England Magazine," October, 1835, gave a single line to the author,
speaking of him as "the most pleasing writer of fanciful prose, except
Irving, in the country;" and in November of the same year, in a review
of the same work, Chorley, the critic of the London "Athenaeum,"
commended his tales and gave extracts from them. This was the first
substantial praise of a nature to encourage the author.
In Hawthorne's own eyes the stories and sketches had become a source of
depression, and the difficulties he had met with in getting out a book
had especially irritated him. It might be thought, perhaps, that he had
destroyed a good deal of his work, to judge by his own words, but this
seems unlikely, although he may have rewritten some of the earlier
pieces. The tale of "The Devil in Manuscript" is taken to be the
autobiographical parable, at least, commemorating the burning of the
"Seven Tales of my Native Land;" but it was written some years later,
and reflects his general experience as a discouraged storyteller, and it
contains touches of bitterness more marked than occur elsewhere. Its
personal character is emphasized by the hero's name, "Oberon," a
familiar signature Hawthorne used in his letters to his old college
friend, Bridge. The following passages are distinctly autobiographical,
and afford the most vivid view of the young author's inner life:--
"You cannot conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has
had on me. I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid
reputation. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by
aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten
path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude,--a
solitude in the midst of men,--where nobody wishes for what I do, nor
thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are
ashes, perhaps I shall be as I was before they had existence. Moreover,
the sacrifice is less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish
them....
"But the devil of the business is this. These people have put me so out
of conceit with the tales, that I loathe the very thought of them, and
actually experience a physical sickness of the stomach, whenever I
glance at them on the table. I tell you there is a demon in them! I
anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing them in the blaze; such as I
should feel in taking vengeance on an enemy, or destroying something
noxious....
"But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn over these leaves!
This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a
starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air, I became all
soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the
Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself during a dark
and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the
wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a
dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes
shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight: they would not
depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and
feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!...
"Sometimes my ideas were like precious stones under the earth, requiring
toil to dig them up, and care to polish and brighten them; but often a
delicious stream of thought would gush out upon the page at once, like
water sparkling up suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I
gnawed my pen hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil,
as if there were a wall of ice between me and my subject."
"Do you now perceive a corresponding difference," inquired I, "between
the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the
mind?"
"No," said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. "I find no
traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My
treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture,
painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded
and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and
humorous in a dream,--and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am
awake....
"I will burn them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have
me a damned author--To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect,
and faint praise, bestowed, for pity's sake, against the giver's
conscience! A hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous
thoughts! An outlaw from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes
every careless foot might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered
scornfully in death! Am I to bear all this, when yonder fire will insure
me from the whole? No! There go the tales! May my hand wither when it
would write another!"
These extracts set forth the mixed emotions of young authorship in a
life-like manner. They have the stamp of personal experience. A
supplement to them is found in one of his more obscure pieces, "The
Journal of a Solitary Man," in which Hawthorne bids farewell to that
eidolon of himself which he had embodied as "Oberon." He describes the
character as an imaginary friend, from whose journals he gives extracts;
but the veil thrown over his own personality is transparent.
"Merely skimming the surface of life, I know nothing, by my own
experience, of its deep and warm realities. I have achieved none of
those objects which the instinct of mankind especially prompts them to
pursue, and the accomplishment of which must therefore beget a native
satisfaction. The truly wise, after all their speculations, will be led
into the common path, and, in homage to the human nature that pervades
them, will gather gold, and till the earth, and set out trees, and build
a house. But I have scorned such wisdom. I have rejected, also, the
settled, sober, careful gladness of a man by his own fireside, with
those around him whose welfare is committed to his trust, and all their
guidance to his fond authority. Without influence among serious affairs,
my footsteps were not imprinted on the earth, but lost in air; and I
shall leave no son to inherit my share of life, with a better sense of
its privileges and duties, when his father should vanish like a bubble;
so that few mortals, even the humblest and the weakest, have been such
ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I must. Even a
young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand vagrant fantasies,
I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to loneliness
throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my soul has never
married itself to the soul of woman.
"Such are the repinings of one who feels, too late, that the sympathies
of his nature have avenged themselves upon him. They have prostrated,
with a joyless life and the prospect of a reluctant death, my selfish
purpose to keep aloof from mortal disquietudes, and be a pleasant idler
among care-stricken and laborious men. I have other regrets, too,
savoring more of my old spirit. The time has been when I meant to visit
every region of the earth, except the poles and Central Africa. I had a
strange longing to see the Pyramids. To Persia and Arabia, and all the
gorgeous East, I owed a pilgrimage for the sake of their magic tales.
And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep
would not be quiet in the grave unless I should return, as it were, to
my home of past ages, and see the very cities, and castles, and
battle-fields of history, and stand within the holy gloom of its
cathedrals, and kneel at the shrines of its immortal poets, there
asserting myself their hereditary countryman. This feeling lay among the
deepest in my heart. Yet, with this homesickness for the fatherland, and
all these plans of remote travel,--which I yet believe that my peculiar
instinct impelled me to form, and upbraided me for not accomplishing,--
the utmost limit of my wanderings has been little more than six
hundred miles from my native village. Thus, in whatever way I consider
my life, or what must be termed such, I cannot feel as if I had lived
at all.
"I am possessed, also, with the thought that I have never yet discovered
the real secret of my powers; that there has been a mighty treasure
within my reach, a mine of gold beneath my feet, worthless because I
have never known how to seek for it; and for want of perhaps one
fortunate idea, I am to die
'Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.'"
"Oberon" is represented as in the position of the "Story-Teller," and
leaves home because of some fancied oppression; he visits Niagara, of
which he gives some scenes as well as other anecdotes of his pedestrian
journey, but he falls ill and determines to return home to die. As he
approaches his birthplace he pleases himself with the fancy that there
is some youth there whom he can teach by the lesson of his life, and he
moralizes in a vein in which self-criticism may be read between the
lines:--
"He shall be taught by my life, and by my death, that the world is a sad
one for him who shrinks from its sober duties. My experience shall warn
him to adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to,
that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen
earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an
eccentric path, nor, by stepping aside from the highway of human
affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a
text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an
American."
Finally he describes the power he has obtained by the use of his
imagination, in the view of life:--
"I have already a spiritual sense of human nature, and see deeply into
the hearts of mankind, discovering what is hidden from the wisest. The
loves of young men and virgins are known to me, before the first kiss,
before the whispered word, with the birth of the first sigh. My glance
comprehends the crowd, and penetrates the breast of the solitary man. I
think better of the world than formerly, more generously of its virtues,
more mercifully of its faults, with a higher estimate of its present
happiness, and brighter hopes of its destiny."
These passages from "The Devil in Manuscript" and "The Journal of a
Solitary Man" may fairly be taken as a contemporary general account of
Hawthorne's secret life in the years before his own "Note-Books" begin.
The latter afford rather a view of his existence, from day to day. The
earliest of them which has survived opens in the summer of 1835, and
while containing scraps of information that he had jotted down as in a
commonplace book, and also brief memoranda of ideas for tales and
sketches, it also keeps record of his observations in his walks and
drives, and thus pictures his outward life. He lived at Salem still, in
the habits of seclusion that had always obtained in the house, and saw
little of mankind. Society, if he sought it at all, was found for him
among common people at the tavern or by the wayside, and was of the sort
that he enjoyed on his summer journeys. But solitude was his normal
state. This was indulged in his own room; or else he took a morning or
afternoon to wander out to the near Salem beaches and points, or to the
pleasant lanes of Danvers or across the river to the upland or seashore
of Beverly. He occasionally drove a dozen miles or more to Ipswich,
Nahant, or Andover. What he saw, however, was only rustic life of the
countryside, or the natural views of wood and sky and sea, with the
nearer objects to attract particular attention, of which he has left so
many minute descriptions. His observation at such times, though without
the naturalist's preoccupation,--rather with the poet's or
novelist's,--was as keen and detailed as Thoreau's. These Note-Books,
however, do not open his familiar life except as a record of changing
seasons and of detached thoughts to be worked up in fiction. Many of his
later tales are found here in the germ, in 1835 and for the year or two
after; but the diary is not so much a confidant as it afterward became.
The time had now come when he must make some further step in
establishing himself in some means of livelihood. He never showed much
power of initiative, and at every stage was materially aided by his
friends in obtaining employment and position. In this instance it was
Goodrich again who gave him opportunity. It was not a great chance, but
it was doubtless all Goodrich had to offer. He procured for him the
editorship of a small publication which undertook to disseminate popular
information, called "The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge," and published by the Bewick Company, at Boston, with which
Goodrich had some connection through his interests in engraving. His
salary was to be five hundred dollars, and he entered on his duties
about the beginning of 1836. The change was welcomed by his friends, or
such of them as were still near enough to him to know of his affairs;
and from this time his college mates, Pierce, Cilley, and especially
Bridge, interested themselves in his fortunes. Bridge, writing from
Havana, February 20, 1836, congratulated him, as did also Pierce from
Washington, on the intelligence concerning his "late engagement in
active and responsible business," and particularly on his having got
"out of Salem," which he credits with "a peculiar dulness;" and in later
letters he continues to hearten him, subscribes for his magazine, reads
and praises it, in the most cordial and cheering way. But the event did
not justify these hopes and prognostications of a better fortune. The
magazine was, after all, the merest hack-work. Hawthorne, with the aid
of his sister Elizabeth, wrote most of it, compiling the matter from
books or utilizing his own notes of travel. In it appeared, of such
pieces as have found a place in his works, "An Ontario Steamboat," "The
Duston Family," "Nature of Sleep," "Bells," besides much that has been
suffered to repose in its scarce pages. The material, though
conscientiously dealt with according to the measure of time at his
disposal, is the slightest in interest, and the least re-worked from the
raw state, of any of his writings. He had, however, little temptation to
do more for the magazine than its limited scope required. He found great
difficulty in collecting his salary, and for this he blames Goodrich,
who had made promises of pay which he kept very imperfectly. Hawthorne
states that of forty-five dollars he was to receive on coming to Boston
he got only a small part, and on June 3, 1836, he received a notice, in
answer to a dunning letter, that the Bewick Company had made an
assignment, and he would have to wait until the settlement. Shortly
after this he gave up the editorship, and returned to Salem. The
incident was unfortunate, as in the course of it he developed a great
deal of irritation toward Goodrich, who was his best friend in practical
ways, and broke off communication with him. This, however, did not last
long; and Goodrich offered him the job of compiling a "Peter Parley"
book, for one hundred dollars. He wrote this, also with the aid of his
sister Elizabeth, and gave her the money. The volume was "Peter Parley's
Universal History on the basis of Geography," [Footnote: _Peter
Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography._ For the Use of
Families. Illustrated by Maps and Engravings. Boston: American
Stationers' Company. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo, cloth. 2 vols., pp.
380, 374.] and was published in 1837, and had a very large sale,
amounting finally, it is said, to more than a million copies.
In the mean time, Hawthorne had found cause of complaint also in his
relations with "The New England Magazine." This periodical had come to
an end in 1835, and at the close of that year was merged in "The
American Monthly Magazine" of New York, whither Park Benjamin, its
editor, went. It paid, according to its own statement, only one dollar a
page for contributions, but it appears to have been in arrears with
Hawthorne at the time of the change. Bridge states that when Hawthorne,
in consequence, stopped writing for it, the editor "begged for a mass of
manuscript in his possession, as yet unpublished, and it was scornfully
bestowed. 'Thus,' wrote Hawthorne, 'has this man, who would be
considered a Mścenas, taken from a penniless writer material
incomparably better than any his own brain can supply.'" In this
Hawthorne, if correctly reported, was scarcely just. Park Benjamin, who
had a violent quarrel with Goodrich, exempted Hawthorne from any adverse
criticism, even when writing a short notice of "The Token," and always
spoke well of him. The manuscripts he carried to New York could have
been but few and slight, unless they were burned in the fire which
destroyed the archives of the "American Monthly Magazine" not long
afterwards. At all events, the only paper by Hawthorne in that magazine
appears to have been "Old Ticonderoga," a note of travel, published in
February, 1836, unless "The Journal of a Solitary Man," which did not
appear till July, 1837, be added as one of the left-over manuscripts,
and also a paper, never yet attributed to him but which seems clearly
from his pen, "A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather," anonymously
published in May, 1836. Whatever the coolness was between Hawthorne and
Benjamin, it was overcome by the end of the year, and the quarrel was
made up. In 1836, too, he kept his temper with Goodrich sufficiently to
allow him to contribute to "The Token" of 1837, published in the
preceding fall, a group of tales, eight in number: "Monsieur du Miroir,"
as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple;" "Mrs. Bullfrog," as by the
author of "The Wives of the Dead;" "Sunday at Home" and "The Man of
Adamant," both as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," "David Swan, A
Fantasy," "Fancy's Show Box, A Morality," and "The Prophetic Pictures,"
all anonymously; and "The Great Carbuncle," as by the author of "The
Wedding Knell." These papers constituted one third of the volume, and
for them he was paid a dollar a page, or one hundred and eight dollars,
which may be regarded therefore as the normal price he received from
Goodrich. Two of these tales are on subjects set down in his "Note-Book"
of 1835; the others are perhaps earlier in conception. These tales were
his substantial work for the year.
They gave occasion for what appears to have been the first public
mention of Nathaniel Hawthorne as the author who had hitherto disguised
himself under so many descriptions. It is not surprising that his name
was unknown, for he had sedulously suppressed it. His sister, referring
to these years, said, "He kept his very existence a secret so far as
possible." He had never signed an article in the twelve years since
leaving college. He had preferred to become known in "the author of
Waverley" style, but the charm did not work. In "The Token" he was, in
the main, the author of "Sights from a Steeple" or "The Gentle Boy;" in
"The New England Magazine" he was the author of "The Gray Champion." But
now his anonymity was to be dissipated in a friendly if rude way. It
was, doubtless, Park Benjamin, in New York, who wrote thus of these last
tales in "The Token," in "The American Monthly Magazine" for October,
1836:--
"The author of 'Sights from a Steeple,' of 'The Gentle Boy,' and of 'The
Wedding Knell,' we believe to be one and the same individual. The
assertion may sound very bold, yet we hesitate not to call this author
second to no man in this country, except Washington Irving. We refer
simply to romance writing; and trust no wise man of Gotham will talk of
Dewey, and Channing, and Everett, and Verplanck. Yes, to us the style of
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE is more pleasing, more fascinating, than any one's
except their dear Geoffry Crayon! This mention of the real name of our
author may be reprobated by him. His modesty is the best proof of his
true excellence. How different does such a man appear to us from one who
anxiously writes his name on every public post! We have read a
sufficient number of his pieces to make the reputation of a dozen of our
Yankee scribblers; and yet how few have heard the name above written! He
does not even cover himself with the same anonymous shield at all times;
but liberally gives the praise, which, concentrated on one, would be
great, to several unknowns. If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his
various tales and essays into one volume, we can assure him that their
success would be brilliant--certainly in England, perhaps in this
country."
It was in this way that the world began to hear of Mr. Nathaniel
Hawthorne, of Salem; but it was still long before the public knew him.
Meanwhile, at the very moment of the disclosure, he was in the lowest
ebb of discouragement, in spirits, that he ever knew. It is to this time
that his gloomiest memories attached themselves. He had tried to enter
the world, he had even tried to earn a living, and had failed. Cilley,
his old college mate, was just elected to Congress from Maine, Pierce
was just elected Senator from New Hampshire, and Longfellow had found
the ways of literature as smooth as the primrose path to the everlasting
bonfire. Hawthorne was of a noble disposition, and glad of the fortunes
that came to these of his circle in boyhood at Bowdoin; but it was not
in human nature to be oblivious of the difference in his own lot. To
this mood must be referred the dream he described afterwards as one that
recurred through life:--
"For a long, long while I have been occasionally visited with a singular
dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have
been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even
at school,--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably
long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries
have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and
depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This
dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one
of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for
twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and
left me behind."
Under another picture, he describes this same state in the preface to
"The Snow Image," dedicated to Bridge:--
"I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a
shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and
the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the
entangling depths of my obscurity. And there, perhaps, I should be
sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks,
and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if
it had not been for you. For it was through your interposition--and
that, moreover, unknown to himself--that your early friend was brought
before the public, somewhat more prominently than heretofore, in the
first volume of 'Twice-Told Tales.'"
Bridge had been, in fact, his only confidant from boyish days. To him he
showed the misery of "hope deferred" that then was in his heart, and to
him allowed himself to speak in words that went beyond his steady sense
of the situation, though representing moments of low courage. "I'm a
doomed man," he wrote to him, "and over I must go."