which would have photographed them, warts
and all.
Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him
away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof from
the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain aspects, he
cared little for man; and the high tides of collective emotion among
his fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds and describes the
generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with
hopeful cordiality.
He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the ardent
van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better than half
a dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the millennium
to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So soon?" Yet in
all this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so far from this,
that the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all Hawthorne's writings, the
kind of heartache that they leave behind, seem to spring from the fact
that his nature was related to the moral world, as his own Donatello was
to the human. "So alert, so alluring, so noble", muses the heart as
we climb the Apennines towards the tower of Monte Beni; "alas! is he
human?" it whispers, with a pang of doubt.
How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment of
them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is
not, therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born
interested him only in the same way.
When he went to Europe as consul, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was already
published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved
its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No
author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing
a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace
prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with
my dear native land." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance
ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the
imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation
are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and
Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie England". But
our great romancer looked at the American life of his time with these
marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous sunshine. That the devil,
in the form of an elderly man clad in grave and decent attire, should
lead astray the saints of Salem village, two centuries ago, and confuse
right and wrong in the mind of Goodman Brown, was something that excited
his imagination, and produced one of his weirdest stories. But that the
same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was confusing the sentiment of
right and wrong in the mind of his own countrymen he did not even
guess. The monotonous sunshine disappeared in the blackest storm. The
commonplace prosperity ended in tremendous war. What other man of equal
power, who was not intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne
was, could have stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the
inability of positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all
in its terrible vortex?
In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ. But
this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is an
attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it oppressed
any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure universal
justice under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against human nature.
Civilization itself is at stake; and the warm blood of the noblest youth
is everywhere flowing in as sacred a cause as history records--flowing
not merely to maintain a certain form of government, but to vindicate
the rights of human nature. Shall there not be sorrow and pain, if a
friend is merely impatient or confounded by it--if he sees in it only
danger or doubt, and not hope for the right--or if he seem to insinuate
that it would have been better if the war had been avoided, even at
that countless cost to human welfare by which alone the avoidance was
possible?
Yet, if the view of Hawthorne's mental constitution which has been
suggested be correct, this attitude of his, however deeply it may be
regretted, can hardly deserve moral condemnation. He knew perfectly well
that if a man has no ear for music he had better not try to sing. But
the danger with such men is that they are apt to doubt if music itself
be not a vain delusion. This danger Hawthorne escaped. There is none of
the shallow persiflage of the sceptic in his tone, nor any affectation
of cosmopolitan superiority. Mr. Edward Dicey, in his interesting
reminiscences of Hawthorne, published in _Macmillan's Magazine_,
illustrates this very happily.
"To make his position intelligible, let me repeat an anecdote which
was told me by a very near friend of his and mine, who had heard it
from President Pierce himself. Frank Pierce had been, and was to the
day of Hawthorne's death, one of the oldest of his friends. At the
time of the Presidential election of 1856, Hawthorne, for once, took
part in politics, wrote a pamphlet in favor of his friend, and took
a most unusual interest in his success. When the result of the
nomination was known, and Pierce was President-elect, Hawthorne was
among the first to come and wish him joy. He sat down in the room
moodily and silently, as he was wont when anything troubled him; then,
without speaking a word, he shook Pierce warmly by the hand, and at
last remarked, 'Ah, Frank, what a pity!' The moment the victory was
won, that timid, hesitating mind saw the evils of the successful
course--the advantages of the one which had not been followed. So it
was always. Of two lines of action, he was perpetually in doubt which
was the best; and so, between the two, he always inclined to letting
things remain as they are.
"Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the
difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly
upon his mind. He told me once that, while he had been consul at
Liverpool, a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who
had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved
again on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of
the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection--who was to
provide for them if they became free? and, as he said, with a sigh,
'while I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So, I recollect, on the old
battle-field of Manassas, in which I strolled in company with
Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, foot-sore,
wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going
northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the
remark, 'I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can these
poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' Thus this ingrained
and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course
vigorously. He thought, on the whole, that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
Garrison and the Abolitionists were in the right, but then he was
never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that
his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character. He saw
the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never
could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its
wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly.
"'Better to bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of,'
"expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne
imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon
as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In
politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather,
holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere
to it and it only."
The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were
just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind
held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of
principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read and
mused. If you ask why this was so--how it was that the tragedy of an old
Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of
a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic
appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina
slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity--you must take your
answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his
stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His genius
obeyed its law. When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence of
events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering--when the same
half-smile flutters upon his lips in the essay _About War Matters_,
sketched as it were upon the battle-field, as in that upon _Fire
Worship_, written in the rural seclusion of the mossy Manse--ah me! it
is Donatello, in his tower of Monte Beni, contemplating with doubtful
interest the field upon which the flower of men are dying for an idea.
Do you wonder, as you see him and hear him, that your heart, bewildered,
asks and asks again, "Is he human? Is he a man?"
Now that Hawthorne sleeps by the tranquil Concord, upon whose shores the
Old Manse was his bridal bower, those who knew him chiefly there revert
beyond the angry hour to those peaceful days. How dear the Old Manse was
to him he has himself recorded; and in the opening of the _Tanglewood
Tales_ he pays his tribute to that placid landscape, which will always
be recalled with pensive tenderness by those who, like him, became
familiar with it in happy hours. "To me," he writes, "there is a
peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They
are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype
themselves into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong
impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains,
a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever
new, because continually fading out of the memory, such would be my
sober choice." He used to say, in those days--when, as he was fond of
insisting, he was the obscurest author in the world, because, although
he had told his tales twice, nobody cared to listen--that he never
knew exactly how he contrived to live. But he was then married, and the
dullest eye could not fail to detect the feminine grace and taste that
ordered the dwelling, and perceive the tender sagacity that made all
things possible.
Such was his simplicity and frugality that, when he was left alone for a
little time in his Arcadia, lie would dismiss "the help", and, with some
friend of other days who came to share his loneliness, he cooked the
easy meal, and washed up the dishes. No picture is clearer in the memory
of a certain writer than that of the magician, in whose presence he
almost lost his breath, looking at him over a dinner-plate which he was
gravely wiping in the kitchen, while the handy friend, who had been a
Western settler, scoured the kettle at the door. Blithedale, where their
acquaintance had begun, had not allowed either of them to forget how to
help himself. It was amusing to one who knew this native independence of
Hawthorne, to hear, some years afterwards, that he wrote the "campaign"
_Life of Franklin Pierce_ for the sake of getting an office. That such a
man should do such a work was possibly incomprehensible to those who did
not know him upon any other supposition, until the fact was known
that Mr. Pierce was an old and constant friend. Then it was explained.
Hawthorne asked simply how he could help his friend, and he did the only
thing he could do for that purpose. But although he passed some years
in public office, he had neither taste nor talent for political life.
He owed his offices to works quite other than political. His first and
second appointments were virtually made by his friend Mr. Bancroft, and
the third by his friend Mr. Pierce. His claims were perceptible enough
to friendship, but would hardly have been so to a caucus.
In this brief essay we have aimed only to indicate the general character
of the genius of Hawthorne, and to suggest a key to his peculiar
relation to his time. The reader will at once see that it is rather the
man than the author who has been described; but this has been designedly
done, for we confess a personal solicitude, shared, we are very sure, by
many friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that there shall not be wanting to
the future student of his works such light as acquaintance with the
man may throw upon them, as well as some picture of the impression his
personality made upon his contemporaries.
Strongly formed, of dark, poetic gravity of aspect, lighted by the deep,
gleaming eye that recoiled with girlish coyness from contact with your
gaze; of rare courtesy and kindliness in personal intercourse, yet
so sensitive that his look and manner can be suggested by the word
"glimmering;" giving you a sense of restrained impatience to be away;
mostly silent in society, and speaking always with an appearance of
effort, but with a lambent light of delicate humor playing over all he
said in the confidence of familiarity, and firm self-possession under
all, as if the glimmering manner were only the tremulous surface of the
sea, Hawthorne was personally known to few, and intimately to very few.
But no one knew him without loving him, or saw him without remembering
him; and the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, which, when it was first written,
was supposed to be fictitious, is now one of the most enduring facts of
English literature.