have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses;
as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!'"
This is in the form of dialogue; but Hawthorne's own attitude toward
reform is clearly disclosed in the analytic passages in which he
discusses Holgrave, though it is observable that he embodies no adverse
criticism upon it in the character itself, as he was to do in his next
novel. He appears to take the same view of reform that is sometimes
found in respect to prayer, that it has great subjective advantages and
is good for the soul, but is futile in the world of fact. It was well
for Holgrave, he says, to think as he did; this enthusiasm "would serve
to keep his youth pure and make his aspirations high," and he goes on
with his own judgment on the matter:--
"And when, with the years settling down more weightily upon him, his
early faith should be modified by inevitable experience, it would be
with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still
have faith in man's brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the
better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf; and
the haughty faith, with which he began life, would be well bartered for
a far humbler one at its close, in discerning that man's best directed
effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of
realities."
This may be profound truth, as it is intended to be; but it needs no
penetration to see here a man whose sympathies with all kinds of those
"come-outers" who then multiplied exceedingly in his neighborhood, would
be infinitesimal. He had not, however, yet engaged with this problem so
closely as he was to do. So far one would discern only that fatalistic
and pessimistic trait indicated by "The Scarlet Letter" and found in
"The House of the Seven Gables" in the hard conclusion that there was no
remedy for the harm that had been done in the long past. The curse was
done with now, it is true, by the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave, but
for Clifford and Hepzibah there was no amends for the lives the dead
Judge had ruined by the aid of an imperfect and blundering human law;
they were wrecks, so Hawthorne represents it,--they had missed life's
happiness and were now in hospital, as it were, till they should die;
but in their lives evil had been triumphant, had made them innocent
victims, and for this there was neither help nor compensation. The
irremediableness of the breach that sin makes in the soul had been
preached in "The Scarlet Letter;" here is the other half of the truth,
as Hawthorne saw it, the irremediableness of the injury done to others.
So far as the book has ethical meaning it lies in the implacability of
the uncanceled wrong lingering as a curse, destroying the bad and
blasting the good descendants of the house, and presenting the mystery
of evil as something positive, persisting, and unchecked in its career.
The moral element, nevertheless, lies well in the background and is
overlaid with romantic and legendary features; its hatefulness in the
main story is not the principal theme; and the novel pleases and
succeeds, not by these traits, but by its humble realism, its delicate
character-drawing, and that ancestral power which makes it the story of
a house long lived in.
On finishing this work Hawthorne took that rest which he always required
after any great intellectual exertion, and spent the time with his
children and wife. His second daughter, Rose, was born in the spring. A
happier childhood seldom gets into books than that which appears in the
reminiscences of this small family, whether they were in Salem, or
Berkshire, or Liverpool. Hawthorne lived much with his children, and he
had the habit of observing them minutely and writing down the history of
their little lives in his journals. All winter their play and
recreation, their sayings and adventures and habits, diversified the
Berkshire days; they thrived on "the blue nectared air," and had rosy
cheeks and abounding spirits, and their heads were stuffed with fairy
tales. The year was a glorious one in Julian's memory, and the page he
makes of it may be taken as a leaf of his father's life at home,
disclosing his daily life and home-nature, as it was through years of
domestic happiness. Hawthorne, indeed, is never so attractive as when
seen with the light of his children's eyes upon him:--
"He made those spring days memorable to his children. He made them boats
to sail on the lake, and kites to fly in the air; he took them fishing
and flower-gathering, and tried (unsuccessfully for the present) to
teach them swimming. Mr. Melville used to ride or drive up, in the
evenings, with his great dog, and the children used to ride on the dog's
back. In short, the place was made a paradise for the small people. In
the previous autumn, and still more in the succeeding one, they all went
nutting, and filled a certain disused oven in the house with such bags
upon bags of nuts as not a hundred children could have devoured during
the ensuing winter. The children's father displayed extraordinary
activity and energy on these nutting expeditions; standing on the ground
at the foot of a tall walnut-tree, he would bid them turn their backs
and cover their eyes with their hands; then they would hear, for a few
seconds, a sound of rustling and scrambling, and, immediately after, a
shout, whereupon they would uncover their eyes and gaze upwards; and lo!
there was their father--who but an instant before, as it seemed, had
been beside them--swaying and soaring high aloft on the topmost
branches, a delightful mystery and miracle. And then down would rattle
showers of ripe nuts, which the children would diligently pick up, and
stuff into their capacious bags. It was all a splendid holiday; and they
cannot remember when their father was not their playmate, or when they
ever desired or imagined any other playmate than he."
The spirit of such a fatherhood, and all this delight in the children's
world, was distilled for the great multitude of other children in "The
Wonder-Book" and its sequel "Tanglewood Tales." From very early in his
career he had written charming childhood sketches, of which "Little
Annie's Ramble" and "Little Daffydown-dilly" are easily recalled; and
his association with his wife's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, had directed
his attention particularly to literature for children, and
"Grandfather's Chair" had been the result. Whenever he fell into
discouragement in respect to the earning capacity of his pen, his first
thought was that he would write children's books for a living. For some
time he had meditated a volume which should adapt the classical tales of
mythology to the understanding and interests of such children as his
own, and he now put the plan in execution. He began "The Wonder-Book"
with the summer, and finished it at one effort in six weeks of June and
July; the ease with which he accomplished the task indicates how
pleasurable it was, and well adapted to his sympathies and powers; and
the result was very successful, a book of sunshine from cover to cover.
It [Footnote: _A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys_. By Nathaniel
Hawthorne, with Engravings by Baker from designs by Billings. Boston:
Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 16mo. Pp. vi. 256.] was published in the
fall, and was followed after an interval by its second part, "Tanglewood
Tales." [Footnote: _Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys_. Being a
Second Wonder-Book. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Fine Illustrations.
Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1853. 16mo. Pp. 336.]
A multitude of children have loved these books, for whom their very
names are a part of the golden haze of memory; and, in view of the
association of Hawthorne's genius and temperament with quite other
themes and the darker element in grown lives, this band of children make
a kind of halo round his figure. Whether the thing done should have been
so done, whether Greek should have been turned into Gothic, is a foolish
matter. To please a child is warrant enough for any work; and here
romantic fancy plays around the beautiful forms and noble suggestion of
old heroic and divine life, and marries them to the hillside and
fireside of New England childhood with the naturalness of a fairy
enchantment; these tales are truly transplanted into the minds of the
little ones with whose youngest tendrils of imagination they are
intertwined. To tear apart such tender fibres were a poor mode of
criticism, for the living fact better speaks for itself; and, in the
case of the present writer, whose earliest recollection of the great
world of literature, his first dawn-glimpse of it, lying in dreamy
beauty, was Bellerophon's pool, the memory is potent and yields an
appreciation not to be distilled in any other alembic. Few facts are
more fixed in his memory than that he was the child who watched the pool
for the tall boy with the shining bridle who was his strange friend from
another world. If to wake and feed the imagination and charm it, and
fill the budding mind with the true springtime of the soul's life in
beautiful images, noble thoughts, and brooding moods that have in them
the infinite suggestion, be success for a writer who would minister to
the childish heart, few books can be thought to equal these; and the
secret of it lies in the wondering sense which Hawthorne had of the
mystical in childhood, of that element of purity in being which is felt
also in his reverence for womanhood, and which, whether in child or
woman, was typical of the purity of the soul itself,--in a word, the
spiritual sense of life. His imagination, living in the child-sphere,
pure, primitive, inexperienced, found only sunshine there, the freshness
of the early world; nor are there any children's books so dipped in
morning dews.
On finishing "The Wonder-Book" Hawthorne devoted himself to life with
Julian for three weeks, during the absence of the rest of the family on
a visit, and wrote a daily account of it with such fullness that this
history would fill a hundred pages of print. Some passages have been
published, and they illustrate how this amusement had taken the place of
the earlier note-books which recorded his observations of ordinary and
even trivial life round about him. There may be some wonder that a mind
of Hawthorne's powers should find its play in such literary
journalizing, and the inference is ready that, when not at work in
imagination, he was mentally unoccupied; his intellectual interests
were, however, always limited in scope, and his readings in the evening
to his wife were confined to pure literature; outside of such books he
apparently had no intellectual life, and his thoughts and affections
found their exercise in the domestic circle just as his eyes were
engaged with the look of the landscape, the incidents of the road, and
the changes of the weather. His capacity for idleness was great, and as
his vigor had already somewhat waned his periods of repose were long. He
undertook no new work during the summer, but prepared for the press a
new volume of tales, "The Snow Image," [Footnote: _The Snow Image and
other Twice-Told Tales_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor,
Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo, brown cloth. Pp. 273. The contents and
source of the tales were as follows: The Snow Image, _International
Review_, November, 1850; The Great Stone Face, _National Era_,
January 24, 1850; Main Street, _∆sthetic Papers_, 1849; Ethan
Brand, _Dollar Magazine_, May, 1851; A Bell's Biography,
_Knickerbocker Magazine_, March, 1837; Sylph Etherege, Boston
_Token_, 1838; The Canterbury Pilgrims, Boston _Token_, 1833;
No. I, Old News, _New England Magazine_, February, 1835; No. II,
The Old French War, March, 1835; No. III, The Old Tory, May, 1835; The
Man of Adamant, Boston _Token_, 1837; The Devil in Manuscript,
_New England Magazine_, May, 1835; John Inglefield's Thanksgiving,
_Democratic Review_, March, 1840; Old Ticonderoga, _Democratic
Review_, February, 1836; The Wives of the Dead, Boston _Token_,
1832; Little Daffydowndilly, _Boys' and Girls' Magazine_, Boston,
1843; Major Molineux, Boston _Token_, 1832.] which was ready by the
first of November and was soon afterwards issued. It is made up of
stories and sketches out of old periodicals, which had not been gathered
in the former collection, some of them dating from the beginning of his
career. Three, however, were later in composition, and were perhaps
among those which he had thought of binding up with "The Scarlet
Letter," had that been issued according to his original plan as one of
several new tales. These three were "The Great Stone Face," from "The
National Era," January 24, 1850, "The Snow Image" from "The
International Magazine," November, 1850, and "Ethan Brand; a Chapter
from an Abortive Romance," from "Holden's Dollar Magazine," May, 1851;
they were all published with the author's name. These stories require no
comment, as the types to which they belong are well marked. They were,
in reality, his last trials of his art as a teller of tales.
Late in November, the family again removed to a new dwelling-place. The
inland air had proved, it was thought, less favorable to health than was
expected, and except in the bracing months of mid-winter Hawthorne found
it enervating. He had been, however, very happy in Berkshire, as happy
probably as it was in his nature to be, and the distant beauty and near
wildness of the country had been attractive; the house, nevertheless,
was very small, and he fretted at its inconveniences, not in a
disagreeable way, but desiring to have a house and home of his own among
more familiar scenes and within reach of the sea; he regarded the new
move as a makeshift, and settled in West Newton, a suburb of Boston,
where his wife's family lived, until he should purchase a place of his
own. The change from the winter picturesqueness of Berkshire was marked,
but the village was of the usual New England type and his surroundings
were not essentially different from those he was accustomed to at
Concord and Salem.
West Newton was near to Roxbury and the scenes of his rural experience
at Brook Farm; but he hardly needed to refresh his memory of the places
and persons that had been so much a part of his life ten years before.
Brook Farm, as an experiment in the regeneration of society, had run its
course, and was gone; but much that was characteristic of it externally
was now to be transferred to the novel Hawthorne had in hand as his next
work. "The Blithedale Romance" [Footnote: The Blithedale Romance, By
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo,
cloth. Pp. viii, 288.] was written during the winter, and was finished
as early as May, 1852, when it was at once issued. It is the least
substantial of any of his longer works. It lacks the intensity of power
that distinguishes "The Scarlet Letter," and the accumulated richness of
surface that belongs to "The House of the Seven Gables," due to the
overlaying of story on story in that epitome of a New England family
history. "The Blithedale Romance," on the contrary, has both less depth
and less inclusiveness; and much of its vogue springs from the fact of
its being a reflection of the life of Brook Farm, which possesses an
interest in its own right. Hawthorne used his material in the direct way
that was his custom, and transferred bodily to his novel, to make its
background and atmosphere, what he had preserved in his note-books or
memory from the period of his residence with the reformers. The April
snowstorm in which he arrived at the farm, his illness there, the
vine-hung tree that he made his autumnal arbor, the costume and habits,
the fancy-dress party, the Dutch realism of the figure of Silas Foster,
and many another detail occur at once to the mind as from this origin;
his own attitude is sketched frankly in Miles Coverdale, and the germs
of others of the characters, notably Priscilla, are to be found in the
same experience. The life of the farmhouse, however, is not of
sufficient interest in itself to hold attention very closely, and the
socialistic experiment, after all, is not the theme of the story; these
things merely afford a convenient and appropriate ground on which to
develop a study of the typical reformer, as Hawthorne conceived him, the
nature, trials, temptations, and indwelling fate of such a man; and to
this task the author addressed himself. In the way in which he worked
out the problem, he revealed his own judgment on the moral type brought
so variously and persistently under his observation by the wave of
reform that was so strongly characteristic of his times.
The characters are, as usual, few, and they have that special trait of
isolation which is the birthmark of Hawthorne's creations. Zenobia,
Priscilla, and Hollingsworth are the trio, who, each in an environment
of solitude, make the essence of the plot by their mutual relations.
Zenobia is set apart by her secret history and physical nature, and
Priscilla by her magnetic powers and enslavement to the mesmerist;
Hollingsworth is absorbed in his mission. It is unlikely that Hawthorne
intended any of these as a portrait of any real person, though as the
seamstress of Brook Farm gave the external figure of Priscilla, it may
well be that certain suggestions of temperament were found for the other
two characters among his impressions of persons whom he met. Neither
Zenobia nor Priscilla, notwithstanding the latter's name, are
essentially New England characters; in each of them there is something
alien to the soil, and they are represented as coming from a different
stock. Hollingsworth, on the other hand, is meant as a native type. The
unfolding of the story, and the treatment of the characters, are not
managed with any great skill. Hawthorne harks back to his old habits,
and does so in a feebler way than would have been anticipated. He
interjects the short story of The Veiled Lady, for example, in the
middle of the narrative, as he had placed the tale of Alice in "The
House of the Seven Gables," but very ineffectively; it is a pale
narrative and does not count visibly in the progress of the novel, but
only inferentially. He uses also the exotic flower, which Zenobia wears,
as a physical symbol, but it plays no part and is only a relic of his
old manner. The description of the performance in the country hall seems
like an extract from one of the old annuals of the same calibre as the
Story-Teller's Exhibition. Mesmerism is the feebler substitute for the
old witchcraft element. In a word, the work is not well knit together,
and the various methods of old are weakly combined. One comes back to
the moral situation as the centre of interest; and in it he exhibits the
reformer as failing in the same ways in which other egotists fail, for
he perceives in the enthusiasm of the humanitarian only selfishness,
arrogance, intolerance in another form. Hollingsworth, with the best of
motives apparently, since his cause is his motive, as he believes, is
faithless to his associates and willing to wreck their enterprise
because it stands in his way and he is out of sympathy with it; he is
faithless to Priscilla in so far as he accepts Zenobia because she can
aid him with her wealth, and on her losing her wealth he is faithless to
her in returning to Priscilla; he has lost the power to be true, in the
other relations of life, through his devotion to his cause. One feels
that Hollingsworth is the victim of Hawthorne's moral theory about him.
It is true that at the end Hawthorne has secured in the character that
tragic reversal which is always effective, in the point that
Hollingsworth, who set out to be the friend and uplifter and saviour of
the criminal classes, sees at last in himself the murderer of Zenobia;
but this is shown almost by a side-light, and not as the climax of the
plot, perhaps because the reader does not hold him guilty in any true
sense of the disaster which overtakes Zenobia. In its main situation,
therefore, the plot, while it suggests and illustrates the temptations
and failures of a nature such as Hollingsworth's, does not carry
conviction. Description takes the place of action; much of Zenobia's
life and of Hollingsworth's, also, is left untold in the time after
Coverdale left them; as in the case of Judge Pyncheon, the wrong-doing
is left much in the shadow, suggested, hinted at, narrated finally, but
not shown in the life; and such wrong-doing loses the edge of villainy.
It might be believed that Hollingsworth as a man failed; but as a
typical man, as that reformer who is only another shape of the selfish
and heartless egotist sacrificing everything wrongfully to his
philanthropic end, it is not so easily believed that he must have
failed; it is the absence of this logical necessity that discredits him
as a type, and takes out of his character and career the universal
quality. This, however, may be only a personal impression. The truth of
the novel, on the ethical side, may be plainer to others; it presents
some aspects of moral truth, carefully studied and probably observed,
but they seem very partial aspects, and too incomplete to allow them,
taken all together, to be called typical. The power of the story lies
rather in its external realism, and especially in that last scene, which
was taken from Hawthorne's experience at Concord on the night when he
took part in rescuing the body of the young woman who had drowned
herself; but with the exception of this last scene, and of some of the
sketches that reproduce most faithfully the life and circumstances of
Brook Farm, the novel does not equal its predecessors in the ethical or
imaginative value of its material, in romantic vividness, or in the
literary skill of its construction. The elements of the story are
themselves inferior; and perhaps Hawthorne made the most of them that
they were capable of; but his mind was antipathetic to his main theme.
His representation of the New England reformer is as partial as that of
the Puritan minister; both are depraved types, and in the former there
is not that vivid truth to general human nature which makes the latter
so powerful a revelation of the sinful heart.
Hawthorne had purchased at some time during the winter, while at work
upon this novel, the house at Concord that he named The Wayside. It had
belonged to Mr. Alcott, and was an ordinary country residence with about
twenty acres of ground, part of which was a wooded hillside rising up
steeply back of the house, which itself stood close to the road. The
family took possession of this new home early in June, and it soon took
on the habitual look of their domicile, which, wherever it might be, had
a character of its own. Mrs. Hawthorne, as usual, was much pleased with
everything, and wrote an enthusiastic account of its prettiness and
comfort, though no important changes were then made in the house itself.
She describes the "Study," and the passage, which is in a letter to her
mother, gives the very atmosphere of the place:--