not very populous settlement in a retired corner of one of the New
England States." This, no doubt, is a reproduction of Bowdoin. Mr.
Longfellow tells me that the descriptions of the seminary and of the
country around it strongly suggest the Brunswick College. The President
of Harley is a Dr. Melmoth, an amiable and simple old delver in
learning, in a general way recalling Dominie Sampson, whose vigorous
spouse rules him somewhat severely: their little bickerings supply a
strain of farce indigenous to Scott's fictions, but quite unlike
anything in Hawthorne's later work. A young lady, named Ellen Langton,
daughter of an old friend of Dr. Melmoth's, is sent to Harley, to stay
under his guardianship. Ellen is somewhat vaguely sketched, in the style
of Scott's heroines; but this sentence ends with a trace of the young
writer's quality: "If pen could give an adequate idea of Ellen Langton's
beauty, it would achieve what pencil ... never could; for though the
dark eyes might be painted, the pure and pleasant thoughts that peeped
through them could only be seen and felt." This maiden the doctor once
took into his study, to begin a course of modern languages with her; but
she "having discovered an old romance among his heavy folios, contrived
by the sweet charm of her voice to engage his attention," and quite
beguiled him from severer studies. Naturally, she inthralls two young
students at the college: one of whom is Edward Wolcott, a wealthy,
handsome, generous, healthy young fellow from one of the seaport towns;
and the other, Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor but ambitious recluse,
already passing into a decline through overmuch devotion to books and
meditation. Fanshawe, though the deeper nature of the two, and intensely
moved by his new passion, perceiving that a union between himself and
Ellen could not be a happy one, resigns the hope of it from the
beginning. But circumstances bring him into intimate relation with her.
The real action of the book, after the preliminaries, takes up only some
three days, and turns upon the attempt of a man named Butler to entice
Ellen away under his protection, then marry her, and secure the fortune
to which she is heiress. This scheme is partly frustrated by
circumstances, and Butler's purpose towards Ellen then becomes a much
more sinister one. From this she is rescued by Fanshawe; and, knowing
that he loves her, but is concealing his passion, she gives him the
opportunity and the right to claim her hand. For a moment, the rush of
desire and hope is so great that he hesitates; then he refuses to take
advantage of her generosity, and parts with her for the last time. Ellen
becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had won her heart from the first; and
Fanshawe, sinking into rapid consumption, dies before his class
graduates. It is easy to see how the sources of emotion thus opened
attracted Hawthorne. The noble and refined nature of Fanshawe, and the
mingled craftiness, remorse, and ferocity of Butler, are crude
embodiments of the same characteristics which he afterward treated in
modified forms. They are the two poles, the extremes,--both of them
remote and chilly,--of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew,
after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these
persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a
few characteristic portions of the book which suggest its tone.
When the young lady's flight with the stranger actually takes place,
young Wolcott and President Melmoth ride together in the pursuit, and at
this point there occurs a dialogue which is certainly as laughable and
is better condensed than most similar passages in Scott, whom it
strongly recalls. A hint of Cervantes appears in it, too, which makes it
not out of place to mention that Hawthorne studied "Don Quixote" in the
original, soon after leaving college.
* * * * *
"'Alas, youth! these are strange times,' observed the President, 'when a
doctor of divinity and an undergraduate set forth like a knight-errant
and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of
the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray
Heaven, however, there be no encounter in store for us; for I utterly
forgot to provide myself with weapons.'
"'I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' replied Edward,
whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous
comparison.
"'Ay, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the divine. 'But
wherewith shall I defend myself?--my hand being empty except of this
golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton.'
"'One of those, if you will accept it,' answered Edward, exhibiting a
brace of pistols, 'will serve to begin the conflict, before you join the
battle hand to hand.'
"'Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly
instrument, since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the
bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. 'But were it not better, seeing we are so
well provided with artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an
encounter, to some stone-wall or other place of strength?'
"'If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, 'you, as being most
valiant and experienced, should ride forward, lance in hand (your long
staff serving for a lance), while I annoy the enemy from afar.'
"'Like Teucer behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. Melmoth, 'or
David with his stone and sling. No, no, young man; I have left
unfinished in my study a learned treatise, important not only to the
present age, but to posterity, for whose sakes I must take heed to my
safety. But lo! who rides yonder?'"
* * * * *
In one place only does the author give full rein to his tragic power;
but this is a vigorous burst, and remarkable also for its sure and
trenchant analysis. During his escape with Ellen, Butler is moved to
stop at a lonely hut inhabited by his mother, where he finds her dying;
and, torn by the sight of her suffering while she raves and yearns for
his presence, he makes himself known to her.
* * * * *
"At that unforgotten voice, the darkness burst away at once from her
soul. She arose in bed, her eyes and her whole countenance beaming with
joy, and threw her arms about his neck. A multitude of words seem
struggling for utterance; but they gave place to a low moaning sound,
and then to the silence of death. The one moment of happiness, that
recompensed years of sorrow, had been her last.... As he [Butler]
looked, the expression of enthusiastic joy that parting life had left
upon the features faded gradually away, and the countenance, though no
longer wild, assumed the sadness which it had worn through a long course
of grief and pain. On beholding this natural consequence of death, the
thought perhaps occurred to him that her soul, no longer dependent on
the imperfect means of intercourse possessed by mortals, had communed
with his own, and become acquainted with all its guilt and misery. He
started from the bedside and covered his face with his hands, as if to
hide it from those dead eyes.... But his deep repentance for the misery
he had brought upon his parent did not produce in him a resolution to do
wrong no more. The sudden consciousness of accumulated guilt made him
desperate. He felt as if no one had thenceforth a claim to justice or
compassion at his hands, when his neglect and cruelty had poisoned his
mother's life, and hastened her death."
* * * * *
What separates this story from the rest of Hawthorne's works is an
intricate plot, with passages of open humor, and a rather melodramatic
tone in the conclusion. These are the result in part of the prevalent
fashion of romance, and in part of a desire to produce effects not quite
consonant with his native bent. The choice of the title, "Fanshawe,"
too, seems to show a deference to the then prevalent taste for brief and
quaint-sounding names; and the motto, "Wilt thou go on with me?" from
Southey, placed on his title-page, together with quotations at the heads
of chapters, belongs to a past fashion. Fanshawe and Butler are powerful
conceptions, but they are so purely embodiments of passion as to assume
an air of unreality. Butler is like an evil wraith, and Fanshawe is as
evanescent as a sad cloud in the sky, touched with the first pale light
of morning. Fanshawe, with his pure heart and high resolves, represents
that constant aspiration toward lofty moral truth which marked
Hawthorne's own mind, and Butler is a crude example of the sinful spirit
which he afterward analyzed under many forms. The verbal style has few
marks of the maturer mould afterward impressed on it, except that there
is the preference always noticeable in Hawthorne for Latin wording. Two
or three phrases, however, show all the limpidness and ease for which he
gained fame subsequently. For instance, when Fanshawe is first surprised
by his love for Ellen, he returns to his room to study: "The books were
around him which had hitherto been to him like those fabled volumes of
magic, from which the reader could not turn away his eye, till death
were the consequence of his studies." This, too, is a pretty description
of Ellen: "Terror had at first blanched her as white as a lily.... Shame
next bore sway; and her blushing countenance, covered by her slender
white fingers, might fantastically be compared to a variegated rose,
with its alternate stripes of white and red." Its restraint is perhaps
the most remarkable trait of the novel; for though this comes of
timidity, it shows that Hawthorne, whether this be to his advantage or
not, was not of the order of young genius which begins with tumid and
excessive exhibition of power. His early acquaintance with books,
breeding a respect for literary form, his shy, considerate modes of
dealing with any intellectual problem or question requiring judgment,
and the formal taste of the period in letters, probably conspired to
this end.
IV.
TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES.
1828-1838.
We have now reached the point where the concealed foundations of
Hawthorne's life terminate, and the final structure begins to appear
above the surface, like the topmost portion of a coral island slowly
rising from the depths of a solitary ocean.
When he left college, his friends Cilley and Pierce entered into law,
the gateway to politics; Bridge returned to his father's estate at
Bridgton, to engage later in a large enterprise there; and other
classmates took up various activities in the midst of other men; but for
Hawthorne no very clear path presented itself. Literature had not yet
attained, in the United States, the rank of a distinct and powerful
profession. Fifteen years before, Brockden Brown had died prematurely
after a hapless struggle, worn out with overwork,--the first man who had
undertaken to live by writing in this country since its colonization.
"The North American Review," indeed, in Boston, was laying the
corner-stone of a vigorous periodical literature; and in this year of
1825 William Cullen Bryant had gone to New York to edit "The New York
Review," after publishing at Cambridge his first volume of poetry, "The
Ages." Irving was an author of recent but established fame, who was
drawing chiefly from the rich supplies of European manners, legend, and
history; while Cooper, in his pleasant Pioneer-land beside Otsego Lake,
had begun to make clear his claim to a wide domain of native and
national fiction. But to a young man of reserved temper, having few or
no friends directly connected with publication, and living in a sombre,
old-fashioned town, isolated as all like towns were before the era of
railroads, the avenue to publicity and a definite literary career was
dark and devious enough.
I suppose it was after his venture of "Fanshawe," that he set about the
composition of some shorter stories which he called "Seven Tales of my
Native Land." [Footnote: The motto prefixed to these was, "We are
seven."] His sister, to whom he read these, has told me that they were
very beautiful, but no definite recollection of them remains to her,
except that some of them related to witchcraft, and some to the sea,
being stories of pirates and privateers. In one of these latter were
certain verses, beginning,--
"The pirates of the sea, they were a fearful race."
Hawthorne has described in "The Devil in Manuscript," while depicting a
young author about to destroy his manuscript, his own vexations in
trying to find a publisher for these attempts. "They have been offered
to some seventeen booksellers. It would make you stare to read their
answers.... One man publishes nothing but school-books; another has five
novels already under examination; ... another gentleman is just giving
up business on purpose, I verily believe, to escape publishing my
book.... In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has
vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he--a literary dabbler himself, I
should judge--has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he
calls vast improvements, and concluding ... that he will not be
concerned on any terms.... But there does seem to be one honest man
among these seventeen unrighteous ones; and he tells me fairly that no
American publisher will meddle with an American work, seldom if by a
known writer, and never if by a new one, unless at the writer's risk."
He indeed had the most discouraging sort of search for a publisher; but
at last a young printer of Salem promised to undertake the work. His
name was Ferdinand Andrews; and he was at one time half-owner with Caleb
Cushing of an establishment from which they issued "The Salem Gazette,"
in 1822, the same journal in which Hawthorne published various papers at
a later date, when Mr. Caleb Foote was its editor. Andrews was
ambitious, and evidently appreciative of his young townsman's genius;
but he delayed issuing the "Seven Tales" so long that the author,
exasperated, recalled the manuscript. Andrews, waiting only for better
business prospects, was loath to let them go; but Hawthorne insisted,
and at last the publisher sent word, "Mr. Hawthorne's manuscript awaits
his orders." The writer received it and burned it, to the chagrin of
Andrews, who had hoped to bring out many works by the same hand.
This, at the time, must have been an incident of incalculable and
depressing importance to Hawthorne, and the intense emotion it caused
may be guessed from the utterances of the young writer in the sketch
just alluded to, though he has there veiled the affair in a light film
of sarcasm. The hero of that scene is called Oberon, one of the feigned
names which Hawthorne himself used at times in contributing to
periodicals. "'What is more potent than fire!' said he, in his gloomiest
tone. 'Even thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape
it.... All that I had accomplished, all that I planned for future years,
has perished by one common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The
deed has been my fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life; a
long repentance of this hour; and at last an obscure grave, where they
will bury and forget me!'" There is also an allusion to the tales
founded on witchcraft: "I could believe, if I chose," says Oberon, "that
there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have read them, and
know what I mean,--that conception in which I endeavored to embody the
character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written
records of witchcraft. O, I have a horror of what was created in my own
brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a
sort of material existence!' You remember how the hellish thing used to
suck away the happiness of those who ... subjected themselves to his
power." This is curious, as showing the point from which Hawthorne had
resolved to treat the theme. He had instinctively perceived that the
only way to make the witchcraft delusion available in fiction was to
accept the witch as a fact, an actual being, and expend his art upon
developing the abnormal character; while other writers, who have
attempted to use the subject for romantic ends, have uniformly taken the
historical view, and sought to extract their pathos from the effect of
the delusion on innocent persons. The historical view is that of
intelligent criticism; but Hawthorne's effort was the harbinger and
token of an original imagination.
After the publication of "Fanshawe" and the destruction of his "Seven
Tales," Hawthorne found himself advanced not so much as by a single
footstep on the road to fame. "Fame!" he exclaims, in meditation; "some
very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it,--as the
penny-post, the town-crier, the constable,--and they are known to
everybody; while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are
unknown by the majority of their fellow-citizens." But the fame that he
desired was, I think, only that which is the recognition by the public
that a man is on the way to truth. An outside acknowledgment of this is
invaluable even to the least vain of authors, because it assures him
that, in following his own inner impulse through every doubt and
discouragement, he has not been pursuing a chimera, and gives him new
heart for the highest enterprises of which he is capable. To attain
this, amid the peculiar surroundings of his life, was difficult enough.
At that time, Salem society was more peculiarly constituted than it has
been in later years. A strong circle of wealthy families maintained
rigorously the distinctions of class; their entertainments were
splendid, their manners magnificent, and the fame of the beautiful women
born amongst them has been confirmed by a long succession reaching into
the present day. They prescribed certain fashions, customs, punctilios,
to disregard which was social exile for the offending party; and they
were divided even among themselves, I am told, by the most inveterate
jealousies. It is said that certain people would almost have endured the
thumb-screw rather than meet and speak to others. There seems to be good
authority for believing that Hawthorne could have entered this circle,
had he so chosen. He had relatives who took an active part within it;
and it appears that there was a disposition among some of the
fashionable coterie to show him particular favor, and that advances were
made by them with the wish to draw him out. But one can conceive that it
would not be acceptable to him to meet them on any but terms of entire
equality. The want of ample supplies of money, which was one of the
results of the fallen fortunes of his family, made this impossible;
those who held sway were of older date in the place than some of the
Hawthornes, and, like many another long-established stock, they had a
conviction that, whatever their outward circumstances might be, a
certain intrinsic superiority remained theirs. They were, like the lady
of Hawthorne blood mentioned in the "American Note-Books," "proud of
being proud." The Hawthornes, it was said, were as unlike other people
as the Jews were to Gentiles; and the deep-rooted reserve which
enveloped Hawthorne himself was a distinct family trait. So that,
feeling himself to be in an unfair position, he doubtless found in these
facts enough to cause him acute irritation of that sort which only very
young or very proud and shrinking men can know. Besides this, the
altered circumstances of his line, and his years in Maine, had brought
him acquainted with humbler phases of life, and had doubtless developed
in him a sympathy with simpler and less lofty people than these
magnates. His father had been a Democrat, and loyalty to his memory, as
well as the very pride just spoken of, conspired to lead him to that
unpopular side. This set up another barrier between himself and the rich
and powerful Whigs, for political feeling was almost inconceivably more
bitter then than now. Thus there arose within him an unquiet,
ill-defined, comfortless antipathy that must have tortured him with
wearisome distress; and certainly shut him out from the sympathy and
appreciation which, if all the conditions had been different, might have
been given him by sincere and competent admirers. So little known among
his own townsfolk, it is not to be wondered at that no encouraging
answer reached him from more distant communities.
In his own home there was the faith which only love can give, but
outside of it a chill drove his hopes and ardors back upon himself and
turned them into despairs. His relatives, having seen him educated by
the aid of his uncle, and now arrived at maturity, expected him to take
his share in practical affairs. But the very means adopted to train him
for a career had settled his choice of one in a direction perhaps not
wholly expected; all cares and gains of ordinary traffic seemed sordid
and alien to him. Yet a young man just beginning his career, with no
solid proof of his own ability acquired, cannot but be sensitive to
criticism from those who have gained a right to comment by their own
special successes. As he watched these slow and dreary years pass by,
from his graduation in 1825 to the time when he first came fully before
the public in 1837, he must often have been dragged down by terrible
fears that perhaps the fairest period of life was being wasted, losing
forever the chance of fruition. "I sat down by the wayside of life," he
wrote, long after, "like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang
up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings
became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling
depths of my obscurity." Judge in what a silence and solitary
self-communing the time must have passed, to leave a thought like this:
"To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course
of the day,--events of ordinary occurrence; as, the clocks have struck,
the dead have been buried." Or this: "A recluse like myself, or a
prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his
chamber." His Note-Books show how the sense of unreality vexed and
pursued him; and how the sadness and solemnity of life returned upon him
again and again; and how he clothed these dark visitants of his brain
with the colors of imagination, and turned them away from him in the
guise of miraculous fantasies. He talks with himself of writing "the
journal of a human heart for a single day, in ordinary circumstances.
The lights and shadows that flit across it, its internal vicissitudes."
But this is almost precisely what his printed Note-Books have revealed
to us. Only now and then do we get precisely the thought that is passing
through his mind at the moment; it more often throws upon the page a
reflected image,--some strange and subtle hint for a story, the germs of
delicate fabrics long afterward matured, some merry or sad conceit, some
tender yet piercing inference,--like the shadows of clouds passing
quickly across a clear sky, and casting momentary glooms, and glances of
light, on the ground below. These journals do not begin until a date
seven years after "Fanshawe" was published; but it is safe to assume
that they mirror pretty closely the general complexion of the
intervening years.