Spectator may be compared to those of a fond Parent, when he beholds a
beloved child about to embark on the troubled Ocean of public Life.
Perhaps the iron hand of Criticism may crush our humble undertaking, ere
it is strengthened by time. Or it may pine in obscurity neglected and
forgotten by those, with whose assistance it might become the Pride and
Ornament of our Country.... We beg leave farther to remark that in order
to carry on any enterprise with spirit MONEY is absolutely necessary.
Money, although it is the root of all evil, is also the foundation of
everything great and good, and therefore our Subscribers ... will please
carefully to remember that the terms are two cents per month."
A little further on there is this allusion to the Scriptural proverb
cited above: "We have been informed that this expression is incorrect,
and that it is the love of Money which is the 'Root of all Evil.' But
money is certainly the cause of the love of Money. Therefore, Money is
the deepest 'Root of Evil.'" (Observe, here, the young student's pride
of reason, and the consciousness of a gift for casuistry!) Under the
head of "Domestic News" occur some remarks on the sea-serpent, the
deduction from various rumors about the monster being that "he seems to
possess a strange and we think rather unusual faculty of appearing in
different shapes to different eyes, so that where one person sees a
shark, another beholds a nameless dragon." (Here, too, is the humorously
veiled distrust that always lurked beneath his dealings with the
marvellous.) In the next columns there is found an advertisement of the
Pin Society, which "will commence lending pins to any creditable person,
on Wednesday, the 23d instant. No numbers except ten, twenty, and thirty
will be lent"; and the rate of interest is to be one pin on every ten
per day. This bold financial scheme is also carried on by the editor in
person,--a combination which in these days would lay him open to
suspicions of unfair dealing. I have seen a little manuscript book
containing the remarkable constitution and by-laws of this society, in
which there were but two members; and it is really a curious study of
whimsical intricacy, the work of a mind perfectly accustomed to solitude
and fertile in resources for making monotony various and delightful. It
does not surprise one to meet with the characteristic announcement from
this editor that he has "concluded not to insert deaths and marriages
(except of very distinguished persons) in the Spectator. We can see but
little use in thus giving to the world the names of the crowd who are
tying the marriage knot, and going down to the silent tomb." There is
some poetry at the end of the paper, excellent for a boy, but without
the easy inspiration of the really witty prose.
It would seem that this weekly once made a beginning, which was also an
end, before nourishing up into the series of which I have synopsized the
first issue; for there is another Number One without date, but
apparently earlier. This contains some exemplary sentiments "On
Solitude," with a touch of what was real profundity in so inexperienced
a writer. "Man is naturally a sociable being," he says; "and apart from
the world there are no incitements to the pursuit of excellence; there
are no rivals to contend with; and therefore there is no improvement....
The heart may be more pure and uncorrupted in solitude than when exposed
to the influences of the depravity of the world; but the benefit of
virtuous examples is equal to the detriment of vicious ones, and both
are equally lost." The "Domestic Intelligence" of this number is as
follows: "The lady of Dr. Winthrop Brown, a son and Heir. Mrs.
Hathorne's cat, Seven Kittens. We hear that both of the above ladies are
in a state of convalescence." Also, "Intentions of Marriage. The
beautiful and accomplished Miss Keziah Dingley will shortly be united to
Dominicus Jordan Esq." (The young author appears to have allowed himself
in this paragraph the stimulus of a little fiction respecting real
persons. Dominicus Jordan is the pedler of the Raymond notes. Who Miss
Keziah was I do not know, but from the name I guess her to have been a
relative, by appellation at least, through Richard Manning's wife. If
Hawthorne did not himself call Miss Dingley aunt, he may very likely
have heard her commonly spoken of by that title. Did the old, boyish
association perhaps unconsciously supply him with a name for the Indian
aunt of "Septimius Felton"?) The next item is "DEATHS. We are sorry to
be under the necessity of informing our readers that no deaths of
importance have taken place, except that of the publisher of this Paper,
who died of Starvation, owing to the slenderness of his patronage."
Notwithstanding this discouraging incident, one of the advertisements
declares that "Employment will be given to any number of indigent Poets
and Authors at this office." But shortly afterward is inserted the
announcement that "Nathaniel Hathorne proposes to publish by
subscription a new edition of the Miseries of Authors, to which will be
added a sequel, containing Facts and Remarks drawn from his own
experience."
In Number Two of the new series, the editor speaks of a discourse by Dr.
Stoughton, "on Tuesday evening.... With the amount of the contribution
which was taken up ... we are unacquainted, as, having no money in our
pockets, we departed before it commenced." This issue takes a despondent
view of the difficulties that beset editors. There is a clever paragraph
of "Domestic News" again. "As we know of no News," it says, "we hope our
readers will excuse us for not inserting any. The law which prohibits
paying debts when a person has no money will apply in this case." Next
we have a very arch dissertation "On Industry": "It has somewhere been
remarked that an Author does not write the worse for knowing little or
nothing of his subject. We hope the truth of this saying will be
manifest in the present article. With the benefits of Industry we are
not personally acquainted." The desperate editor winds up his week's
budget with a warning to all persons who may be displeased by
observations in the Spectator, that he is going to take fencing lessons
and practise shooting at a mark. "We also," he adds, "think it advisable
to procure a stout oaken cudgel to be the constant companion of our
peregrinations." The assumption of idleness in the essay on Industry,
just quoted, breaks down entirely in a later number, when the editor--in
apologizing for inaccuracies in the printing of his paper--enumerates
his different occupations: "In the first place we study Latin and Greek.
Secondly we write in the employment of William Manning Esq., [at that
time proprietor of an extensive line of stagecoaches]. Thirdly, we are
Secretary, Treasurer, and Manager of the 'Pin Society'; Fourthly, we are
editor of the Spectator; fifthly, sixthly, and lastly, our own Printers,
Printing Press and Types." But the young journalist carried on his
labors unabatedly, for the term of some five weeks, and managed to make
himself very entertaining. I take from an essay "On Benevolence" a
fragment which has a touch of poetry out of his own life. Benevolence,
he says, is "to protect the fatherless, and to make the Widow's heart
sing for joy." One of the most cherishable effusions is that "On
Wealth," in which the venerable writer drops into a charmingly
confidential and reminiscent vein. "All men," he begins, "from the
highest to the lowest, desire to pursue wealth.... In process of time if
we obtain possession" of a sum at first fixed as the ultimatum, "we
generally find ourselves as far from being contented as at first....
When I was a boy, I one day made an inroad into a closet, to the secret
recesses of which I had often wished to penetrate. I there discovered a
quantity of very fine apples. At first I determined to take only one,
which I put in my pocket. But those which remained were so very inviting
that it was against my conscience to leave them, and I filled my pockets
and departed, wishing that they would hold more. But alas! an apple
which was unable to find space enough among its companions bounced down
upon the floor before all the Family. I was immediately searched, and
forced, very unwillingly, to deliver up all my booty." In the same
number which contains this composition appears the token of what was
doubtless Hawthorne's first recognition in literature. It is a
"Communication," of tenor following:--
"Mr. Editor: I have observed in some of your last papers, Essays on
Various subjects, and am very much pleased with them, and wish you to
continue them. If you will do this, you will oblige
"MARIA LOUISA HATHORNE."
"We hail the above communication," writes the editor with exaggerated
gratitude, "as the dawn of a happy day for us." In his next and final
issue, though (September, 18, 1820), he satirically evinces his
dissatisfaction at the want of a literary fraternity in his native land,
through this "Request":--
"As it is part of the plan of the Spectator to criticise
home-manufactured publications, we most earnestly desire some of our
benevolent Readers to write a book for our special benefit. At present
we feel as we were wont to do in the days of our Boyhood, when we
possessed a Hatchet, without anything to exercise it upon. We engage to
execute the Printing and Binding, and to procure the Paper for the Work,
free of all expense to the Author. If this request should be denied us,
we must infallibly turn our arms against our own writings, which, as
they will not stand the test of criticism, we feel very unwilling to do.
We do not wish that the proposed work should be too perfect; the Author
will please to make a few blunders for us to exercise our Talents upon."
In these quotations one sees very clearly the increased maturity (though
it be only by a year or two) of the lad, since the engrossing of his
records at Raymond. We get in these his entire mood, catch gleams of a
steady fire of ambition under the light, self-possessed air of assumed
indifference, and see how easily already his humor began to play, with
that clear and sweet ripeness that warms some of his more famous pages,
like late sunshine striking through clusters of mellow and translucent
grapes. Yet our grasp of his mental situation at this point would not be
complete, without recognition of the graver emotions that sometimes
throbbed beneath the surface. The doubt, the hesitancy that sometimes
must have weighed upon his lonely, self-reliant spirit with weary
movelessness, and all the pain of awakening ambition and departing
boyhood, seem to find a symbol in this stanza from the fourth
"Spectator":--
"Days of my youth, ye fleet away,
As fades the bright sun's cheering ray,
And scarce my infant hours are gone,
Ere manhood's troubled step comes on.
My infant hours return no more,
And all their happiness is o'er;
The stormy sea of life appears,
A scene of tumult and of tears."
Of the vexations of unfledged manhood the boy of sixteen did not speak
without knowledge. Various sorts of pressure from uncongenial sources
were now and then brought to bear upon him; there was present always the
galling consciousness of depending on others for support, and of being
less self-sustaining than approaching manhood made him wish to be.
Allusion has been made to his doing writing for his uncle William. "I
still continue," he says in a letter of October, 1820, to his mother at
Raymond, "to write for Uncle William, and find my salary quite
convenient for many purposes." This, to be sure, was a first approach to
self-support, and flattering to his sense of proper dignity. But
Hawthorne, in character as in genius, had a passion for maturity. An
outpouring of his thoughts on this and other matters, directed to his
sister, accompanies the letter just cited. Let us read it here as he
wrote it more than a half-century ago:--
DEAR SISTER:--I am very angry with you for not sending me some of your
poetry, which I consider a great piece of ingratitude. You will not see
one line of mine until you return the confidence which I have placed in
you. I have bought the 'Lord of the Isles,' and intend either to send or
to bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems. I
have read Hogg's "Tales," "Caleb Williams," "St. Lean," and
"Mandeville." I admire Godwin's novels, and intend to read them all. I
shall read the "Abbot," by the author of "Waverley," as soon as I can
hire it. I have read all Scott's novels except that. I wish I had not,
that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I
like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can
be a Poet and a book-keeper at the same time. I do find this place most
"dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I
think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the
"Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I
can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert for four years
longer. How happy I should be to be able to say, "I am Lord of myself!"
You may cut off this part of my letter, and show the other to Uncle
Richard. Do write me some letters in skimmed milk. [The shy spirit finds
it thus hard, even thus early, to be under possible surveillance in his
epistolary musings, and wants to write invisibly.] I must conclude, as I
am in a "monstrous hurry!"
Your affectionate brother, NATH. HATHORNE.
P. S. The most beautiful poetry I think I ever saw begins:--
"She's gone to dwell in Heaven, my lassie,
She's gone to dwell in Heaven:
Ye're ow're pure quo' a voice aboon
For dwalling out of Heaven."
It is not the words, but the thoughts. I hope you have read it, as I
know you would admire it.
As to the allusion to college, it is but a single ray let into the
obscurity of a season when the sensitive, sturdy, proud young heart must
have borne many a vigil of vexatious and bitter revery. And this must
not be left out in reckoning the grains and scruples that were
compounding themselves into his inner consciousness. But at last he
struck a balance, wisely, among his doubts; and in the fall of 1821 he
went to Bowdoin to become one of the famous class with Longfellow and
Cheever, the memory of which has been enwreathed with the gentle verse
of "Morituri Salutamus,"--a fadeless garland. In "Fanshawe," an
anonymous work of his youth, Hawthorne has pictured some aspects of the
college at Brunswick, under a very slight veil of fiction.
"From the exterior of the collegians," he says, "an accurate observer
might pretty safely judge how long they had been inmates of those
classic walls. The brown cheeks and the rustic dress of some would
inform him that they had but recently left the plough, to labor in a not
less toilsome field. The grave look and the intermingling of garments of
a more classic cut would distinguish those who had begun to acquire the
polish of their new residence; and the air of superiority, the paler
cheek, the less robust form, the spectacles of green, and the dress in
general of threadbare black, would designate the highest class, who were
understood to have acquired nearly all the science their Alma Mater
could bestow, and to be on the point of assuming their stations in the
world. There were, it is true, exceptions to this general description. A
few young men had found their way hither from the distant seaports; and
these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom
they asserted a superiority in exterior accomplishments, which the
fresh, though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them
in their literary competitions. A third class, differing widely from
both the former, consisted of a few young descendants of the aborigines,
to whom an impracticable philanthropy was endeavoring to impart the
benefits of civilization.
"If this institution did not offer all the advantages of elder and
prouder seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to its students by
the inculcation of regular habits, and of a deep and awful sense of
religion, which seldom deserted them in their course through life. The
mild and gentle rule ... was more destructive to vice than a sterner
sway; and though youth is never without its follies, they have seldom
been more harmless than they were here. The students, indeed, ignorant
of their own bliss, sometimes wished to hasten the time of their
entrance on the business of life; but they found, in after years, that
many of their happiest remembrances, many of the scenes which they would
with least reluctance live over again, referred to the seat of their
early studies."
* * * * *
He here divides the honors pleasantly between the forest-bred and
city-trained youth, having, from his own experience, an interest in each
class. Yet I think he must have sided, in fact, with the country boys.
Horatio Bridge, his classmate, and throughout life a more confidential
friend than Pierce, was brought up on his father's estate at Bridgton,
north of Sebago Lake; and Franklin Pierce, in the class above him, his
only other frequent companion, was a native of the New Hampshire
hill-lands. He himself, in his outward bearing, perhaps gathered to his
person something the look of both the seaport lads and the sturdy
mountaineers and woodsmen. He was large and strong (in a letter to his
uncle Robert, just before entering college, he gives the measure of his
foot, for some new shoes that are to be sent; it is ten inches), but an
interior and ruling grace removed all suspicion of heaviness. Being a
sea-captain's son, he would naturally make his connections at college
with men who had the out-of-doors glow about them; the simple and severe
life at Raymond, too, had put him in sympathy with the people rather
than with the patricians (although I see that the reminiscences of some
of the old dwellers near Raymond describe the widow and her brother
Richard as being exclusive and what was there thought "aristocratic").
Hawthorne, Pierce, and Bridge came together in the Athenaean Society,
the newer club of the two college literary unions, and the more
democratic; and the trio preserved their cordial relations intact for
forty years, sometimes amid confusions and misconstructions, or between
cross-fires of troublous counter-considerations, with a rare fidelity.
Hawthorne held eminent scholarship easily within his grasp, but he and
his two cronies seem to have taken their curriculum very easily, though
they all came off well in the graduation. Hawthorne was a good Latinist.
The venerable Professor Packard has said that his Latin compositions,
even in the Freshman year, were remarkable; and Mr. Longfellow tells me
that he recalls the graceful and poetic translations which his classmate
used to give from the Roman authors. He got no celebrity in Greek, I
believe, but he always kept up his liking for the Latin writers. Some
years since a Latin theme of his was found, which had been delivered at
an exhibition of the Athenaean Society, in December, 1823. [Footnote:
See Appendix II.] It shows some niceties of selection, and the style is
neat; I even fancy something individual in the choice of the words
_sanctior nec beatior_, as applied to the republic, and a
distinctly Hawthornesque distinction in the _fulgor tantum fuit sine
fervore_; though a relic of this kind should not be examined too
closely, and claims the same exemption that one gives to Shelley's
school-compelled verses, _In Horologium_.
His English compositions also excited notice. Professor Newman gave them
high commendation, and Mr. Bridge speaks of their superiority. But none
of them have survived; whether owing to the author's vigilant
suppression, or to the accidents of time. It was Hawthorne's habit as a
young man to destroy all of his own letters that he could find, on
returning home after an absence; and few records of his college life
remain. Here is a brief note, however.
BRUNSWICK, August 12, 1823.
MY DEAR UNCLE:--I received your letter in due time, and should have
answered it in due season, if I had not been prevented, as L----
conjectures, by laziness. The money was very acceptable to me, and will
last me till the end of the term, which is three weeks from next
Wednesday. I shall then have finished one half of my college life.... I
suppose your farm prospers, and I hope you will have abundance of fruit,
and that I shall come home time enough to eat some of it, which I should
prefer to all the pleasure of cultivating it. I have heard that there is
a steamboat which runs twice a week between Portland and Boston. If this
be the case I should like to come home that way, if mother has no
apprehension of the boiler's bursting.
I really have had a great deal to do this term, as, in addition to the
usual exercises, we have to write a theme or essay of three or four
pages, every fortnight, which employs nearly all my time, so that I hope
you will not impute my neglect of writing wholly to laziness....
Your affectionate nephew, NATH. HATHORNE.
This letter, as well as the others here given, shows how much of boyish
simplicity surrounded and protected the rare and distinct personality
already unfolded in this youth of eighteen. The mixture makes the charm of
Hawthorne's youth, as the union of genius and common-sense kept his
maturity alive with a steady and wholesome light. I fancy that obligatory
culture irked him then, as always, and that he chose his own green lanes
toward the advancement of learning. His later writings vouchsafe only two
slight glimpses of the college days. In his Life of Franklin Pierce, he
recalls Pierce's chairmanship of the Athenaean Society, on the committee
of which he himself held a place. "I remember, likewise," he says, "that
the only military service of my life was as a private soldier in a
college company, of which Pierce was one of the officers. He entered
into this latter business, or pastime, with an earnestness with which I
could not pretend to compete, and at which, perhaps, he would now be
inclined to smile." But much more intimate and delightful is the
reminiscence which, in the dedicatory preface of "The Snow Image,"
addressed to his friend Bridge, he thus calls up. "If anybody is
responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know
not whence your faith came: but, while we were lads together at a
country college, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall
academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the
current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in
the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching treats in
that shadowy little stream, which, I suppose, is still wandering
riverward through the forest,--though you and I will never cast a line
in it again,--two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to
acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard
of, or else it had been the worse for us,--still it was your prognostic
of your friend's destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction." I have
asked Mr. Bridge what gave him this impression of Hawthorne, and he
tells me that it was an indescribable conviction, aroused by the whole
drift of his friend's mind as he saw it. Exquisite indeed must have been
that first fleeting aroma of genius; and I would that it might have been
then and there imprisoned and perpetuated for our delight. But we must
be satisfied with the quick and sympathetic insight with which
Hawthorne's friend discovered his true bent. The world owes more,
probably, to this early encouragement from a college companion than it
can ever estimate.