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A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE
BY
GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
I. POINT OF VIEW
II. SALEM
III. BOYHOOD.--COLLEGE DAYS.--FANSHAWE
IV. TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES
V. AT BOSTON AND BROOK FARM
VI. THE OLD MANSE
VII. THE SCARLET LETTER.
VIII. LENOX AND CONCORD: PRODUCTIVE PERIOD
IX. ENGLAND AND ITALY
X. THE LAST ROMANCE
XI. PERSONALITY
XII. POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE
XIII. THE Loss AND THE GAIN
APPENDIX I.
APPENDIX II.
APPENDIX III.
INDEX
A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE.
I.
POINT OF VIEW.
This book was not designed as a biography, but is rather a portrait.
And, to speak more carefully still, it is not so much this, as my
conception of what a portrait of Hawthorne should be. For I cannot write
with the authority of one who had known him and had been formally
intrusted with the task of describing his life. On the other hand, I do
not enter upon this attempt as a mere literary performance, but have
been assisted in it by an inward impulse, a consciousness of sympathy
with the subject, which I may perhaps consider a sort of inspiration. My
guide has been intuition, confirmed and seldom confuted by research.
Perhaps it is even a favoring fact that I should never have seen Mr.
Hawthorne; a personality so elusive as his may possibly yield its traits
more readily to one who can never obtrude actual intercourse between
himself and the mind he is meditating upon. An honest report upon
personal contact always has a value denied to the reviews of
after-comers, yet the best criticism and biography is not always that of
contemporaries.
Our first studies will have a biographical scope, because a certain
grouping of facts is essential, to give point to the view which I am
endeavoring to present; and as Hawthorne's early life has hitherto been
but little explored, much of the material used in the earlier chapters
is now for the first time made public. The latter portion of the career
may be treated more sketchily, being already better known; though
passages will be found throughout the essay which have been developed
with some fulness, in order to maintain a correct atmosphere,
compensating any errors which mere opinions might lead to. Special
emphasis, then, must not be held to show neglect of points which my
space and scope prevent my commenting on. But the first outline
requiring our attention involves a distant retrospect.
The history of Hawthorne's genius is in some sense a summary of all New
England history.
From amid a simple, practical, energetic community, remarkable for its
activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to
dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly
enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light
and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods,
in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old
colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans.
Thrusting itself up into view through the drift of a later day, it must
not be confounded with other growths nourished only by that more recent
deposit; though the surface-drift had of course its own weighty
influence in the nourishment of it. The artistic results of a period of
action must sometimes be looked for at a point of time long subsequent,
and this was especially sure to be so in the first phases of New England
civilization. The settlers in this region, in addition to the burdens
and obstacles proper to pioneers, had to deal with the cares of forming
a model state and of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path
in which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an
ample enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were
enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and
exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm
Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's Saint's
Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would suffice to appease
whatever yearnings the immense experiment of their lives failed to
satisfy. Gradually, of course, the native press and new-comers from
England multiplied books in a community which held letters in unusual
reverence. But the continuous work of subduing a new country, the
dependence upon the mother-land for general literature, and finally the
excitements of the Revolutionary period, deferred the opportunity for
any aesthetic expression of the forces that had been at work here ever
since Winthrop stepped from the Arbella on to the shore of the New
World, with noble manliness and sturdy statesmanship enough in him to
uphold the whole future of a great people. When Hawthorne came,
therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding
centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we
owe the high qualities of New England,--a nature which is often so
easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,--this side,
long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found
expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various
elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius
revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had
piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence
imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all this part of
Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses
through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has
been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through
Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration
of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he
himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the
interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's
breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person
and his own blood the same elements, the same capabilities still
existed, however modified or differently ordered. The records of
Massachusetts Bay are full of suggestive incongruities between the
ideal, single-souled life which its founders hoped to lead, and the
jealousies, the opposing opinions, or the intervolved passions of
individuals and of parties, which sometimes unwittingly cloaked
themselves in religious tenets. Placing himself in the position of these
beings, then, and conscious of all the strong and various potencies of
emotion which his own nature, inherited from them, held in curb, it was
natural that Hawthorne should give weight to this contrast between the
intense, prisoned life of shut sensibilities and the formal outward
appearance to which it was moulded. This, indeed, is the source of
motive in much of his writing; notably so in "The Scarlet Letter." It is
thus that his figures get their tremendous and often terrible relief.
They are seen as close as we see our faces in a glass, and brought so
intimately into our consciousness that the throbbing of their passions
sounds like the mysterious, internal beating of our own hearts in our
own ears. And even when he is not dealing directly with themes or
situations closely related to that life, there may be felt in his style,
I think,--particularly in that of the "Twice-Told Tales,"--a union of
vigorous freedom, and graceful, shy restraint, a mingling of guardedness
which verges on severity with a quick and delicately thrilled
sensibility for all that is rich and beautiful and generous, which is
his by right of inheritance from the race of Non-conformist colonizers.
How subtile and various this sympathy is, between himself and the past
of his people, we shall see more clearly as we go on.
Salem was, in fact, Hawthorne's native soil, in all senses; as
intimately and perfectly so as Florence was the only soil in which Dante
and Michael Angelo could have had their growth. It is endlessly
suggestive, this way that historic cities have of expressing themselves
for all time in the persons of one or two men. Silently and with
mysterious precision, the genius comes to birth and ripens--sometimes
despite all sorts of discouragement--into a full bloom which we afterward
see could not have reached its maturity at any other time, and would
surely have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared
in any other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato;
Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris
secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled
expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the
eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the
capital of the Anglo-Saxon race today. In like manner the sober little
New England town which has played a so much more obscure, though in its
way hardly less significant part, sits quietly enshrined and preserved
in Hawthorne's singularly imperishable prose.
Of course, Salem is not to be compared with Florence otherwise than
remotely or partially. Florence was naturally the City of Flowers, in a
figurative sense as well as in the common meaning. Its splendid,
various, and full-pulsed life found spontaneous issue in magnificent
works of art, in architecture, painting, poetry, and sculpture,--things
in which New England was quite sterile. Salem evolved the artistic
spirit indirectly, and embodied itself in Hawthorne by the force of
contrast: the weariness of unadorned life which must have oppressed many
a silent soul before him at last gathered force for a revolt in his
person, and the very dearth which had previously reigned was made to
contribute to the beauty of his achievement. The unique and delicate
perfume of surprise with which his genius issued from its crevice still
haunts his romances. A quality of homeliness dwells in their very
strangeness and rarity which endears them to us unspeakably, and
captivates the foreign sense as well; so that one of Hawthorne's chief
and most enduring charms is in a measure due to that very barrenness of
his native earth which would at first seem to offer only denial to his
development. It is in this direction that we catch sight of the analogy
between his intellectual unfolding and that of the great Florentines. It
consists in his drawing up into himself the nourishment furnished by the
ground upon which he was born, and making the more and the less
productive elements reach a climax of characteristic beauty. One marked
difference, however, is that there was no abundant and inspiriting
municipal life of his own time which could enter into his genius: it was
the consciousness of the past of the place that affected him. He himself
has expressed as much: "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.... 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.... 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 kind of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the
present phase of the town."
It is by briefly reviewing that past, then trying to reproduce in
imagination the immediate atmosphere of Hawthorne's youth, and comparing
the two, that we shall best arrive at the completion of our proposed
portrait. We have first to study the dim perspective and the suggestive
coloring of that historic background from which the author emerges, and
then to define clearly his own individual traits as they appear in his
published works and Note-Books.
The eagerness which admirers of such a genius show, to learn all
permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the
vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that
it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose
winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and
touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two objections
may be urged against giving such details here: one is, that Hawthorne
especially disapproved the writing of a Life of himself; the other, that
the history of Salem and the works of Hawthorne are easily accessible to
any one, without intervention.
Of the first it may frankly be said, indeed, that Hawthorne alone could
have adequately portrayed his life for us; though in the same breath it
should be added that the idea of his undertaking to do it is almost
preposterous. To such a spirit as his, the plan would have had an
exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of
imposition. The mass of trivial details essential to the accurate and
consecutive account of an entire life could never have gained his
serious attention: his modesty would have made as little of them as of
boyish slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to
observers, but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer.
There is something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the
spectacle presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of
his childhood with senile vanity and persistence, and fashioning with
avaricious care the silver shrine and crystal case in which--like a very
different sort of Saint Charles Borromeo--he hopes to have the reverent
ages view him, is one which increases my sense of his defective though
splendid personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling,
that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with
him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In
the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good.
His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of
biography is in these somewhat abated, so that they have been of
incalculable use in assisting the popular eye to see him as he really
was. Other material for illustration of his daily life is somewhat
meagre; and yet, on one account, this is perhaps a cause for rejoicing.
There is a halo about every man of large poetic genius which it is
difficult for the world to wholly miss seeing, while he is alive.
Afterward, when the biographer comes, we find the actual dimensions, the
physical outline, more insisted upon. That is the biographer's business;
and it is not altogether his fault, though partly so, that the public
regard is thus turned away from the peculiar but impalpable sign that
floats above the poet's actual stature. But, under this subtile
influence, forgetting that old, luminous hallucination (if it be one),
we suddenly feel the want of it, are dissatisfied; and, not perceiving
that the cause lies largely with us, we fall to detracting from the
subject. Thus it is fortunate that we have no regular biography of
Shakespere authoritative enough to fade our own private conceptions of
him; and it is not an unmixed ill that some degree of similar mystery
should soften and give tone to the life of Hawthorne. Not that Hawthorne
could ever be seriously disadvantaged by a complete record; for behind
the greatness of the writer, in this case, there stands a person eminent
for strength and loveliness as few men are eminent in their private
lives. But it is with dead authors somewhat as it proved with those
Etruscan warriors, who, seen through an eyehole lying in perfect state
within their tombs, crumbled to a powder when the sepulchres were
opened. The contact of life and death is too unsympathetic. Whatever
stuff the writer be made of, it seems inevitable that he should suffer
injury from exposure to the busy and prying light of subsequent life,
after his so deep repose in death.
"Would you have me a damned author?" exclaims Oberon, in "The Devil in
Manuscript," [Footnote: See the Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.]
"to undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint praise
bestowed against the giver's conscience!... An outlaw from the
protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot might
spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death!" This, to
be sure, is a heated statement, in the mouth of a young author who is
about to cast his unpublished works into the fire; but the dread
expressed here is by no means unfounded. Even the publication of
Hawthorne's Note-Books has put it in the power of various writers of the
day to assume an omniscience not altogether just, and far from
acceptable. Why, then, should further risk of this be incurred, by
issuing the present work?
It is precisely to put a limit to misconstructions, as well as to
meet--however imperfectly--the desire of genuine appreciators, that it
has been written. If this study for a portrait fulfils its aim, it will
at least furnish an outline, fix a definite shape, within which whatever
is observed by others may find its place with a truer effect and more
fitting relation. The mistakes that have been made, indeed, are in no
wise alarming ones; and it would be difficult to find any author who has
been more carefully considered, on the whole, or with such generally
fair conclusions, as Hawthorne. Still, if one sees even minor
distortions current, it can do no harm to correct them. Besides, there
has as yet been no thorough attempt at a consistent synthetic
portraiture; and the differences of different critics' estimates need
some common ground to meet and be harmonized upon. If this can be
supplied, there will be less waste of time in future studies of the same
subject.
It will be seen, therefore, that my book makes no pretension to the
character of a Life. The wish of Hawthorne on this point would alone be
enough, to prevent that. If such a work is to be undertaken, it should
be by another hand, in which the right to set aside this wish is much
more certainly vested than in mine. But I have thought that an earnest
sympathy with the subject might sanction the present essay. Sympathy,
after all, is the talisman which may preserve even the formal biographer
from giving that injury to his theme just spoken of. And if the insight
which guides me has any worth, it will present whatever material has
already been made public with a selection and shaping which all
researchers might not have time to bestow.
Still, I am quite alive to the difficulties of my task; and I am
conscious that the work may to some appear supererogatory. Stricture and
praise are, it will perhaps be said, equally impertinent to a fame so
well established. Neither have I any rash hope of adding a single ray to
the light of Hawthorne's high standing. But I do not fear the charge of
presumption. Time, if not the present reader, will supply the right
perspective and proportion.
On the ground of critical duty there is surely defence enough for such
an attempt as the one now offered; the relative rank of Hawthorne, and
other distinctions touching him, seem to call for a fuller discussion
than has been given them. I hope to prove, however, that my aim is in no
wise a partisan one. Criticism is appreciative estimation. It is
inevitable that the judgments of competent and cultivated persons should
flatly contradict each other, as well as those of incompetent persons;
and this whether they are coeval or of different dates. At the last, it
is in many respects matter of simple individual impression; and there
will always be persons of high intelligence whom it will be impossible
to make coincide with us entirely, touching even a single author. So
that the best we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of
our diverse admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way,
everything good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become
catholic.
Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it? But
there are two ways in which he may express himself,--through speech and
through silence,--both of them sacred alike. Which of these we will use
on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too surely fraught
with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of arbitrary
prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that I
have adopted only another kind of silence.
[Illustration]
II.
SALEM.
Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand
Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once
transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different
kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers,
that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a
man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he
died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years
before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of
the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects;
almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations,
opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action,
these changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold
between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable
space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne
then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of
Parnell which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: "A
poet while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much
attention.... When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to
investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning
are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian
splendor." The bustle of American life certainly does away with "the
dews of morning" very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to
reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the
century. But there are resources for doing so. To begin with, we shall
view Salem as it is. Vigorous and thriving still, the place has
fortunately not drifted so far from its moorings of seventy years since
as to take us out of our bearings, in considering its present aspect.
Pace its quiet, thoroughfares awhile, and you will find them leading
softly and easily into the past.
You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place
wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem
impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the
streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due
understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote
themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic
events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this
stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must
approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They
will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort.
Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink,
as it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex
Street, or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come
upon shy, ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses
stand out here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold
the whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with
carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some
simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand
on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that
hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint
gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron
gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always
with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps
rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth
caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right
magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient pumps
like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear and sparkling
little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into so many and
such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now disappeared, having
been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of all, by
ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over the past
and the present of the place. Looking down from here you behold the
ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by
soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge
gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or
a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising
slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach
a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at
intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears a probable
aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would have chosen for
the standpoint of his "Sights from a Steeple"; and the two kinds of
spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the Puritan aspiration
that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond the gray and
sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective seems to rise
above it and to dominate the place with its dim, half-threatening blue;
as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great measure, bringing
first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many successive
generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary privateering
or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too, Hawthorne's name
again is connected, as we shall presently notice. Then, quitting the
brimming blue, our eyes return over the "flat, unvaried surface covered
chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to
architectural beauty," with its "irregularity which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame"; and retracing the line upon
which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in "Main
Street," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] we
fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name. At its
foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are
exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once
overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the
land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest
period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete
as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs
from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow
upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world
full of witches. But here on the hill there is no special suggestion of
the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging
Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the witches and
their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering with their own
barren little dwellings the three sides of the height facing the town.
Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line. One small area at
the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of
some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this
space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory
sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to
commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here
endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful
vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from
this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that
hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting
place for execution, indeed! It looms up visible for many miles of lower
country around; and as you stand upon the top, earth seems to fall away
with such a fatal ease around it!
The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by
calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed
with bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous
"witch-pins." These are the identical little instruments which the
afflicted children drew from different parts of their dress, in the
trial-room, declaring that some one of the accused had just caused them
to be sharply inserted into their persons. The pins are kept in a small
glass bottle, and are thin and rudely made; and as one looks at the
curious, homely little relics, it is hard to know whether to laugh at
the absurdly insignificant sight, or shudder at the thought of what
deadly harm they worked in the hands of the bewitched. So, while one is
hesitating, one gives the bottle back to the clerk, who locks it up
speedily, and at the next instant is absorbed in the drawing up of some
document; leaving the intruder free to pursue his search for antiquities
elsewhere. But the monuments and remains of the past are nowhere large
enough, in our American towns, to furnish the pilgrim a complete shelter
and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion, or "Witch
House," to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark and grimy
room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a solid scrap
of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been fastened on
to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a wasp's
nest,--as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The descendants of
the first settlers have with pious care preserved the remains of the
First Church of Salem, and the plain little temple may still be seen,
though hidden away in the rear of the solid, brick-built Essex
Institute. Yet, after all, it is only the skeleton of the thing, the
original framework set into a modern covering for protection,--the whole
church being about as large as a small drawing-room only. Into this
little space a few dumb and shrinking witnesses of the past have been
huddled: the old communion-table, two ancient harpsichords, a single
pew-door, a wooden samp-mortar, and a huge, half-ruinous loom; and some
engraved portraits of ancient ministers hang upon the walls. When I
visited the place, a party of young men and women were there, who
hopelessly scattered any slight dust of revery that might have settled
on me from the ancient beams, and sent the ghosts fleeing before their
light laughter. The young women fingered the old harpsichords, and
incontinently thrummed upon them; and one cried, "Play a waltz!" She was
a pretty creature; and, as her gay tone mingled with the rattle of
protesting strings in the worn-out instrument, one might easily have
divined how dire a fate would have been hers, in the days when men not
only believed in bewitchment, but made it punishable. Then a young man
who had clung for guidance amid her spells to the little printed
pamphlet that describes the church, read aloud from its pages,
seriously: "'Nowhere else in this land may one find so ancient and
worshipful a shrine. Within these walls, silent with the remembered
presence of Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, Roger Williams, and their
grave compeers, the very day seems haunted, and the sunshine falls but
soberly in.'"
"O don't!" besought the siren, again. "We're not in a solemn state."
And, whether it was the spell of her voice or not, I confess the
sunshine did not seem to me either haunted or sober.
Thus, all through Salem, you encounter a perverse fate which will not
let you be alone with the elusive spirit of the past. Yet, on
reflection, why should it? This perverse fate is simply the life of
to-day, which has certainly an equal right to the soil with that of our
dreams and memories. And before long the conflict of past and present
thus occasioned leads to a discovery.
In the first place, it transpires that the atmosphere is more favorable
than at first appears for backward-reaching revery. The town holds its
history in reverence, and a good many slight traces of antiquity, with
the quiet respect maintained for them in the minds of the inhabitants,
finally make a strong cumulative attack on the imagination. The very
meagreness and minuteness of the physical witnesses to a former
condition of things cease to discourage, and actually become an
incitement more effective than bulkier relics might impart. The delicacy
of suggestion lends a zest to your dream; and the sober streets open out
before you into vistas of austere reminiscence. The first night that I
passed in Salem, I heard a church-bell ringing loudly, and asked what it
was. It was the nine-o'clock bell; and it had been appointed to ring
thus every night, a hundred years ago or more. How it reverberated
through my mind, till every brain-cell seemed like the empty chamber of
a vanished year! Then, in the room where I slept, there was rich and
ponderous furniture of the fashion of eld; the bed was draped and
canopied with hangings that seemed full of spells and dreamery; and
there was a mirror, tall, and swung between stately mahogany posts
spreading their feet out on the floor, which recalled that fancy of
Hawthorne's, in the tale of "Old Esther Dudley," [Footnote: See also
American Note-Books, Vol. I.; and the first chapter of The House of the
Seven Gables.] about perished dames and grandees made to sweep in
procession through "the inner world" of a glass. Such small matters as
these engage the fancy, and lead it back through a systematic review of
local history with unlooked-for nimbleness. Gradually the mind gets to
roving among scenes imaged as if by memory, and bearing some strangely
intimate relation to the actual scenes before one. The drift of clouds,
the sifting of sudden light from the sky, acquire the import of historic
changes of adversity and prosperity. The spires of Salem, seen one day
through a semi-shrouding rain, appeared to loom up through the mist of
centuries; and the real antiquity of sunlight shone out upon me, at
other times, with cunning quietude, from the weather-worn wood of old,
unpainted houses. Every hour was full of yesterdays. Something of
primitive strangeness and adventure seemed to settle into my mood, and
the air teemed with anticipation of a startling event; as if the deeds
of the past were continually on the eve of returning. With all this,
too, a certain gray shadow of unreality stole over everything.
Then one becomes aware that this frame of mind, produced by actual
contact with Salem, is subtly akin to the mood from which so many of
Hawthorne's visions were projected. A flickering semblance, perhaps, of
what to him must have been a constant though subdued and dreamy flame
summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but from
this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a
hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence
itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If
you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and
the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate
suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts
of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly
from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the
founders themselves.
John White, the English Puritan divine, who, with the "Dorchester
Adventurers," established the first colony at Cape Ann, was moved to
this by the wish to establish in Massachusetts Bay a resting-place for
the fishermen who came over from Dorchester in England, so that they
might be kept under religious influences. This was the origin of Salem;
for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called
Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they
supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it
"proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by
interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem,
"for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in
it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond, now
Wenham, he took as his text, "At Enon, near to Salim, because there was
much water there." This playing with names is a mere surface indication
of the ever-present scriptural analogy which these men were constantly
tracing in all their acts. Cut off by their intellectual asceticism from
any exertion of the imagination in literature, and denying themselves
all that side of life which at once develops and rhythmically restrains
the sense of earthly beauty, they compensated themselves by running
parallels between their own mission and that of the apostles,--a
likeness which was interchangeable at pleasure with the fancied
resemblance of their condition to that of the Israelites. When one
considers the remoteness of the field from their native shores, the
enormous energy needful to collect the proper elements for a population,
and to provide artificers with the means of work; the almost impassable
wildness of the woods; the repeated leagues of hostile Indians; the
depletions by sickness; and the internal dissensions with which they had
to struggle,--one cannot wonder that they invested their own unsurpassed
fortitude, and their genius for government and war, with the quality of
a special Providence. But their faith was inwoven in the most singular
way with a treacherous strand of credulity and superstition. Sometimes
one is impressed with a sense that the prodigious force by which they
subdued the knotty and forest-fettered land, and overcame so many other
more dangerous difficulties, was the ecstasy of men made morbidly strong
by excessive gloom and indifference to the present life. "When we are in
our graves," wrote Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived
in plenty or penury, whether we have died in a bed of downe or lockes of
straw." And Hawthorne speaks of the Puritan temperament as
"accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little." Yet, though they were not, as Winthrop says, "of those that
dreame of perfection in this world," they surely had vast hopes at
heart, and the fire of repressed imagination played around them and
before them as a vital and guiding gleam, of untold value to them, and
using a mysterious power in their affairs. They were something morbid in
their imaginings, but that this morbid habit was a chief source of their
power is a mistaken theory. It is true that their errors of imagination
were so closely knit up with real insight, that they could not
themselves distinguish between the two. Their religious faith, their
outlook into another life, though tinged by unhealthy terrorism, was a
solid, energetic act of imagination; but when it had to deal with
intricate tangles of mind and heart, it became credulity. That lurking
unhealthiness spread from the centre, and soon overcame their judgment
entirely. The bodeful glare of the witchcraft delusion makes this
fearfully clear. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft,"--one of the most
vigorous, true, and thorough of American histories, without which no one
can possess himself of the subject it treats,--has shown conclusively
the admirable character of the community in which that delusion broke
out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out
for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter
where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as
in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from
such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was
not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution
in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general,"
procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three
times as many as suffered in Salem during the whole delusion"; several
persons were tried by water ordeal, and drowned, in Suffolk, Essex, and
Cambridgeshire, at the same time with the Salem executions; and capital
punishments took place there some years after the end of the trouble
here. It is well known, also, that persons were put to death for
witchcraft in two other American colonies. The excess in Salem was
heightened by a well-planned imposture, but found quick sustenance
because "the imagination, called necessarily into extraordinary action
in the absence of scientific certainty, was ... exercised in vain
attempts to discover, unassisted by observation and experiment, the
elements and first principles of nature," [Footnote: Upham, I. 382] and
"had reached a monstrous growth," nourished by a copious literature of
magic and demonology, and by the opinions of the most eminent and humane
preachers and poets.
The imagination which makes beauty out of evil, and that which
accumulates from it the utmost intensity of terror, are well exemplified
in Milton and Bunyan. Doubtless Milton's richly cultured faith, clothed
in lustrous language as in princely silks that overhang his chain-mail
of ample learning and argument, was as intense as the unlettered belief
of Bunyan; and perhaps he shared the prevalent opinions about
witchcraft; yet when he touches upon the superstitious element, the
material used is so transfused with the pictorial and poetic quality
which Milton has distilled from the common belief, and then poured into
this _image_ of the common belief, that I am not sure he cared for
any other quality in it.
"Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, call'd
In secret, riding through the air she comes,
Lured by the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon
Ellipses at their charms."
_Paradise Lost_, II. 662.
Again, in Comus:--
"Some say, no evil thing that walks by night,
Blue meagre hag, or stubborn, unlaid ghost
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin, or swart faery of the mine,
Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity."
How near these passages come to Shakespere, where he touches the same
string! And is it not clear that both poets exulted so in the
_beauty_ born among dark, earthy depths of fear, that they would
have rejected any and every horror which failed to contribute something
to the beautiful? Indeed, it may easily be that such high spirits accept
awful traditions and cruel theologies, merely because they possess a
transmuting touch which gives these things a secret and relative value
not intrinsically theirs; because they find here something to satisfy an
inward demand for immense expansions of thought, a desire for all sorts
of proportioned and balanced extremes. This is no superficial
suggestion, though it may seem so. But in such cases it is not the
positive horror and its direct effect which attract the poet: a deeper
symbolism and an effect both aesthetic and moral recommend the element
to him. With Milton, however, there follows a curious result. He
produces his manufactured myth of Sin and Death and his ludicrous Limbo
of Vanity with a gravity and earnestness as convincing as those which
urge home any part of his theme; yet we are aware that he is only making
poetic pretence of belief; so that a certain distrust of his sincerity
throughout creeps in, as we read. How much, we ask, is allegory in the
poet's own estimation, and how much real belief? Now in Bunyan there is
nothing of this doubt. Though the author declares his narrative to be
the relation of a dream, the figment becomes absolute fact to us; and
the homely realism of Giant Despair gives him a firmer hold upon me as
an actual existence, than all the splendid characterization of Milton's
Beelzebub can gain. Even Apollyon is more real. Milton assumes the
historic air of the epic poet, Bunyan admits that he is giving an
allegory; yet of the two the humble recorder of Christian's progress
seems the more worthy of credit. Something of this effect is doubtless
due to art: the "Pilgrim's Progress" is more adequately couched in a
single and consistent strain than the "Paradise Lost." Milton, by
implying veracity and then vaporing off into allegory, challenges
dispute; but Bunyan, in humbly confessing himself a dreamer, disarms his
reader and traps him into entire assent. Certainly Bunyan was not the
greater artist: that supposition will not even bear a moment's
contemplation; but, as it happened, his weakness was his strength. He
had but one chance. His work would have been nothing without allegory,
and the simple device of the dream--which is the refuge of a man
unskilled in composition, who feels that his figures cannot quite stand
as self-sufficient entities--happens to be as valuable to him as it was
necessary; for the plea of unreality brings out, in the strong light of
surprise, a contrast between the sincere substance of the story and its
assumed insubstantiality. Milton had many chances, many resources of
power to rely on; but by grasping boldly at the effect of authenticity
he loses that one among the several prizes within his reach. I do not
know that I am right, but all this seems to me to argue a certain
dividing and weakening influence exerted by the imagination which uses
religious or superstitious dread for the purposes of beauty; while that
which discourses confidently of the passage from this to another life,
with all the several stages clearly marked, and floods the whole scene
with a vivid and inartificial light from "the powers and terrors of what
is yet unseen," affects the mind with every atom of energy economized
and concentred.
Leaving the literary question, we may bring this conclusion to bear upon
the Puritans and Salem, as their history affected Hawthorne. I have said
that a gradual suffusion of the marvellous overspreads the comparatively
arid annals of the town, if one reviews them amid the proper influences;
and I have touched upon the two phases of imagination which, playing
over the facts, give them this atmosphere. Now if what I guess from the
contrast between Milton and Bunyan be true, the lower kind of
imagination--that is, imagination deformed to credulity--would be likely
to be the more impressive. This uncanny quality of superstition, then,
is the one which insensibly exudes from the pages of New England's and
perhaps especially of Salem's colonial history, as Hawthorne turns them.
This is the dank effluence that, mingling with the sweeter and freer air
of his own reveries, has made so many people shudder on entering the
great romancer's shadowy but serene domain.