magnificent swing and pulsates with passion. When Webster’s defection
spread anger, consternation, and grief through the ranks of the party
of Freedom, Whittier penned the burning stanzas to which he gave the
title ‘Ichabod.’ This anti-slavery poem was published in _Songs of
Labor_, and is justly accounted one of the loftiest expressions of
Whittier’s genius.
_In War Time and Other Poems_ records the anxieties, fears, hopes, and
exultations incident to the great conflict between North and South.
Says the poet:--
‘... our voices take
A sober tone; our very household songs
Are heavy with a nation’s griefs and wrongs;
And innocent mirth is chastened for the sake
Of the brave hearts that nevermore shall beat,
The eyes that smile no more, the unreturning feet!’
The volume contains ‘Barbara Frietchie,’ perhaps the most popular
ballad of the war, based on an incident told to Whittier by Mrs.
Southworth, the novelist. One must reconstruct the times to comprehend
the extraordinary effect produced by this dramatic little incident.
Iconoclasts have made havoc with the story. If their points are well
taken, we have one proof more of the superiority of legend over history
for poetic purposes. Other noteworthy poems in this volume are ‘Thy
Will be Done’ and the magnificent hymn ‘Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott.’
We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation;
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mould anew the nation.
Hot burns the fire
Where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand
That from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.
VI
_SNOW-BOUND_, _TENT ON THE BEACH_, _PENNSYLVANIA PILGRIM_, _VISION OF
ECHARD_
The volume of 1860, _Home Ballads and Poems_, contained two perfect
examples of Whittier’s art, namely, ‘My Playmate’ and ‘Telling the
Bees.’ To inquire what far-off experiences in the poet’s life prompted
the making of these exquisite ‘ballads,’ as Whittier called them, were
idle, poets being proverbially given to the use of the imagination.
The music of the dark pines on Ramoth Hill could be no sweeter than
it is. The theme of either poem is common enough among bards, and
perennially attractive. ‘My Playmate’ and ‘Telling the Bees,’ together
with ‘Amy Wentworth’ and ‘The Countess,’ all show, though in varying
degrees, how pregnant with poetic suggestion were the scenes amid which
Whittier passed his life. Even that urban and aristocratic little poem
‘Amy Wentworth’ derives half its charm from the world of associations
called up by the fog wreaths, the pebbled beach, and the sweet brier
blooming on Kittery-side.
The above-named poems, together with ‘The Barefoot Boy’ and ‘In
School-Days,’ suggest a phase of Whittier’s genius which found complete
expression in the ‘winter idyl,’ a picture of life in the old East
Haverhill homestead.
_Snow-Bound_ was published in 1866. What the author thought of it we
now know: ‘If it were not mine I should call it pretty good.’ The
public decided for itself and bought copies enough to fatten Whittier’s
lean purse with ten thousand dollars. The enviously-inclined should
remember that the poet was nearly sixty when this happened to him.
A twelvemonth later _The Tent on the Beach_ was published and began
selling at the rate of a thousand copies a day. Whittier wrote to
Fields: ‘This will never do; the swindle is awful; Barnum is a saint to
us.’
Readers who find difficulty in comprehending the enthusiasm that
_Snow-Bound_ evoked must reflect that there are strange creatures in
the world who actually like winter. For them Whittier had a particular
message. He has reproduced the atmosphere of the New England landscape
under storm-cloud and falling snow with utmost precision. No important
detail is wanting, and no detail is emphasized to the injury of
the general effect. The exactness and simplicity of the touch are
wholly admirable. The result is as exquisite as the means to it are
unostentatious.
_Snow-Bound_ is a favorite because of its homely, sweet realism,
because of the poetic glow thrown on old-fashioned scenes, because of
the variety of moods (which, lying between the extremes of playfulness
and deepest feeling, shade naturally from one to the next); and because
of the reverential spirit, the high confidence and trust. The poem
is autobiographical, but it needs no ‘key’ to give it interest. The
characters are types.
In _The Tent on the Beach_ it is related how a poet,[37] a publisher
(who in this instance, contrary to the traditions of his race, is a
friend of the poet), and a traveller beguile an evening at the seaside
with the reading of manuscript verses from the publisher’s portfolio.
The tales, eleven in number, with a closing lyric on ‘The Worship
of Nature,’ are too uniformly sombre. The one called ‘The Maids of
Attitash’ is blithe enough, but the gray tints need even more relief.
Whittier’s power in descriptions of sea and sky is displayed at its
best in this volume. One does not soon forget this stanza from the
prelude:--
Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,
Stooped low upon the darkening main,
Piercing the waves along its track
With the slant javelins of rain.
And when west-wind and sunshine warm
Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm,
They saw the prismy hues in thin spray showers
Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth-flowers!
Even better is the description of the breakers seen by twilight:--
... trampling up the sloping sand,
In lines outreaching far and wide,
The white-maned billows swept to land,
Dim seen across the gathering shade,
A vast and ghostly cavalcade.
The change from the mist and confusion of the brief tempest to the
clear after effect was never better rendered:--
Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
The trend of the coast lay hard and black.
_Among the Hills_, _Miriam_, and _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_ come next
in order of publication. The first is a romance of New England country
life; the second is ‘Oriental and purely fiction;’ the third, partly
historical and partly imaginative, is an attempt to reconstruct life in
Penn’s colony towards the close of the Seventeenth Century. Whittier
said of _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_: ‘It is as long as _Snow-Bound_,
and better, but nobody will find it out.’ The poet felt that too
little had been said in praise of the humanizing influences at work in
the colonies by the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The Pilgrim Father
here celebrated is Daniel Pastorius, who planted the settlement of
Germantown. He was the first American abolitionist. The poem abounds
in happy pictures of scenery, and in tenderly humorous sketches of the
quaint characters who found peace, shelter, and, above all, toleration,
under the beneficent rule of Pastorius.
_The Vision of Echard_ will serve to introduce Whittier’s distinctively
religious poems. A characteristic performance, it admirably illustrates
his manner, diction, cast of thought. First, the scenes of great
natural beauty, where historical memories are overlaid and blended
with ideas of ceremonial pomp associated with formal religion; and
then, projected on this rich background, the dreamer and his dream. The
blended walls of sapphire in Echard’s vision ‘blazed with the thought
of God:’--
Ye bow to ghastly symbols,
To cross and scourge and thorn;
Ye seek his Syrian manger
Who in the heart is born.
* * * * *
O blind ones, outward groping,
The idle quest forego;
Who listens to His inward voice
Alone of him shall know.
* * * * *
A light, a guide, a warning,
A presence ever near,
Through the deep silence of the flesh
I reach the inward ear.
* * * * *
The stern behest of duty,
The doom-book open thrown,
The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear,
Are with yourselves alone.
Whittier did not include ‘The Preacher’ among his religious poems.
This fine picture of the ‘great awakening’ might be so classified.
Also ‘The Chapel of the Hermits,’ ‘Tauler,’ and yet others. In general
the religious poems consist of meditations on sacred characters and
scenes, poetic settings of Biblical narrative, and reflective poems in
which Whittier gives voice to phases of his spiritual life, and above
all to a faith so broad that the distinctions of sect and creed are
lost in its catholic charity. ‘Questions of Life,’ ‘The Over-Heart,’
‘Trinitas,’ ‘The Shadow and the Light,’ and ‘The Eternal Goodness’ are
the expressions of this lofty and inspiring side of his poetic genius.
Whittier’s singing voice lost none of its flexibility but rather gained
as time went on. ‘The Henchman’ was a striking performance for a man of
seventy. ‘It is not exactly a Quakerly piece, nor is it didactic, and
it has no moral that I know of,’ observed Whittier. He must have known
that it had the moral of exquisite beauty. Indeed he admitted that it
was ‘not unpoetical.’
His last utterance was a little group of poems, _At Sundown_, having
for the controlling thought the close of life’s day. One of them,
‘Burning Drift-Wood,’ was the poet’s farewell; and with the quotation
of four of its stanzas we may bring to an end this brief survey of
Whittier’s work.
What matter that it is not May,
That birds have flown, and trees are bare,
That darker grows the shortening day,
And colder blows the wintry air!
The wrecks of passion and desire,
The castles I no more rebuild,
May fitly feed my drift-wood fire,
And warm the hands that age has chilled.
* * * * *
I know the solemn monotone
Of waters calling unto me;
I know from whence the airs have blown
That whisper of the Eternal Sea.
As low my fires of drift-wood burn,
I hear that sea’s deep sound increase.
And, fair in sunset light, discern
Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Whittier’s Autobiographical Letter, in Carpenter’s _Whittier_.
[36] The first collected edition made with Whittier’s consent.
[37] Whittier, J. T. Fields, and Bayard Taylor.
X
_Nathaniel Hawthorne_
REFERENCES:
=Julian Hawthorne=: _Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, second
edition, 1885.
=Horatio Bridge=: _Personal Recollections of Nathaniel
Hawthorne_, 1893.
=G. E. Woodberry=: _Nathaniel Hawthorne_, ‘American Men of
Letters,’ 1902.
I
HIS LIFE
Among the passengers in the ship which brought Winthrop and Dudley to
the New World was William Hathorne, the ancestor of the novelist. A
man of character, versatile, naturally eloquent, and a born leader, he
rose to a position of influence in the colony. One of his sons, John
Hathorne, was destined to sinister renown as a judge at the trials for
witchcraft held at Salem in 1691.
Daniel Hathorne, a grandson of the old witch judge, took to the
sea, and during the Revolutionary War served as a privateersman. He
had seven children. Nathaniel, his third son, also a sea-captain,
married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, and became the father of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, the novelist, who was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on July
4, 1804.
Captain Hawthorne died at Surinam in 1808. The rigid seclusion in which
his widow lived after her husband’s death had a marked effect on her
son, quickening his sensibilities and at the same time clouding his
lively nature with a shadow of premature gravity.
Hawthorne’s boyhood was passed partly at Salem, partly on the shores of
Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts
of land. His reading for pleasure included Clarendon and Froissart,
to say nothing of that old-time boys’ delight, the Newgate Calendar.
The first book that he bought with his own money was Spenser’s _Faery
Queen_. At sixteen he had read _Caleb Williams_, _St. Leon_, and
_Mandeville_. ‘I admire Godwin’s novels and intend to read all of them.’
He entered Bowdoin College in the same class with Longfellow and
Franklin Pierce, and was graduated in 1825. For the next twelve years
he lived the life of a recluse in his own home at Salem, indulging his
passion for writing and for taking twilight walks. It was the period of
his literary apprenticeship. Later he was, as he says, ‘drawn somewhat
into the world and became pretty much like other people.’ In 1828 he
published, anonymously and at his own expense, a novel, _Fanshawe_. He
made some mystery about it, binding by solemn promises the few who
were in the secret of the authorship, not to betray it. The public was
indifferent to the book, and Hawthorne afterwards destroyed the copies
he could find. His early sketches and stories were published in annuals
such as ‘The Token,’ and in periodicals such as ‘The New England
Magazine,’ ‘Knickerbocker,’ and ‘The Democratic Review.’ For the most
part they ‘passed without notice.’
In 1837 appeared a volume of eighteen of these sketches and stories,
to which Hawthorne gave the title of _Twice-Told Tales_. An enlarged
edition, containing twenty-one additional stories, appeared in 1842.
Between the two, Hawthorne brought out a group of children’s stories,
_Grandfather’s Chair_, _Famous Old People_, and the _Liberty Tree_, all
in 1841, and _Biographical Stories for Children_, 1842.
When Bancroft became Collector of the Port of Boston, he appointed
Hawthorne as weigher and gauger (1839). Thrown out by the change of
administration (1841), Hawthorne invested his savings in the Brook
Farm enterprise. This move (described by his latest biographer as ‘the
only apparently freakish action of his life’) was made in the hope of
providing a home for his betrothed, Sophia Peabody. He threw himself
with good humor into the life of the community, planted potatoes, cut
straw, milked three cows night and morning, and signed his letters to
his sister ‘Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman.’ Reports circulated that the
author of the _Twice-Told Tales_ might be seen dressed in a farmer’s
frock, carrying milk to Boston every morning; also that he was ‘to do
the travelling in Europe _for the Community_.’
Brook Farm proved ‘thralldom and weariness,’ and Hawthorne abandoned
it, losing, as he later discovered, the one thousand dollars he had
invested. In July, 1842, he married and settled in the ‘Old Manse’ at
Concord.
He had now enough and to spare of the leisure which a deliberate writer
finds indispensable. In a room overlooking the battlefield (the room in
which Emerson had written _Nature_) Hawthorne penned many of the tales
afterwards incorporated in _Mosses from an Old Manse_. The period of
his residence at Concord will always seem to those who have studied its
many charming records not undeserving the characterization of idyllic.
It was brought to a close in 1845, when there seemed a likelihood (made
a certainty the following year) of his becoming Surveyor of Customs
for the Port of Salem. Hawthorne held this post until June, 1849. His
removal gave him time for the working out of an idea that had possessed
him for many months, and which took shape in the form of his great
romance, _The Scarlet Letter_.
From the spring of 1850 to the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne lived at Lenox
in the Berkshire Hills, and there wrote _The House of the Seven
Gables_. He then removed to West Newton, where, during the winter of
1851–52, he wrote _The Blithedale Romance_. In June, 1852, he took
possession of a house in Concord, which he had bought of Alcott. He had
but fairly settled himself in his new home (‘The Wayside’ he called it)
when his friend Franklin Pierce, now President of the United States,
made him consul at Liverpool.
Hawthorne assumed his charge in July, 1853, and conducted its affairs
with energy and skill until September, 1857. The period of his English
residence was rich in experiences, of which social honors formed the
least part. The quiet, brooding observer had no wish to be lionized and
apparently discouraged the few well-meant advances that were made. He
once saw Tennyson at the Arts’ Exhibition at Manchester, and rejoiced
in him more than in all the other wonders of the place; but it was like
Hawthorne to have been content merely to gaze at the laureate without
presuming on his own achievements as ground for claiming acquaintance.
After leaving Liverpool, Hawthorne spent two winters in Italy, where
_The Marble Faun_ was conceived. The greater part of the actual writing
was done in England, at Redcar on the North Sea.
At this point it will be well to take note of Hawthorne’s principal
writings subsequent to the publication of the second edition of the
_Twice-Told Tales_. They are: _The Celestial Railroad_, 1843; _Mosses
from an Old Manse_, 1846;[38] _The Scarlet Letter_, 1850; _The House
of the Seven Gables_, 1851; _A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys_, 1852;
_The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales_, 1852; _The Blithedale
Romance_, 1852; _Life of Franklin Pierce_, 1852; _Tanglewood Tales_,
1853; _The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni_, 1860;[39] _Our
Old Home_, 1863.
The posthumous publications are: _Passages from the American Note-Books
of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, 1868; _Passages from the English Note-Books_
..., 1870; _Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books_ ...,
1872; _Septimius Felton_, 1872; _The Dolliver Romance_, 1876; _Doctor
Grimshawe’s Secret_, 1883.
In June, 1860, after an absence of seven years, Hawthorne returned
to ‘The Wayside.’ He felt the burden of the political situation now
culminating in civil war. With little sympathy for the cause of
Abolition, Hawthorne, when the conflict had actually begun, found it
‘delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time’ and to feel
that he had a country.[40]
His health began to decline and he was spiritless and depressed. In
March, 1864, accompanied by his friend W. D. Ticknor, he started
southward, hoping for benefit from the change. Ticknor, who was
seemingly in perfect health, died suddenly in Philadelphia. Hawthorne
was unnerved by the shock. In May he undertook a carriage journey
among the New Hampshire hills with Pierce. The friends proceeded by
easy stages, reaching Plymouth in the evening of May 18. Hawthorne
was growing visibly weaker and Pierce had already determined that he
would send for Mrs. Hawthorne. Shortly after midnight he went into his
friend’s room. Hawthorne was apparently sleeping. He went again between
three and four in the morning. Hawthorne was dead.
II
HAWTHORNE’s CHARACTER
‘I am a man, and between man and man there is always an insuperable
gulf,’ said Kenyon in _The Marble Faun_.
Hawthorne might have been speaking through Kenyon’s lips, so accurately
does the saying voice his private thought. He lived in a world apart.
No experience of custom-house, consulate, or farm could bring him
quite out of his world into the common world of men. Hawthorne had
more reason than Emerson to complain of the wall between him and
his fellow-mortals. When glib talkers were displaying no end of
conversational change, Hawthorne kept his hands in his pockets. He had
no mind to indulge in that form of matching pennies known as small talk.
Observers have voiced their impressions of him in different ways;
their testimony is not discordant. The romantically inclined described
Hawthorne as mysterious. Plain people thought him queer. Even his
brother authors found him odd. Longfellow described Hawthorne as ‘a
strange owl, a very peculiar individual, with a dash of originality
about him very pleasant to behold.’ Yet Hawthorne was without a grain
of affectation, and took keen interest in the homely facts of life. His
books everywhere betray this interest. He who wrote that description
of his kitchen garden in _The Old Manse_ would seem to be just the
man to lean over the fence and talk cabbages and squashes with some
neighborhood farmer. And perhaps he did.
He was not fond of men of letters as a class--which is not surprising.
The friends who stood close to him were not literary. Bridge was a
naval officer. Pierce was a politician, representative of a type for
which Hawthorne had contempt. Hillard was a lawyer, a man of the world.
Hawthorne was not without his share of ‘human nature,’ as we say.
He had his prejudices, and they were sometimes deeply rooted. When
smarting under a sense of injustice he could wield a caustic pen. He
was a good hater, but not narrow-minded. He hated spirit-rapping,
table-tipping, and all the vulgar machinery and manifestations of a
vulgar delusion. He hated noise, brawling, and dissension. He loved his
home. His letters to his wife reveal a nature of exquisite delicacy. He
loved children, Nature, and he was chivalrous in his attitude towards
the animal creation.
A trait of Hawthorne’s character comes out in the following incident.
He proposed to dedicate _Our Old Home_ to Franklin Pierce. This was
in 1863. The publishers, it is said, were filled with ‘consternation
and distress.’ The ex-president’s name was not one to conjure with.
Hawthorne explained his position: ‘I find that it would be a piece of
poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory
letter.... If Pierce is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is
enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old
friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary
profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately
felt and thought it right to do.... As for the literary public, it must
accept my book precisely as I see fit to give it, or let it alone.’
Friendship sometimes has in it an element of perversity, and has been
known to delight in petty martyrdom. There was nothing of this in
Hawthorne. All he notes is that friendship is not a commodity.
III
THE WRITER
Hawthorne knew the secret of producing magical effects by quiet means.
He had perfect command of the materials by which are rendered the
half tones, the delicate shadings, the mysterious opalescent hues of
beautiful prose. Yet his manner is unostentatious and his vocabulary
simple. There are writers in whose work the feeling excited of
pleasurable surprise can be traced to a particular word glittering like
a diamond or a sapphire. With Hawthorne the effects are elusive, not
always to be apprehended at the moment.
The beauty of his prose is best explained by the beauty of the ideas;
the natural phrasing serves but to define it, as physical loveliness
may be accentuated by simplicity of dress. Hawthorne’s thoughts, being
exquisite in themselves, make ornament superfluous.
There is no trace of effort in his writing. _The Scarlet Letter_, for
example, reads as if it had come ‘like a breath of inspiration.’ Such
directness and precision of touch must always be a source of wonder
and delight, not alone to writers who fumble their sentences but to
skilled literary craftsmen as well. In Henry James’s admirable story
‘The Death of the Lion’[41] is a paragraph which suggests Hawthorne’s
manner. The regal way in which the famous novelist, Neil Paraday, adds
perfect sentence to perfect sentence is altogether like Hawthorne.
Economy of phrase is one of his virtues. In Hawthorne there are no
wasted or superfluous sentences, not even a word in excess. Something
inexorably logical enters into his work, as in the poetic art. This
economy extends to his books as a whole. For stories so rich in ideas,
so heavy with suggestion, they are short rather than long. Yet the
movement is always leisurely. There is no haste or eagerness. A few
strokes of the pen, made with restful deliberation, serve to carry
the reader into the very heart of a tragedy. He cannot but admire the
superb strength which with so little visible effort could bring him so
far.
IV
THE SHORT STORIES
_TWICE-TOLD TALES_, _MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE_, _THE SNOW-IMAGE_
Hawthorne’s real entrance into literature dates from the publication
of the _Twice-Told Tales_, a series of harmoniously framed narratives
which have maintained their rank unmoved by the capriciousness of
popular taste.