characteristically expressed, the idea of isolation is common to all;
like the secrecy of men's bosoms, this solitude in life is a fixed idea
in his imagination, an integral part of life as it was viewed by him,
and he seldom freed his attention from it even temporarily. On the other
hand, sin, conscience, evil, though their realm is felt to be a
neighboring province, are not here directly dealt with. His probings in
that sphere belong to a later time. These tales, like the others, are
studies of life, not of the evil principle by itself as a thing of
special interest; they view life as lying under a shadow, it is true,
but this shadow is their atmosphere, not their world. The point should
be defined, perhaps more explicitly: the Calvinism of New England, its
interest in the perversion of man's will, his sinful state, and the
mysterious modes of salvation, is not the region of Hawthorne's
imagination, as here disclosed. It is enough to note this, here, as
bearing on his representative character. The most surprising thing,
however, is that his genius is found to be so purely objective; he
himself emphasized the objectivity of his art. From the beginning, as
has been said, he had no message, no inspiration welling up within him,
no inward life of his own that sought expression. He was not even
introspective. He was primarily a moralist, an observer of life, which
he saw as a thing of the outside, and he was keen in observation, cool,
interested. If there was any mystery in his tales, it was in the object,
not in the author's breast; he makes no confessions either direct or
indirect,--he describes the thing he sees. He maintained that his tales
were perfectly intelligible, and he meant this to apply not only to
style but to theme. It is best to cite his own testimony. His personal
temper is indicated in the fragmentary phrase in the "Note-Books;" "not
that I have any love of mystery, but because I abhor it," he writes; and
again in the oft-quoted passage, he describes perfectly the way in which
his nature cooperated with his art to give the common ground of human
sympathy, but without anything peculiar to himself being called into
play:--
"A cloudy veil stretches over the abyss of my nature. I have, however,
no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees
through my heart, and, if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he
is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any mortal
who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my
depths. But he must find his own way there. I can neither guide nor
enlighten him. It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given
the objectivity to my writings; and when people think that I am pouring
myself out in a tale or an essay, I am merely telling what is common to
human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them,
not they with me."
In the preface to "Twice-Told Tales," which however was prefixed to a
late edition and may be fairly held to cover his view of his tales in
general, he directs attention to their objectivity in another form:--
"The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound; but it
is rather more remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design
on the writer's part to make them so. They have none of the abstruseness
of idea or obscurity of expression which mark the written communications
of a solitary mind with itself. They never need translation. It is, in
fact, the style of a man of society. Every sentence, so far as it
embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody
who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book
in a proper mood."
A little further on he adds his statement of what the sketches both are
and are not:--
"They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart
(had it been so, they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and
permanently valuable), but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful
ones, to open an intercourse with the world."
To Hawthorne himself these tales seemed so external; and his analysis,
however much may be allowed for modesty in the statement, appears to be
true.
Hawthorne left himself out of his work, so far as a man can. Indeed, his
own life was neither vigorous nor one of much variety of faculty,
outside of his art. He had the indolence of the meditative habit, or of
the artistic nature, if one chooses to call it so. He clearly spent a
great deal of time doing nothing in particular; he read, observed the
world of the passing seasons, made long memoranda of nature and human
nature and short notes of ideas for tales and sketches, and had in fact
large leisure, except in the years when he was in the Boston Custom
House, and he was not without leisure even then. He shows no inclination
toward scholarship, but was a desultory reader of English, with some
French; he had no intellectual interests, apparently, of a philosophical
kind; the aloofness in which he stood from Longfellow and Emerson, for
example, was not shyness of nature wholly, but stood for the real
aloofness of his mind from their ways of life, from the things that
absorbed them in their poetic and speculative activity; it is but
another example, if it is added that he took no interest in public
affairs, truly speaking. He was a Democrat, but that does not fully
account for his indifference to those philanthropies which his literary
friends shared; for, as a party man, he was not zealous. His nature was
torpid in all these ways; there was dullness of temperament,
indifference to all except the one thing in which he truly lived, his
artistic nature; and here he was an observer, using an objective method
with as little indebtedness to personal experience as ever artist had.
His reserve amounted to suppression; and, in fact, his personal life was
not of the sort that must find a voice. He seemed to feel that the
"Twice-Told Tales," at least, which he described as "memorials of
tranquil and not unhappy years," had contracted some faintness of life
from their author's mind, as if a low vital tone characterized them,
owing to his incapacity to yield himself with fullness of power even to
this reflective or creative art:--
"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a
shade,--the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself
through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion
there is sentiment; and, 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. Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the
Author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can
hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humor; the tenderest woman, one
would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. The
book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear,
brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the
sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages."
This is, of course, the natural overstatement of an author whose work
has gone from him and seems less vital because he has outlived it; but
nevertheless it contains sound judgment as to the limitations of his
art.
But notwithstanding Hawthorne's objectivity and reserve, of which he
justly makes so much, and the low vital tone of his work, resulting from
whatever cause, he did not altogether escape from himself in his art;
his shadow followed him into that world. The "clear brown twilight
atmosphere" of which he speaks was an affair of temperament; it exhaled
from his personality. That recurring idea of isolation, the sense of the
secrecy of men's bosoms, the perception of life as always lying in the
shadow that falls on it, proceeded from predilections of his own,
differentiating him from other men; there may have been no very perilous
stuff in his breast, nothing to confess or record peculiar to himself in
act or experience, no intensity of self-life, but there was this
temperament of the solitary brooder upon life. In that common fund of
human nature which he said was the basis of sympathy between himself and
the world, there was also some specialization, which is rightly ascribed
to his race qualities. He took practically no interest in life except as
seen under its moral aspects as a life of the soul; and this absorption
in the moral sphere was due to his being a child of New England. It was
his inheritance from Puritanism. What distinguished Puritan life and the
people who grew up under its influences was an intense self-
consciousness of life in the soul,--in a word, spirituality of life;
and Hawthorne, as he came to find himself in his growth, disclosed
one form of this spirituality both reflectively and imaginatively in his
writings, the form that lived in him. The moral world, the supremacy of
the soul's interests, how life fared in the soul, was his region; he
thought about nothing else. He desired to present what he saw through
the medium of romantic art, but he was never able to be wholly content
with this medium; he desired to make assurance doubly sure by expressing
it in its abstract moral terms also, either explicitly in an idea which
shows through the story, or else imperfectly in an allegory or symbol
where the moral element should be definitely felt in its intellectual,
its unartistic form. The fact that this abstract element really
outvalues the tale and its characters is shown, for example, by the lack
of interest one feels in the future of his characters, in what becomes
of them at the end of the story; they are lost from the mind, because
their function is fulfilled in illustrating an idea; and, that once
conveyed, the characters cease to have life,--they disappear, like the
man of science or the artist of the beautiful, into the background of
the general world; they fade out. It is by this abstract moral element
that Hawthorne's art is universalized.
His manner, it must be acknowledged, retains provinciality; in the best
of the tales, just as in those sketches of observation in Salem, there
is something countrified in the mode of handling, something archaic and
stiff in the literary mould, something awkward, cramped, and bare in the
way his art works in its main motions, however felicitous in word and
fall is the garment of prose as language. There is a lack of urban ease,
certainty, and perfection of manner. The limitation, however, stops
there. The world in which the artist works is the universal world of
man's nature, just as much as is Shakespeare's. He escapes from
provincialism here, in the substance, because he was a New Englander,
not in spite of that fact; for the spirituality which is the central
fact of New England life itself escapes from provincialism, being a pure
expression of that Christianity in which alone true cosmopolitanism is
found, of that faith which presents mankind as one and indivisible.
Hence arises in Hawthorne a second distinctly Puritan trait, his
democracy. He looks only at the soul; all outward distinctions of rank
and place, fortune, pride, poverty, disappear as unconcerning things; he
sees all men as in the light of the judgment day. He does this
naturally, too, almost without knowing it, so inbred in him is that
preconception of the Christian soul, whose moral fortune constitutes
alone the significance of life. In these ways the race element, the New
England element, is shown; from it springs the moral prepossession of
his art, its universal quality, and its democratic substance. This was
the nucleus of inheritance and breeding, which together with his
temperament governs his art from within, even amid all its personal
reserve and its objectivity. The gradually increasing power of these
elements gave his tales greater intensity and reach, and was to lift his
romances to another level; for what was inchoate and experimental in the
tales, in many ways, was to receive a new and greater development in his
later work, on which his world-wide fame rests. The tales had not
brought him fame; as yet, his audience was small, and confined to New
England. He had advanced so far as to seem like one talking to his
friends, instead of, as at first, one talking to himself in a dark
place, as he said; but recognition, such as he desired, he had not
obtained. There is certainly some irritation in his repeated references
to the early neglect he felt from the public, at the time when, as he
says, he "was for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in
America." He thought this lack of appreciation palsied his efforts, so
that he did not do what he might have done, and it may have been the
case; but before the days when he wrote "The Artist of the Beautiful" he
must have learned that one must serve the Muses for themselves alone.
V.
THE SCARLET LETTER.
Amid the hard conditions of his life at Concord Hawthorne had decided to
place himself again under the aegis of his political friends to earn his
living as a public officer. He had no confidence in his literary
capacity as a means of livelihood. He found himself, he says, unable to
write more than a third of the time, and he composed slowly and with
difficulty; he refers more than once to that hatred of the pen which
belongs to a tired writer, and he was frequently indisposed to
composition for long periods; and, in any event, he thought that what he
wrote must appeal necessarily to so small an audience that, should he
continue to devote himself exclusively to a literary career, he must do
so as a professional hack-writer of children's books, translations,
newspaper essays, and such miscellaneous drudgery. His habits, formed in
his years at Salem, included an element of large leisure, an indulgence
of one's self in times and seasons of mental activity, a certain
lethargy of life; and he had not shown any power of sustained production
in the monotony of daily work for bread. He felt a dread of such
necessity. "God keep me," he writes to Hillard before this time, "from
ever being really a writer for bread!" The only alternative for him was
office-holding.
The election of Polk to the Presidency gave his friends the opening, and
the campaign to secure an appointment was begun. Bridge, then living in
bachelor quarters at Portsmouth Navy Yard, conceived the rather daring
idea of a sailor house-party with Hawthorne as its centre, for the
purpose of making him acquainted with the political group in whose hands
influence lay; and, if it be remembered that the Hawthornes had not
spent an evening out for years, and still continued their seclusive
life, the proposition may well seem a bold stroke. The party, however,
gathered in the summer of 1845; Franklin Pierce and his wife, Senator
Atherton and his wife, of New Hampshire, and Senator Fairfield of Maine,
to mention the notables, were the principal guests, and there were
several others, making a greater company than Hawthorne had been thrown
with since he lodged at Brook Farm. It was an informal naval picnic,
apparently, of two or three weeks, and Bridge thought that its main
object of popularizing Hawthorne with the Senators was attained. The
point of attack was the Salem Post Office, but this proved
impracticable, and attention was turned to the Custom House, where
either the surveyorship or the naval office might be got. Meanwhile
Bancroft offered him a clerkship in the Charlestown Navy Yard, which he
declined. He was sufficiently sure of success to make him remove from
Concord to Salem to reside, and early in October he was established
again in the old chamber of his youth, having decided to share his
mother's house for the present. He spent his time in writing the
introductory sketch of the Old Manse, and in seeing the "Mosses" through
the press. The appointment lagged, owing to local complications in the
party, but an arrangement was finally made which was agreeable to all
concerned, so that Hawthorne took office without enmity from
disappointed candidates who would have benefited if he had not appeared
upon the scene backed by what must have been locally regarded as outside
interference. He received notice of his nomination as surveyor on March
23, 1846, and it was described "as decidedly popular with the party," as
well as with men of letters and the community; he soon took charge of
the office, those who had made way for him were appointed inspectors
under him, and he entered on the enjoyment of a salary of twelve hundred
dollars.
It was indeed a singular chance of life that had transformed the recluse
romancer of the silent Herbert Street house, where for all the years of
early manhood he had lived unnoticed and almost unknown, into the high
business official of the Custom House, the lofty neighbor of that humble
dwelling, on whose wide granite steps, columned portico, and emblematic
eagle, with the flag over all, he must have looked so often with never a
thought that there was to be his distinguished place in the world of
men; and yet Hawthorne, on coming into this office, seems to have been
pleased with a sense of making a part of Salem as his ancestors had done
in the old days. He did not love Salem, but genuine truth gives body to
those passages of autobiography in which he claims his parentage and
kinship and seems writing the obituary of his race there, in connection
with his memories of the Custom House. He knew himself a story-teller
whom these ancestors would little approve, for all his mask as the
surveyor, but in his official place he felt himself a Salemite with some
peculiar thoroughness; and, familiar as the passage is, no other words
can take the place of his own expression of this sense of rootedness in
the soil, which is so close to the secret of his genius:--
"This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a
hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical
aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly
with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural
beauty,--its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but
only tame,--its long and lazy street lounging wearisomely through the
whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one
end, and a view of the almshouse at the other,--such being the features
of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental
attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet, though invariably
happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which,
in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The
sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my
family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a
quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name,
made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which
has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and
died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no
small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame
wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore,
the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust
for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent
transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it
desirable to know.
"But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account
of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned
progenitor,--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode
the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure,
as a man of war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name
is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator,
judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits,
both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the
Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an
incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will
last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds,
although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting
spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches,
that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So
deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street
burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly
to dust!... Let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their
nature have intertwined themselves with mine.
"Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these
two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here,--
always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced
by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand,
after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so
much as putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have
sunk almost out of sight, as old houses, here and there about the
streets, get covered halfway to the eaves by the accumulation of new
soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, 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 grandsire. 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. This long
connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial,
creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite
independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that
surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came
himself from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has
little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the
oysterlike tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third
century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations
have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him;
that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead
level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the dullest of
social atmospheres,--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see
or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as
powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been
in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that
the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been
familiar here--ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his
grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street--might still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old
town.... On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill
a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better,
have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me."