romance, by many held to be the supreme literary artist of America,
was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was peculiarly a product of New England
and frankly admitted that New England was quite as large a lump of
earth as his heart could take in. His ancestor, William Hathorne,
came to the New World in 1630, in the ship with John Winthrop and
Thomas Dudley, and became a leader in the colony. Hathorne’s son John
was one of the judges in the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1691. The
grandfather and father of Nathaniel Hawthorne were both sea-captains.
The novelist was born at Salem on July 4, 1804. Four years later,
his father, never apparently a robust man, died at Surinam, and the
widowed mother began to live in a deep seclusion which could not fail
to have its effect upon the quick sensibilities of her son. In 1818,
the family removed to Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine,
where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. Hawthorne’s
boyhood environment, therefore, was not widely different from that
of Fenimore Cooper. But he was more of a reader than Cooper. As a
boy, he became familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Clarendon,
Froissart, Rousseau, and Godwin. Entering Bowdoin College, he was
graduated in 1825 in the class with Longfellow. While he did not
distinguish himself in his studies, he became a respectable Latin and
English scholar; and he devoted much time to reading in the little
library of the Athenæan Society. At graduation, he ranked eighteenth
in a class of thirty-eight. Meanwhile his family had returned to
Salem, and thither Hawthorne now went, to begin a period of literary
apprenticeship. It was seemingly a bold undertaking to attempt to live
by his pen; however, he seems to have drifted into the attempt through
aversion to a more active life. In 1828, he published anonymously a
novel called “Fanshawe,” dealing with some of his college experiences
and recalling vaguely the methods of Scott. Some characters, it must
be said, are vigorously conceived, and here and there the volume gave
promise of the author’s future skill; but there is about the whole a
suggestion of unreality, not to say crudeness. The book found, as it
deserved, an indifferent public, and Hawthorne subsequently recalled
as many copies as he could procure and burned them. For several years,
he continued to live in seclusion, contributing stories and sketches
to various annuals and periodicals. For the stories he got $35 each.
In March, 1837, having been encouraged by his friend Horatio Bridge,
he published the first volume to appear with his name, “Twice-Told
Tales.” They were eighteen in number, being only half of the stories he
is known to have printed up to this time. The “Tales” gave Hawthorne a
considerable reputation; Longfellow praised it in _The North American
Review_, then influential in literary affairs. Again helped by his
friends, in January, 1839, Hawthorne assumed the position of weigher
and gauger in the Boston Custom-House. At first, the novelty of contact
with the practical world interested him; but he soon found that his
work, always monotonous, left him no time or strength for writing, and
he was not sorry to lose his post when the Whigs came into power in
1841. For a few months, he tried life at Brook Farm, thinking that in
this new community he should find a suitable way of combining manual
and intellectual labour; but the work was too hard, and he had too
little opportunity for writing. Accordingly in 1842 he left the Farm,
married Miss Sophia A. Peabody, to whom he had been engaged for four
years, and settled at the Old Manse, an idyllic retreat at Concord,
Massachusetts. Meanwhile, he had published (1841) two volumes of
historical tales for young people, “Grandfather’s Chair” and “Famous
Old People”; and to these he now added a third series, “The Liberty
Tree,” as well as a second series of “Twice-Told Tales” and a volume of
“Biographical Stories for Children” (1842). Of these, none except the
“Tales” rises much above the level of respectable writing to sell. In
the next four years, Hawthorne wrote for periodicals some eighteen more
tales, which, together with a number of earlier uncollected stories,
he republished in 1846 as “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Hawthorne now
returned to his native Salem as surveyor of customs (1846-9), and
proved an able administrator of the office. Another period of literary
barrenness ensued, but in 1847 he resumed his writing and produced a
few tales. The idea of a longer romance had come to him, and after
his dismissal from office in 1849 he found the leisure necessary for
writing “The Scarlet Letter.” Once more, then, he exchanged the world
of affairs for that realm of the imagination where he was so much more
at home. Working resolutely amid sickness and poverty, he at length
completed the splendid romance, the publication of which distinguishes
the year 1850 in American letters as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and
Wordsworth’s “Prelude” do in English poetry. Hawthorne had now entered
upon a period of great productivity. In the next two years he published
“The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), “A Wonder-Book for Girls and
Boys” (1851), “The Snow Image and Other Tales” (1851), “Tanglewood
Tales,” (1852), “The Blithedale Romance” (1852), a tale based on
his Brook Farm life, and a campaign “Life of Franklin Pierce,” his
college friend, now a candidate for the Presidency. Promptly after
his election, President Pierce made Hawthorne consul at Liverpool, an
office which he held from July, 1853, until September, 1857. Though
rich in experience and in fruitful observation, his life in England was
outwardly quiet and uneventful. The years 1857-9 the Hawthornes spent
in Italy, where they mingled somewhat more with the world than had
been their wont. The fruit of the Italian life was “The Marble Faun”
(1860), written in Italy and at Redcar, on the shore of the North Sea,
and published in England as “Transformation.” Returning to America in
1860, Hawthorne passed the next four years at the Wayside, Concord. In
1863 he contributed “Our Old Home” to _The Atlantic Monthly_ and began
“The Dolliver Romance,” which he was destined not to finish. He died
suddenly on May 18, 1864, at Plymouth, N. H., while on a journey to the
New Hampshire lakes in search of health.
His literary remains must be at least mentioned. In 1868 appeared
“Passages from American Note-Books”; in 1870, “Passages from
English Note-Books”; and in 1871, “Passages from French and Italian
Note-Books.” These volumes throw much light on Hawthorne’s favourite
haunts and wandering propensities, as well as his eagerness for minute
observation. “Septimius Felton, or, The Elixir of Life” (1871) was
to be a story, placed in Revolutionary times, of a man who sought
earthly immortality. The theme was a powerful one; but Hawthorne’s
strength was evidently exhausted, and the story must be pronounced a
failure. The last works to appear were “The Dolliver Romance” (1876)
and “Doctor Grimshaw’s Secret,” which are fragmentary and ineffective
studies of the same theme as “Septimius Felton.” Their failure, in all
probability, was due not only to the waning of Hawthorne’s powers but
also to the difficulties attending the theme itself.
Hawthorne was one of the shyest of men. Kenyon, in “The Marble Faun,”
says: “Between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf”; such a
gulf at any rate separated Kenyon’s creator from the rest of mankind.
Always fond of solitude, he lived in a world of his own, apart from
humankind; longing at times for more familiar converse with men, but
never quite successful in establishing cordial relations (outside of
his own family) with any but a few friends. Possessed of an exquisitely
sensitive nature, he made no effort to conceal the pleasure which
honest praise afforded him; and he was easily rebuffed by the coolness
of his public. Perhaps the bane of his life was self-distrust. Each
of his books when first written seemed to him well-nigh worthless.
James T. Fields has told of the difficulty with which he extracted
from Hawthorne the first manuscript of “The Scarlet Letter.” “Thus
it is with winged horses,” says Hawthorne in “The Chimæra,” “and
with such wild and solitary creatures. If you can catch and overcome
them, it is the surest way to win their love.” Such was the devotion
with which Hawthorne repaid those who had “captured” him that their
confident encouragement greatly strengthened and inspired him. As
might be supposed, however, with the world at large he was lacking in
sympathy. His point of view was fixed; he could not see the world with
the eyes of another. This helps to account for the effect of harshness
and asperity which his chapter on “The Custom House” in “The Scarlet
Letter” had upon the people of Salem whom he there described; and
for the similar effect of the descriptions of English life in “Our
Old Home” upon the English people in general. As Professor Woodberry
remarks, too, he had “the critical spirit which is a New England
trait, and with this went its natural attendant, the habit of speaking
his mind.” He had, moreover, deeply rooted prejudices and a natural
hatred of shams. He disliked literary friendships. While in England,
for example, he remained a stranger to the brilliant literary set
in London where he might have been warmly welcomed. He saw Tennyson
once in Manchester, but made no effort to meet the poet. Another of
his aversions concerned the manifestations of spiritualism--rappings,
tipping of tables, spirit writing, and the like; he was a good hater of
shams in general.
To his family, Hawthorne was always deeply devoted. When his
mother died, although there had always been “a sort of coldness of
intercourse” between them, he spoke of the time as the darkest hour
he had ever lived through. His wife worshipped him, and the attitude
of his children is sufficiently indicated by the words of his son
Julian: “In my thought of him he has a quality not to be described;
that is associated with the early impressions which make the name of
home beautiful; with a child’s delight in the glory of nature; with a
boy’s aspirations towards a pure and generous career; with intimate
conceptions of truth, bravery, and simplicity.”
So much for the man; what now, shall be said of the artist? In the
first place, as he was the peculiar product of New England Puritanism,
so his genius was in a sense confined to setting forth New England and
the problems of New England Calvinism. Even when he lays the scene of
his tale in Rome, there is the same interest in the working out of the
consequences of sin, and part of the characters are Americans living
in the Eternal City. Hawthorne still stands alone in having given
supreme literary expression to that earnest and virile if narrow and at
times misguided life of early New England; its pathos, its tragedy, its
legacy to modern times. Then it must be observed that in doing this he
places himself in the ranks of the great masters in deducing from the
individual the general experience; from the particular the universal
moral life. In his earlier years he delighted in allegory, of which the
“Tales” and the “Mosses” are full; and he was always fond of symbolism.
Lady Eleanore’s mantle, for example, is a symbol of pride; the scarlet
letter is a symbol of sin; no less is Donatello a symbol, a type of
universal innocence tasting of the knowledge of good and evil--the
missing link, as it were, in the evolution of moral instincts.
Hawthorne constantly describes the unseen in terms of the seen, the
spiritual world by means of the every day, material world.
The “Tales” have been most elaborately characterised by Professor
Woodberry in his admirable biography.[7] Many of them are intrinsically
slight--descriptions of the common events of daily life, always
somewhat moralised, and to an increasing extent as the author grew
older. In some the fancy has free rein, as in “The Seven Vagabonds”
and “The Great Stone Face.” In “Tales of the Province House” and
many others Hawthorne skilfully wove threads of colonial history
with the rich woof of his imagination to produce a splendid romantic
pageant. Sometimes he treats of individuals, as in “David Swan” and
“Rappaccini’s Daughter”; often he studies the group, or the crowd,
as in the “The Celestial Railroad,” “The Christmas Banquet,” “The
Procession of Life.” In all, he studies the moral life and tries to
understand the significance of some phase of universal human experience.
“The Scarlet Letter” has been called by Mr. James “the most
distinctive piece of prose fiction that was to spring from American
soil.” It is a grim tragedy, in which the consequences of sin are
depicted with a simplicity, a steady movement, and a relentlessness
characteristic of the tragedies of Euripides. Hester Prynne and Arthur
Dimmesdale living agonised lives which moved steadily towards the day
of expiatory shame; Roger Chilingworth, outwardly the wise, benevolent
physician, inwardly the ghastly demon gloating over his victim--these
figures indeed move us to pity and fear, and give us a new sense of the
depth and mystery of our human life, which no man liveth to himself
alone, but which must be interpreted as the expression and result of
racial upstriving through myriads of years. “The Scarlet Letter” is
indeed, as Mr. W. C. Brownell says,[8] the Puritan “Faust”; and many
will doubtless agree with him in calling it “our one prose masterpiece.”
In “The House of the Seven Gables,” Hawthorne returns to the present
and studies the workings of heredity. Less gloomy than the earlier
story, this one is still sombre and in part removed from the world
of objective reality. Real enough, to be sure, are the commonplace
features of daily life at the Seven Gables, the pinched features and
heroic heart of Hepzibah, and the homely philosophising of Uncle
Venner; but Jaffrey and Clifford Pyncheon are at best shadowy and
unreal. Holgrave, too, belongs to a type which, common enough in the
days of Brook Farm Fourierism, has now well-nigh passed away. Phœbe
Pyncheon is one of the most delicate and exquisite of all Hawthorne’s
portraits; as Dr. Holmes wrote to the author, “the flavour of the
sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native
sweetness of our little Phœbe.” It is interesting to note that when the
book appeared Hawthorne wrote to his friend Horatio Bridge:
“The House of the Seven Gables,” in my opinion, is better than
“The Scarlet Letter”; but I should not wonder if I had refined upon
the principal character a little too much for popular appreciation,
nor if the romance of the book should be somewhat at odds with the
humble and familiar scenery in which I invest it. But I feel that
portions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write.
More able critics than one have pronounced “The Blithedale Romance”
the most perfect of Hawthorne’s stories. Although he wrote to George
William Curtis that the story had essentially nothing to do with Brook
Farm, it is certain that the community formed more than a background
for the story, and furnished some of its incidents and the traits
of some of the characters. Thus the romance may be said to approach
more closely to real life than any other of the greater works. The
characters are drawn with great distinctness of outline: Hollingsworth
the reformer, earnest, stern, engrossed in his reform undertaking to
the point of selfishness; Miles Coverdale, the dreamer, who bears the
ear-marks of his artist creator, always a spectator of, rather than a
participant in, the life at Blithedale; Priscilla, the timid maid who
seemed to have dropped down from the clouds and sought protection in
this retreat; Zenobia with her splendid beauty, her refinement, her
ardour, her despair when disillusionment comes--all these are highly
individualised. It has been complained, and with justice, that neither
Zenobia nor Priscilla is a typical New England girl; but something may
perhaps be conceded to the romantic atmosphere of the tale; the author
did not promise a transcript from prosaic real life. The plot halts now
and then, and does not move steadily and convincingly to its climax.
The inserted story of “The Veiled Lady” does not materially further
the plot. Yet as a whole the romance is a searching and remarkable
presentment of Hawthorne’s views of reform. He was never a reformer;
he distrusted the excess of zeal, the narrowness of vision too often
characteristic of the more ardent reformers of his day; and with great
skill he has here set forth the illusory hopes, the discouragement, the
sense of impotence and defeat that must attend the outcome of radical
schemes for human improvement which are not grounded on sound and wide
knowledge of man’s nature.
Probably the most popular, as it was the most ambitious, of all the
romances, has been “The Marble Faun.” With consummate skill the author
maintains the mystery necessary for the romantic atmosphere and at the
same time draws in clear outlines the four characters in the little
drama--this miniature world-tragedy, this “story of the fall of man
repeated,” as Miriam says. As Mr. Lathrop has pointed out, moreover,
with the main theme, itself of abiding interest, is joined a study of
the psychology of Beatrice Cenci’s story; but, without stopping where
Shelley stopped, Hawthorne went on to show how Miriam and Donatello
might “work out their purification.” Thus while the romance may, as
one critic avers, “begin in mystery and end in mist,” the end is
nevertheless full of hope.
Hawthorne has never been, and doubtless never will be, a popular
novelist. His stories are for the few, the thoughtful readers who
are willing to read old favourites over and over again. But there
will always be such persons, haply in increasing numbers; and for
them Hawthorne will continue to be a unique personality, the “high
untrammelled thinker,” the interpreter of spiritual mysteries.
_Charles Sealsfield._--Although not mentioned by most historians
of American literature, the Austrian novelist Carl Postl (“Charles
Sealsfield,” 1793-1864) deserves to be recalled here from the fact
that his works deal chiefly with American life and in their English
form enjoyed considerable popularity in America. Born in Poppitz,
Moravia, he became at first a priest of the order of the Kreuzherren
von Pöltenberg; but, having broken with Catholic dogma, he fled from
the cloister and arrived in New York in 1823 as Charles Sealsfield.
He remained in America until 1832, travelling extensively and making
close studies of life and character. His first novel, “Tokeah, or The
White Rose; an Indian Tale” (Philadelphia, 1828), was republished
at Zurich in 1833 as “Der Legitime und die Republikaner”; while
never a popular story in America, it seems, as Professor Faust has
discovered,[9] to have furnished Mrs. Jackson with some hints for
her “Ramona” and Charles F. Hoffman with a _motif_ for his “Vigil of
Faith.” After his return to Europe Sealsfield published, among other
things, “Transatlantische Reiseskizzen” (1833), translated as “Life
in the New World, or Sketches of American Society” (1844), which
originally appeared in _The New York Mirror_ in 1827-8 and which
furnished Simms with some scenes for “Guy Rivers”; “Nathan der Squatter
Regulator” (1837), translated as “Life in Texas” (1845); “Der Virey und
die Aristokraten, oder Mexiko im Jahre 1812” (1834); “Morton, oder Die
grosse Tour” (1835); “Das Cajütenbuch, oder Nationale Charakteristiken”
(1841), translated as “The Cabin Book” (1844), which furnished Mayne
Reid with the last ten chapters of his “Wild Life” without change; and
“Süden und Norden” (1842-3), translated as “North and South, or Scenes
and Adventures in Mexico” (1844). In his vigorous delineations of the
crude American life of the twenties and thirties, Sealsfield exhibited
great enthusiasm, a wide range of observation which overlooked nothing
and which measured impartially, and a comprehension of the true
inwardness of our young institutions such as no native American of his
day possessed. If his exaggerating brush failed of the touch of an
artist, he created some characters, such as Morton and Nathan Strong,
who deserve immortality as typical Americans, and described with
inimitable fidelity “the dauntless squatter and sturdy pioneer, the
Southern planter and patriarchal slave-holder, the grasping millionaire
and his emissaries, the New York dandy and the society belle, the
taciturn Yankee sea-captain and the hot-blooded Kentuckian, the
utilitarian alcalde and the reformed desperado.”
_William Leggett_ (1802-39), after spending some time at Georgetown
College, accompanied his family in 1819 to make a settlement on the
prairies of Illinois. He spent the years 1822-26 as a midshipman in
the navy. His experiences of pioneer and sea life were graphically
portrayed in “The Rifle,” published in 1828 in _The Atlantic Souvenir_,
and in “Tales by a Country Schoolmaster” (1835). For the remainder of
his life he was engaged in journalism, from 1829 till 1836 as one of
the editors of _The Evening Post_.
_Southern Novelists._--Thus far we have considered no native Southern
writer of fiction. The novel ripened late in the South; indeed, only
one writer of fiction of the first rank was produced by the South
before the Civil War. Yet in the varied and picturesque life of the
aristocratic planters, the frontiersmen, the “poor whites,” and the
negroes there were rich materials for the artist and the story-teller,
who in due time began to avail themselves of their opportunity. “The
Valley of the Shenandoah” (1824) by George Tucker (1775-1861), though
reprinted in England and translated into German, possesses slight
worth, and little more can be said of his “Voyage to the Moon” (1827),
a satirical romance; yet these works gave promise of better things from
the South. William A. Carruthers (1806-72), a voluminous contributor
to magazines, wrote two novels, “The Cavaliers of Virginia” (1832)
and “The Knights of the Horseshoe” (1845), which, in spite of serious
defects, deal with colonial days in Virginia in a genial, vigorous, and
unhackneyed manner.
“Davy” Crockett (1786-1836), crude, unlettered hunter, backwoodsman,
and Congressman, published, in his “Autobiography” (1834), a collection
of thrilling narratives of adventure remarkable for directness,
vividness, and virility. The “Georgia Scenes, Characters, and
Incidents” (1835) of Augustus B. Longstreet (1790-1870), who was for
many years a college president, revealed the curious traits of the
poor whites or “Crackers” of Georgia. “The Partisan Leader” (1836) by
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784-1851) dealt with the encroachments of
the Federal Government upon the rights of the States, and prophesied
with startling and accurate logic the terrible disruption which
occurred a quarter of a century later. If artistically imperfect, it
is a stirring tale, intense in its action, and of heroic strain. But
it can scarcely be said that any of these works now survive. They are
mainly important as illustrating the evolution of Southern fiction.
With Kennedy and Simms, however, the South takes a high place in the
fiction of America.