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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
BY
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
PREFACE
The narrative of Hawthorne's life has been partly told in the
autobiographical passages of his writings which he himself addressed to
his readers from time to time, and in the series of "Note Books," not
meant for publication but included in his posthumous works; the
remainder is chiefly contained in the family biography, "Nathaniel
Hawthorne and his Wife" by his son Julian Hawthorne, "Memories of
Hawthorne" by his daughter, Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, and "A Study of
Hawthorne," by his son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop. Collateral
material is also to be found abundantly in books of reminiscences by his
contemporaries. These are the printed sources of the present biography.
The author takes pleasure in expressing his thanks to his publishers for
the ample material they have placed at his disposal; and also to Messrs.
Harper and Brothers for their permission to make extracts from Horatio
Bridge's "Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne," and to Samuel
T. Pickard, Esq., author of "Hawthorne's First Diary," and to Dr.
Moncure D. Conway, author of "Nathaniel Hawthorne" (Appleton's), for a
like courtesy.
COLUMBIA COLLEGE, April 1, 1902.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. FIRST YEARS
II. THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES
III. WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER
IV. THE OLD MANSE
V. THE SCARLET LETTER
VI. LITERARY LABORS
VII. LIFE ABROAD
VIII. LAST YEARS
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
* * * * *
I.
FIRST YEARS.
The Hathorne family stock, to name it with the ancient spelling, was
English, and its old home is said to have been at Wigeastle, Wilton, in
Wiltshire. The emigrant planter, William Hathorne, twenty-three years
old, came over in the Arbella with Winthrop in 1630. He settled at
Dorchster, but in 1637 removed to Salem, where he received grants of
land; and there the line continued generation after generation with
varying fortune, at one time coming into public service and local
distinction, and at another lapsing again into the common lot, as was
the case of the long settled families generally. The planter, William
Hathorne, shared to the full in the vigor and enterprise of the first
generation in New England. He was a leader in war and peace, trade and
politics, with the versatility then required for leadership, being
legislator, magistrate, Indian fighter, explorer, and promoter, as well
as occasionally a preacher; and besides this practical force he had a
temper to sway and incite, which made him reputed the most eloquent man
in the public assembly. He possessed--and this may indicate another side
to his character--a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," certainly a
rare book in the wilderness. He was best remembered, both in local
annals and family tradition, as a patriot and a persecutor, for he
refused to obey the king's summons to England, and he ordered Quaker
women to be whipped through the country-side.
The next generation, born in the colony, were generally of a narrower
type than their fathers, though in their turn they took up the work of
the new and making world with force and conscience; and the second
Hathorne, John, of fanatical memory, was as characteristically a
latter-day Puritan as his father had been a pioneer. He served in the
council and the field, but he left a name chiefly as a magistrate. His
duty as judge fell in the witchcraft years, and under that adversity of
fortune he showed those qualities of the Puritan temperament which are
most darkly recalled; he examined and sentenced to death several of the
accused persons, and bore himself so inhumanely in court that the
husband of one of the sufferers cursed him,--it must have been
dramatically done to have left so vivid a mark in men's minds,--him and
his children's children. This was the curse that lingered in the family
memory like a black blot in the blood, and was ever after used to
explain any ill luck that befell the house. The third heir of the name,
Joseph, was a plain farmer, in whose person the family probably ceased
from the ranks of the gentry, as the word was then used. The fourth,
Daniel, "bold Hathorne" of the Revolutionary ballad, was a
privateersman, robust, ruddy of face, blue-eyed, quick to wrath,--a
strong-featured type of the old Salem shipmaster. His son, Nathaniel,
the fifth descendant, was also bred to the sea, a young man of slight,
firm figure, and in face and build so closely resembling his famous
son--for he was the father of Hawthorne--that a passing sailor once
recognized the latter by the likeness. What else he transmitted to his
son, in addition to physique, by way of temperament and inbred capacity
and inclination, was to suffer more than a sea-change; but he is
recalled as a stern man on deck, of few words, showing doubtless the
early aging of those days under the influence of active responsibility,
danger, and the habit of command, and, like all these shipmasters--for
they were men of some education--he took books to sea with him. He died
at Surinam in 1808, when thirty-two years old. He had married Elizabeth
Clarke Manning, herself a descendant in the fifth generation of Richard
Manning, of St. Petrox Parish, Dartmouth, whose widow emigrated to New
England with her children in 1679. Other old colonial families that had
blended with the Hathornes and Mannings in these American years were the
Gardner, Bowditch, and Phelps stocks, on the one side, and the Giddings,
Potter, and Lord, on the other. Of such descent, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
the second child and only son of this marriage, was born at Salem, July
4, 1804, in his grandfather Daniel's house, on Union Street, near the
wharves.
The pleasant, handsome, bright-haired boy was four years old when his
mother called him into her room and told him that his father was dead.
She soon removed with him and his sisters, of whom Elizabeth was four
years older and Louisa two years younger than himself, to her father's
house in the adjoining yard, which faced on Herbert Street; and there
the young mother, who was still but twenty-seven, following a custom
which made much of widows' mourning in those times, withdrew to a life
of seclusion in her own room, which, there or elsewhere, she maintained
till her death, through a period of forty years; and, as a perpetual
outward sign of her solitude, she took her meals apart, never eating at
the common table. There is a touch of mercy in life which allows
childhood to reconcile itself with all conditions; else one might regret
that the lad was to grow up from his earliest memory in the visible
presence of this grief separating him in some measure from his mother's
life; it was as if there were a ghost in the house; and though early
anecdotes of him are few and of little significance, yet in his childish
threat to go away to sea and never come back again, repeated through
years, one can but trace the deep print of that sorrow of the
un-returning ones which was the tragedy of women's lives all along this
coast. His mother cared for him none the less, though she was less his
companion, and there seems to have been no diminution of affection and
kindness between them, though an outward habit of coldness sprang up as
time went on. He had his sisters for playmates at first, and as he grew
up, he was much looked after by his uncles. His first master was Dr.
Worcester, the lexicographer, then just graduated from Yale, who set up
a school in Salem; and, the lad being lamed in ball-playing, the young
teacher came to the house to carry on the lessons. The accident happened
when Hawthorne was nine years old, and the injury, which reduced him to
crutches, continued to trouble him till he was twelve, at least, after
which, to judge by the fact that he attended dancing-school, he seems to
have entirely recovered from it. The habit of reading came to him
earlier, perhaps because of his confinement and disability for sports in
these three or four years; he was naturally thrown back upon himself. He
is seen lying upon the floor habitually, and when not playing with
cats--the only boyish fondness told of him--reading Shakspere, Milton,
Thomson, the books of the household, not uncommon in New England homes,
where good books were as plenty then as all books are now; and on
Sundays, at his grandmother Hathorne's, across the yard, he would crouch
hour after hour over Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that refuge of
boyhood on the oldtime Sabbaths. It is recollected that, by the time he
was fourteen, he had read Clarendon, Froissart, and Rousseau, besides
"The Newgate Calendar," a week-day favorite; and he may be said to have
begun youth already well versed in good English books, and with the
habit and taste of literary pleasure established as a natural part of
life. "The FaŽrie Queene" was the first book he bought with his own
money. He was vigorous enough now; but the two outward circumstances
that most affected his boyhood, the monotone of his mother's sorrow and
his own protracted physical disability, must have given him touches of
gravity and delicacy beyond his years. It is noticeable that nothing is
heard of any boy friends; nor did he contract such friendships,
apparently, before college days.
In the fall of 1818, when Hawthorne was fourteen years old, the family
removed to Raymond, in Maine, where the Mannings possessed large tracts
of land. The site of this township was originally a grant to the
surviving members and the heirs of Captain Raymond's militia company of
Beverly, the next town to Salem, for service in the French and Indian
war; and Hawthorne's grandfather, Richard Manning, being the secretary
of the proprietors, who managed the property and held their meetings in
Beverly, had toward the close of the century bought out many of their
rights. After his death the estate thus acquired was kept undivided, and
was managed for his children by his sons Richard and Robert, and finally
at any rate, more particularly by the latter, who stood in the closest
relation to Hawthorne of all his uncles, having undertaken to provide
for his education. He had built a large, square, hip-roofed house at
Raymond, after the model common in his native county of Essex, as a
comfortable dwelling, but so seemingly grand amid the humble
surroundings of the Maine clearing as to earn the name of "Manning's
folly;" and, about 1814, he built a similar house for his sister, near
his own, but she had not occupied it until now, when she came to live
there, at first boarding with a tenant. It was pleasantly situated, with
a garden and apple orchard, and with rows of butternut-trees planted
beside it; and perhaps she had sought this retirement with the hope of
its being consonant with her own solitude. The country round about was
wilderness, most of it primeval woods. The little settlement, only a
mill and a country store and a few scattered houses, lay on a broad
headland making out into Sebago Lake, better known as the Great Pond, a
sheet of water eight miles across and fourteen miles long, and connected
with other lakes in a chain of navigable water; to the northwest the
distant horizon was filled with the White Mountains, and northward and
eastward rose the unfrequented hill and lake country, remarkable only,
then as now, for its pure air and waters, and presenting a vast
solitude. This was the Maine home of Hawthorne, of which he cherished
the memory as the brightest part of his boyhood. The spots that can be
named which may have excited his curiosity or interested his imagination
are few, and similar places would not be far off anywhere on the coast.
There was near his home a Pulpit Rock, such as tradition often
preserves, and by the Pond there was a cliff with the usual legend of a
romantic leap, and under it were the Indian rock-paintings called the
Images; but the essential charm of the place was that in all directions
the country lay open for adventure by boat or by trail. Hawthorne had
visited the scene before, in summer times, and he revisited it afterward
in vacations, but his long stay here was in his fifteenth year, the
greater part of which he passed in its neighborhood.
The contemporary record of these days is contained in a diary [Footnote:
Hawthorne's First Diary, with an account of its discovery and loss. By
Samuel T. Pickard. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1897. The volume has
been withdrawn by its editor in consequence of his later doubts of its
authenticity.] which has been regarded as Hawthorne's earliest writing.
The original has never been produced, and the copy was communicated for
publication under circumstances of mystery that easily allow doubts of
its authenticity to arise. The diary is said to have been given to him
by his uncle Richard "with the advice that he write out his thoughts,
some every day, in as good words as he can, upon any and all subjects,
as it is one of the best means of his securing for mature years command
of thought and language,"--these words being written on the first leaf
with the date, "Raymond, June 1, 1816." Whether this inscription and the
entries which follow it are genuine must be left undetermined; there is
nothing strange in Hawthorne's keeping a boy's diary, and being urged to
do so, in view of his tastes and circumstances, and it would be
interesting to trace to so early a beginning that habit of the note-book
that was such a resource to him in mature years; but the evidence is
inconclusive. Whether by his hand or not, the diary embodies the life he
led in this region on his visits and during his longer stay; the names
and places, the incidents, the people, the quality of the days are the
same that the boy knew, wrote of in letters of the time, and remembered
as a man; and though the story may be the fabrication of his mulatto boy
comrade of those days, it is woven of shreds and patches of reality.
After all, the little book is but a lad's log of small doings,--swapping
knives, swimming and fishing, of birds and snakes and bears, incidents
of the road and excursions into the woods and on the lake, and notices
of the tragic accidents of the neighborhood. It has some importance as
illustrating the external circumstances of the place, a very rural place
indeed, and suggesting that among these country people Hawthorne found
the secret of that fellowship--all he ever had--with the rough and
unlearned, on a footing of democratic equality, with the ease and
naturalness of a man. Here at Raymond in his youth, where his personal
superiority was too much a matter of course to be noticed, he must have
learned this freemasonry with young and old at the same time that he
held apart from all in his own life. For the rest, he has told himself
in his undoubted words how he swam and hunted, shot hen-hawks and
partridges, caught trout, and tracked bear in the snow, and ran wild,
yet not wholly free of the call-whistle of his master-passion: "I ran
quite wild," he wrote a quarter-century later, "and would, I doubt not,
have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or
shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on
rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and
any poetry or light books within my reach. These were delightful
days.... I would skate all alone on Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows
of the icy hills on either hand. When I found myself far from home, and
weary with the exhaustion of skating, I would sometimes take refuge in a
log cabin where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. I
would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great
aperture through which the flames went roaring up. Ah, how well I recall
the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the
woods of Maine!" In these memories, it is evident, many years, younger
and older, are diffused in one recollection. For him, here rather than
by his native sea were those open places of freedom that boyhood loves,
and with them he associated the beginnings of his spirit,--the dark as
well as the bright; near his end he told Fields, as his mind wandered
back to these days, "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect
was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits
of solitude." The tone of these reminiscences is verified by his
letters, when he went back to Salem; in the first months he writes of
"very hard fits of homesickness;" a year later he breaks out,--"Oh, that
I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly hence and be at rest! How
often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could again savageize with
you! But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be
so happy as when I did;" and, after another year's interval, "I have
preferred and still prefer Raymond to Salem, through every change of
fortune." There can be no doubt where his heart placed the home of his
boyhood; nor is it, perhaps, fanciful to observe that in his books the
love of nature he displays is rather for the woods than the sea, though
he was never content to live long away from the salt air.
It was plainly the need of schooling that took him from his mother's
home at Raymond and brought him back to Salem by the summer of 1819,
when he was just fifteen years old. Even in the winter interval he seems
to have gone for a few weeks to the house of the Rev. Caleb Bradley,
Stroudwater, Westbrook, in the same county as Raymond, to be tutored. He
remained in Salem with his uncles for the next two years, and was
prepared for college, partly, at least, by Benjamin Oliver, a lawyer, at
the expense of his uncle Robert, and during a portion of this time he
earned some money by writing in the office of his uncle William; but he
was occupied chiefly with his studies, reading, and early compositions.
At the beginning of this period, in his first autumn letters, he
mentions having lately read "Waverley," "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "The
Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom," "Roderick Random," and a volume
of "The Arabian Nights;" and he has learned the easy rhyming of first
verses, and stuffs his letters with specimens of his skill, clever
stanzas, well written, modulated in the cadences of the time, with
melancholy seriousness and such play of sad fancy as youthful poets use.
He laid little store by his faculty for verse, and yet he had practiced
it from an early childish age and had a fair mastery of its simple
forms; and once or twice in mature life he indulged himself in writing
and even in publishing serious poems. In these years, however, verses
were only a part of the ferment of his literary talent, nor have any of
them individuality. He practiced prose, too, and in the next summer,
1820, issued four numbers of a boy's paper, "The Spectator," bearing
weekly date from August 21 to September 18, and apparently he had made
an earlier experiment, without date, in such adolescent journalism; it
was printed with a pen on small note-paper, and contained such serious
matter as belongs to themes at school on "Solitude" and "Industry," with
the usual addresses to subscribers and the liveliness natural to family
news-columns. The composition is smooth and the manner entertaining, and
there is abundance of good spirits and fun of a boyish sort. The paper
shows the literary spirit and taste in its very earliest bud; but no
precocity of talent distinguished it, though doubtless the thought of
authorship fed on its tender leaves. Such experiments belong to the life
of growing boys where education is common and literary facility is
thought to be a distinction and sign of promise in the young; and
Hawthorne did not in these ways differ from the normal boy who was
destined for college. Nothing more than these trifles is to be gleaned
of his intellectual life at that time, but two or three letters
pleasantly illustrate his brotherly feeling, his spirits, and his
uncertainties in regard to the future, at the same time that they
display his absorption in the author's craft; and they conclude the
narrative of these early days before college. The first was written in
October, 1820, just after the last issue of "The Spectator," to his
younger sister Louisa, and shows incidentally that these literary
pleasures were a family diversion:--
Dear Sister,--I am very angry with you for not sending me some of your
poetry, which I consider a great piece of ingratitude. You will not see
one line of mine until you return the confidence which I have placed in
you. I have bought the "Lord of the Isles," and intend either to send or
to bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems. I
have read Hogg's "Tales," "Caleb Williams," "St. Leon," and
"Mandeville." I admire Godwin's novels, and intend to read them all. I
shall read the "Abbot," by the author of "Waverley," as soon as I can
hire it. I have read all Scott's novels except that. I wish I had not,
that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I
like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can
be a Poet and a bookkeeper at the same time. I do find this place most
"dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I
think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the
"Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I
can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert for four years
longer. How happy I should be to be able to say, "I am Lord of myself!"
You may cut off this part of my letter, and show the other to Uncle
Richard. Do write me some letters in skimmed milk. I must conclude, as I
am in a "monstrous hurry"!
Your affectionate brother,
NATH. HATHORNE.
P. S. The most beautiful poetry I think I ever saw begins:--
"She 'a gone to dwell in Heaven, my lassie,
She's gone to dwell in Heaven:
Ye're ow're pure quo' a voice aboon
For dwalling out of Heaven."
It is not the words, but the thoughts. I hope you have read it, as I
know you would admire it.
A passage from a second letter, six months later, March 13, 1821, to his
mother, reveals the character of his relationship with her:--
I don't read so much now as I did, because I am more taken up in
studying. I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend
the vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a
great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I
shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I
should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way
of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one
place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as--a puddle of water.
As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them
(upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A
physician, then, seems to be "Hobson's choice;" but yet I should not
like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And
it would weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my
practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient "ad inferum,"
which being interpreted is, "to the realms below." Oh that I was rich
enough to live without a profession! What do you think of my becoming an
author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the
illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would
feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest
productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull! But authors are always
poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same
predicament as the honest gentleman in "Espriella's Letters:"--
"I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
A-musing in my mind what garment I shall wear."
But as the mail closes soon, I must stop the career of my pen. I will
only inform you that I now write no poetry, or anything else. I hope
that either Elizabeth or you will write to me next week. I remain
Your affectionate son,
NATHL. HATHORNE.
Do not show this letter.
A third letter, June 19, 1821, also to his mother, on the eve of his
departure for college, is interesting for the solicitude it exhibits for
her happiness in the solitary life she had come to live.
"I hope, dear mother, that you will not be tempted by my entreaties to
return to Salem to live. You can never have so much comfort here as you
now enjoy. You are now undisputed mistress of your own house.... If you
remove to Salem, I shall have no mother to return to during the college
vacations, and the expense will be too great for me to come to Salem. If
you remain at Raymond, think how delightfully the time will pass, with
all your children round you, shut out from the world, and nothing to
disturb us. It will be a second Garden of Eden.
'Lo, what an entertaining sight
Are kindred who agree!'
"Elizabeth is as anxious for you to stay as myself. She says she is
contented to remain here for a short time, but greatly prefers Raymond
as a permanent place of residence. The reason for my saying so much on
this subject is that Mrs. Dike and Miss Manning are very earnest for you
to return to Salem, and I am afraid they will commission uncle Robert to
persuade you to it. But, mother, if you wish to live in peace, I conjure
you not to consent to it. Grandmother, I think, is rather in favor of
your staying."
A few weeks later, in the summer of 1821, being then seventeen years
old, Hawthorne left Salem for Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, by
the mail stage from Boston eastward, and before reaching his destination
picked up by the way a Sophomore, Franklin Pierce, afterwards President
of the United States, and two classmates of his own, Jonathan Cilley,
who went to Congress and was the victim of the well-remembered political
duel with Graves, and Alfred Mason; he made friends with these new
companions, and Mason became his room-mate for two years. Bowdoin was a
small college, graduating at that time about thirty students at its
annual Commencement; its professors were kindly and cultivated men, and
its curriculum the simple academic course of those days. Hawthorne's
class, immortalized fifty years later by Longfellow's grave and tender
anniversary lines, "Morituri Salutamus," was destined to unusual
distinction in after life. Longfellow, its scholastic star, was a boy of
fourteen, favored by the regard of the professors, and belonging to the
more studious and steady set of fellows, who gathered in the Peucinian
Society. Hawthorne joined the rival organisation, the Athenaeum, a more
free and boisterous group of lower standing in their studies, described
as the more democratic in their feelings. He is remembered as "a slender
lad, having a massive head, with dark, brilliant, and most expressive
eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion of dark hair." He carried his head
on one side, which gave a singularity to his figure, and he had
generally a countrified appearance; but he took his place among his
mates without much observation. He was reticent in speech and reserved
in manner, and he was averse to intimacy; he had, nevertheless, a full
share in collegiate life and showed no signs of withdrawal from the
common arena. He did not indulge in sports, saving some rough-and-tumble
play, nor did he ride horseback or drive, nor apparently did he care for
that side of youthful life at all, though he was willing to fight on
occasion, and joined the military company of which Pierce was captain.
His athleticism seems to have been confined to his form. He played cards
for small stakes, being a member of the Androscoggin Loo Club, and he
took his part in the convivial drinking of the set where he made one,
winning the repute of possessing a strong head. These indulgences were
almost too trifling to deserve mention, for the scale of life at Bowdoin
was of the most inexpensive order, and though there was light gambling
and occasional jollification, bad habits were practically impossible in
these directions. He was certainly not ashamed of his doings, for on
being detected in one of these scrapes, at the end of his Freshman year,
anticipating a letter of the President, he wrote to his mother, May 30,
1822, an account of the affair:--
MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have nothing
particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in college
have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number. One has
been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself,
have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President intends to
write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case,
you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have
the honor of being suspended; when the President asked what we played
for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents, although it
happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of that, he would
probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no untruth in the
case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at all this term.
I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term, and shall not
till the last week.
* * * * *
He takes up the subject again in a letter to one of his sisters, August
5, 1822:--
"To quiet your suspicions, I can assure you that I am neither 'dead,
absconded, or anything worse.' I have involved myself in no 'foolish
scrape,' as you say all my friends suppose; but ever since my misfortune
I have been as steady as a sign-post, and as sober as a deacon, have
been in no 'blows' this term, nor drank any kind of 'wine or strong
drink.' So that your comparison of me to the 'prodigious son' will hold
good in nothing, except that I shall probably return penniless, for I
have had no money this six weeks.... The President's message is not so
severe as I expected. I perceive that he thinks I have been led away by
the wicked ones, in which, however, he is greatly mistaken. I was full
as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and
would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence
playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another
into anything wrong."
The last week of the term and the close of the Senior year appear to
have been the seasons of conviviality, and Hawthorne's life of this sort
ended with his being an officer of the Navy Club, an impromptu
association of those of his classmates, fourteen out of thirty-eight,
who for one reason or another were not to have a Commencement part on
graduation. The Club met at the college tavern, Miss Ward's, near the
campus, for weekly suppers and every night during Commencement week;
this entertainment was for these youths the happy climax of their
academic life together.
In his studies Hawthorne must have followed his own will very freely. He
refused to declaim, and no power could make him do so, and for this
reason he was denied the honor of a Commencement part, which he had won,
being number eighteen by rank in his class; he was nervously shy about
declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at on his
first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read
a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to
mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in
recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin
scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens,
were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a
collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he
especially mentions Rees's Cyclopśdia--such was the wealth of a boy of
genius in those days--but among the eight hundred books it is certain
that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing
somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by
sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those
destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes
on ways of exterminating it,--all for the benefit of his uncle, who took
the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a memory
of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my novel."
His way of life intellectually had not changed since his schoolboy days,
for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his studies, but only
the books he read; so now he read the books for pleasure, and let his
studies subsist as best they could in the realm of duty. He was poor,
and even in the modest simplicity of this country college, where his
expenses could hardly have been three hundred dollars a year, was
evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the state of his clothes
seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he was self-respecting,
patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of hating debt; and he
went on his way little burdened except by doubtful hopes.
Though he was familiar with his classmates and contemporaries at
college, and firm and fast friends with a few, like Pierce and Cilley,
forming with them the ties that last through all things, he had but one
confidant, Horatio Bridge, afterwards of the United States Navy.
Hawthorne roomed at first with Alfred Mason, in Maine Hall, and being
burned out in their Freshman year, they found temporary quarters
elsewhere, but when the Hall was rebuilt returned to it and occupied
room number nineteen for the Sophomore year. The two chums, however, did
not become intimate, beyond pleasant companionship, and they belonged to
different societies; and the last two years Hawthorne roomed alone in a
private house, Mrs. Cunning's, where both he and Bridge also boarded. It
is from the latter, who remained through life one of Hawthorne's most
serviceable friends, that the account of his college days mainly comes.
He especially remembered, besides such matters of fact as have been
recounted, their walks and rambles together in the pine woods that
stretched about the college unbroken for miles, and by the river with
its rafts of spring logs, and over to the little bay sent up by a
far-reaching arm of the sea; and he recalled the confidences of
Hawthorne in speaking of his hopes of being a writer, in repeating to
him verses as they leaned in the moonlight over the railing of the
bridge below the falls, listening to the moving waters, and in allowing
him some inward glimpses of his solitary life in the brooding time of
youth. Bridge was a fellow of infinite cheer, and praised him, and
clapped him, and urged him on, and gave him the best companionship in
the world for that time of life, if not for all times,--the
companionship of being believed in by a friend. Hawthorne did not forget
it, and in due time paid the tribute of grateful remembrance in the
preface to the volume he dedicated to Bridge, where he recalled his
college days and his friend's part in them.
"If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is
yourself. I know not whence your faith came, but while we were lads
together at a country college, gathering blueberries in study hours
under those tall, academic pines, or watching the great logs as they
tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin, or shooting pigeons or
gray squirrels in the woods, or bat-fowling in the summer twilight, or
catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still
wandering riverward through the forest, though you and I will never cast
a line in it again; two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to
acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard
of, or else it would have been the worse for us--still, it was your
prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of
fiction."
The picture is a vignette of the time, and being in the open, too,
pleasantly ends the tale of college. On separating, it is pleasant to
notice, the friends exchanged keepsakes.
The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who now
adopted the fanciful spelling of the name after his personal whim, was
man grown. There had been trying circumstances in these early days, but
he had met them hardily and lightly, as a matter of course; he had
practically educated himself by the help of books, and had also
discharged his duties as they seemed to the eyes of others; he could go
home feeling that he had satisfied his friends. He seems to have feared
that he might have satisfied them too well; and, some commendation
having preceded him, he endeavored to put them right by a letter to his
sister, July 14, 1825:--
"The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents,
and had probably formed expectations which I shall never realize. I have
thought much upon the subject, and have finally come to the conclusion
that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I
hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do not say this for
the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set mother
and the rest of you right upon a point where your partiality has led you
astray. I did hope that uncle Robert's opinion of me was nearer to the
truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high
estimation of my abilities."
This has the ring of sincerity, like all his home letters, and it is
true that so far there had been nothing precocious, brilliant, or
extraordinary in him to testify of genius,--he was only one of hundreds
of New England boys bred on literature under the shelter of academic
culture; and yet there may have been in his heart something left
unspoken, another mood equally sincere in its turn, for the heart is a
fickle prophet. As Mr. Lathrop suggests in that study of his
father-in-law which is so subtly appreciative of those vital suggestions
apt to escape record and analysis, another part of the truth may lie in
the words of "Fanshawe" where Hawthorne expresses the feelings of his
hero in a like situation with himself at the end of college days:--
"He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in
solitary study,--in conversation with the dead,--while he had scorned to
mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives.
Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world,
unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his
pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost
heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that
dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a
thousand realities."
II.
THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES.
In the summer of 1825 Hawthorne returned to Salem, going back to the old
house on Herbert Street,--the home of his childhood, where his mother,
disregarding his boyish dissuasions, had again taken up her abode three
years before. He occupied a room on the second floor in the southwest
sunshine under the eaves, looking out on the business of the
wharf-streets; and in it he spent the next twelve years, a period which
remained in his memory as an unbroken tract of time preserving a
peculiar character. The way of his life knew little variation from the
beginning to the end. He lived in an intellectual solitude deepened by
the fact that it was only an inner cell of an outward seclusion almost
as complete, for the house had the habits of a hermitage. His mother,
after nearly a score of years of widowhood, still maintained her
separation even from her home world; she is said to have seen none of
her husband's relatives and few of her own, and a visitor must have been
a venturesome person. The custom of living apart spread through the
household. The elder sister, Elizabeth, who was of a strong and active
mind capable of understanding and sympathizing with her brother, and the
younger sister, Louisa, who was more like other people, stayed in their
rooms. The meals of the family, even, which usually go on when
everything else fails in the common life of house-mates, had an
uncertain and variable element in their conduct, as was not unnatural
where the mother never came to the table. The recluse habits of all
doubtless increased with indulgence, and after a while Hawthorne
himself, who was plainly the centre of interest there, fell into the
common ways of isolation. "He had little communication," writes Mr.
Lathrop, "with even the members of his family. Frequently his meals were
brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often that the four
inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never
read his stories aloud to his mother and sisters, as might be imagined
from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his
new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he
sometimes read older literature to them. It was the custom in this
household for the several members to remain very much by themselves; the
three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself; and,
speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said,
'We do not even _live_ at our house!'" He seldom went out by day,
unless for long excursions in the country; an early sea bath on summer
mornings and a dark walk after supper, longer in the warm weather,
shorter in the winter season, were habitual, and a bowl of thick
chocolate with bread crumbed into it, or a plate of fruit, on his return
prepared him for the night's work. Study in the morning, composition in
the afternoon, and reading in the evening, are described as his routine,
but it is unlikely that any such regularity ruled where times and
seasons were so much at his own command. He had no visitors and made no
friends; hardly twenty persons in the town, he thought, were aware of
his existence; but he brought home hundreds of volumes from the Salem
Athenaeum, and knew the paths of the woods and pastures and the way
along the beaches and rocky points, and he had the stuff of his fantasy
with which to occupy himself when nature and books failed to satisfy
him. At first there must have been great pleasure in being at home, for
he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and
he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer
and his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the
first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind,
to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the
sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances: but as youth passed and
manhood came, and yet fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence
became insufficient for him,--it grew burdensome as it showed barren,
and depression set in upon him like a chill and obscure fog over the
marshes where he walked. This, however, year dragging after year, was a
slow process; and the kind of life he led, its gray and deadening
monotone, sympathetic though it was with his temperament, was seen by
him better in retrospect than in its own time.
It is singular that Hawthorne should have undertaken to live by his pen,
or been allowed to do so by his friends, as a practical way of life, but
he was indulged at home, the young lord of the family. "We were in those
days," says Elizabeth, "almost absolutely obedient to him." Occasionally
he thought of going into his uncle's counting-room and so obtaining a
business and place in the world, but he never took this step. He
probably drifted, more or less, into authorship, partly through a
dilatory reluctance to do anything else, and partly led on by the hope
of a success with some one of his tales which would justify him.
The first attempts he made in the craft are involved in some obscurity.
He may have merely carried over from college days what he then had in
hand. At all events his sister Elizabeth, from whom the information
comes in respect to these details, remembered a little collection which
he had prepared for publication with the title "Seven Tales of my Native
Land," and she says that she read it in the summer of 1825; in that case
these stories must have been written at college, but her memory may have
erred. She gives the names of two of them as "Alice Doane" and "Susan
Grey," and adds that he told her, while the volume was still in the
stage of being offered to publishers, that he would first "write a story
which would make a smaller book, and get it published immediately if
possible, before the arrangements for bringing out the 'Tales' were
completed." This was presumably "Fanshawe," which may also have been the
novel she recollected his writing to her about while at college.
"Fanshawe" [Footnote: _Fanshawe_. A Tale. Boston: Marsh & Capen,
362 Washington St. Press of Putnam and Hunt, 1828. 12mo. Pp. 141.] was
published in 1828 by Marsh and Capen, at Boston, without the author's
name but at his expense, one hundred dollars being the sum paid; it
failed, and Hawthorne looked on it with so much subsequent displeasure
that he called in all the copies he could find and destroyed them, and
thus nearly succeeded in sinking the book in oblivion, but the few
copies which survived secured its republication after his death. The
novel is brief, with a melodramatic plot, well-marked scenes, and
strongly contrasted character; the style flows on pleasantly; but the
book is without distinction. Like many a just graduated collegian,
Hawthorne had recourse to his academic experience in lieu of anything
else, and in the setting of the story and some of its delineation of
character Longfellow recognized the strong suggestion of Bowdoin days;
in the same way the hero, Fanshawe, borrowed something from Hawthorne's
own temperament. The figure of the villain, too, adumbrates, though
faintly, the type which engaged Hawthorne's mind in later years.
"Fanshawe" as a whole in all its scenes, whether in the house of the old
President, the tavern, the hut, or the outdoor encounters of the lovers
and rivals, is strongly reminiscent of Scott, the management being
entirely in his manner; its low-life tragedy, its romantic scenery, and
its bookish humor, as well as the characterization in general, are also
from Scott; in fact, notwithstanding what Hawthorne had taken from his
own observation and feelings, this provincial sketch, for it is no more,
is a Scott story, done with a young man's clever mastery of the manner,
but weak internally in plot, character, and dramatic reality. It is as
destitute of any brilliant markings of his genius as his undergraduate
life itself had been, and is important only as showing the serious care
with which he undertook the task of authorship. It is the only relic,
except the shadowy "Seven Tales," of his literary work in the first
three years after leaving college. The "Tales" he is said to have
burned; no better publisher appearing, a young Salem printer, Ferdinand
Andrews, undertook to bring them out, but as he delayed the matter
through lack of capital, Hawthorne, growing impatient and exasperated,
recalled the manuscript and destroyed it.
The example of Scott was, perhaps, the potent influence in fixing
Hawthorne's attention on a definite object, and incited him to seek in
the history of his own country, and especially in the colonial tradition
of New England, which was so near at hand, the field of fiction. He
stored his mind, certainly, with the story of his own people during the
two centuries since the settlement, and prepared himself to describe its
stirring events and striking characters under the veil of imaginative
history. The nature of his reading shows that this was a conscious aim;
and, besides, it was an opinion, loudly proclaimed and widely shared in
that decade, that American writers should look to their own country for
their themes; Cooper was doing so in fiction, and Longfellow felt this
predilection in his choice of subject for verse. Salem was a true centre
of the old times; and a young imagination in that town and neighborhood,
already disposed to writing prose romance, would feel the charm of
historical association and naturally catch impulse from the past,
especially if, as in the case of Hawthorne, the history of his ancestors
was inwoven with its good and evil. It is not surprising therefore that,
as Hawthorne had begun, though unsuccessfully, with tales of his native
land, he should continue to work the vein; and, to adopt what seems to
be a reasonable inference, he now gathered from his materials a new
series which he knew as "Provincial Tales," in which it remains doubtful
how much of the old survived, for the burnt manuscripts of youth have
something of the phoenix in their ashes.