imagination, but must have put the endurance of his nerves to the
severest test. The statement that for several years "he never saw the
sun," is entirely an error; but it is true that he seldom chose to walk
in the town except at night, and it is said that he was extremely fond
of going to fires if they occurred after dark. In summer he was up
shortly after sunrise, and would go down to bathe in the sea. The
morning was chiefly given to study, the afternoon to writing, and in the
evening he would take long walks, exploring the coast from Gloucester to
Marblehead and Lynn,--a range of many miles. Or perhaps he would pace
the streets of the town, unseen but observing, gathering material for
something in the vein of his delicious "Night Sketches." "After a time,"
he writes, "the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding.
Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my
spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock shall strike
bedtime, to satisfy myself that the world is not made of such shadowy
materials as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so
long among fantasies, that the things without him will seem as unreal as
those within." Or, if he chose a later hour, he might go abroad to
people the deserted thoroughfares with wilder phantoms. Sometimes he
took the day for his rambles, wandering perhaps over Endicott's ancient
Orchard Farm and among the antique houses and grassy cellars of old
Salem village, the witchcraft ground; or losing himself among the pines
of Montserrat and in the silence of the Great Pastures, or strolling
along the beaches to talk with old sailors and fishermen. His tramps
along the Manchester and Beverly shores or from Marblehead to Nahant
were productive of such delicate tracings as "Footprints by the
Sea-shore," or the dream-autobiography of "The Village Uncle." "Grudge
me not the day," he says, in the former sketch, "that has been spent in
seclusion, which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my
companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has told me
his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around my hermitage. Such
companionship works an effect upon a man's character, as if he had been
admitted to the society of creatures that are not mortal." This touches
the inmost secret of those lonely, youthful years, which moulded the
pure-hearted muser with ethereal, unsuspected fingers. Elsewhere,
Hawthorne has given another glimpse into his interior life at this time:
"This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a
starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air I became all
soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the
Milky Way. Here is another tale in which I wrapped myself during a dark
and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the
wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a
dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes
shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight; they would not
depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and
feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!" Susan, the imaginary wife
in "The Village Uncle," is said to have had a prototype in the daughter
of a Salem fisherman, whose wit and charm gave Hawthorne frequent
amusement; and I suppose that not seldom he reaped delightful
suggestions from his meetings with frank, unconscious, and individual
people of tastes and life unlike his own. I have heard it told with a
polite, self-satisfied scorn, that he was in the habit of visiting now
and then a tavern patronized by 'longshore-men and nautical veterans, to
listen to their talk. I can well believe it, for it is this sort of
intercourse that a person of manly genius, with a republican
fellow-feeling for the unrenowned, most covets. How well he gives the
tone of these old sea-dogs, when he writes: "The blast will put in its
word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them!" It
was this constant searching among the common types of men, and his ready
sympathy with them, refined as it was hearty, that stored his mind with
a variety of accurate impressions which afterward surprised observers,
in a man of habits so retired.
His uncles, the Mannings, were connected with extensive stage-coach
lines at this time, and Hawthorne seems to have used these as antennae
to bring himself in contact with new and nutritive regions and people. A
letter, probably written in 1830, which I do not feel at liberty to
quote entire, tells something of a trip that he took with Samuel Manning
through a part of Connecticut and the Connecticut valley. The extracts
that follow give a glimpse of the fresh and alert interest he felt about
everything; and I regard them as very important in showing the obverse
of that impression of unhealthy solitude which has been so generally
received from accounts of Hawthorne hitherto published.
"We did not leave New Haven till last Saturday ... and we were forced to
halt for the night at Cheshire, a village about fifteen miles from New
Haven. The next day being Sunday, we made a Sabbath day's journey of
seventeen miles, and put up at Farmington. As we were wearied with rapid
travelling, we found it impossible to attend divine service, which was
(of course) very grievous to us both. In the evening, however, I went to
a Bible class with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I
afterward discovered to be a strolling tailor of very questionable
habits.... We are now at Deerfield (though I believe my letter is dated
Greenfield) ... with our faces northward; nor shall I marvel much if
your Uncle Sam pushes on to Canada, unless we should meet with two or
three bad taverns in succession....
"I meet with many marvellous adventures. At New Haven I observed a
gentleman staring at me with great earnestness, after which he went into
the bar-room, I suppose to inquire who I might be. Finally, he came up
to me and said that as I bore a striking resemblance to a family of
Stanburys, he was induced to inquire if I was connected with them. I was
sorry to be obliged to answer in the negative. At another place they
took me for a lawyer in search of a place to settle, and strongly
recommended their own village. Moreover, I heard some of the students at
Yale College conjecturing that I was an Englishman, and to-day, as I was
standing without my coat at the door of a tavern, a man came up to me,
and asked me for some oats for his horse."
It was during this trip, I have small doubt, that he found the scenery,
and perhaps the persons, for that pretty interlude, "The Seven
Vagabonds." The story is placed not far from Stamford, and the conjurer
in it says, "I am taking a trip northward, this warm weather, across the
Connecticut first, and then up through Vermont, and may be into Canada
before the fall." The narrator himself queries by what right he came
among these wanderers, and furnishes himself an answer which suggests
that side of his nature most apt to appear in these journeys: "The free
mind that preferred its own folly to another's wisdom; the open spirit
that found companions everywhere; above all, the restless impulse that
had so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments: these were my
claims to be of their society." "If there be a faculty," he also writes,
"which I possess more perfectly than most men, it is that of throwing
myself mentally into situations foreign to my own, and detecting with a
cheerful eye the desirableness of each." There is also one letter of
1831, sent back during an expedition in New Hampshire, which supplies
the genesis of another Twice-Told Tale, "The Canterbury Pilgrims."
"I walked to the Shaker village yesterday [he says], and was shown over
the establishment, and dined there with a squire and a doctor, also of
the world's people. On my arrival, the first thing I saw was a jolly old
Shaker carrying an immense decanter of their superb cider; and as soon
as I told him my business, he turned out a tumblerful and gave me. It
was as much as a common head could clearly carry. Our dining-room was
well furnished, the dinner excellent, and the table attended by a
middle-aged Shaker lady, good looking and cheerful.... This
establishment is immensely rich. Their land extends two or three miles
along the road, and there are streets of great houses painted yellow and
tipt with red.... On the whole, they lead a good and comfortable life,
and, if it were not for their ridiculous ceremonies, a man could not do
a wiser thing than to join them. Those whom I conversed with were
intelligent, and appeared happy. I spoke to them about becoming a member
of their society, but have come to no decision on that point.
"We have had a pleasant journey enough.... I make innumerable
acquaintances, and sit down on the doorsteps with judges, generals, and
all the potentates of the land, discoursing about the Salem murder [that
of Mr. White], the cow-skinning of Isaac Hill, the price of hay, and the
value of horse-flesh. The country is very uneven, and your Uncle Sam
groans bitterly whenever we come to the foot of a low hill; though this
ought to make me groan rather than him, as I have to get out and trudge
every one of them."
The "Clippings with a Chisel" point to some further wanderings, to
Martha's Vineyard; and an uncollected sketch reveals the fact that he
had been to Niagara. It was probably then that he visited Ticonderoga;
[Footnote: A brief sketch of the fortress is included in The Snow Image
volume of the Works.] but not till some years later that he saw New
York. With these exceptions, and a trip to Washington before going to
Liverpool in 1853, every day of his life up to that date was passed
within New England. In "The Toll-Gatherer's Day" one sees the young
observer at work upon the details of an ordinary scene near home. The
"small square edifice which stands between shore and shore in the midst
of a long bridge," spanning an arm of the sea, refers undoubtedly to the
bridge from Salem to Beverly. But how lightly his spirit hovers over the
stream of actual life, scarcely touching it before springing up again,
like a sea-bird on the crest of a wave! Nothing could be more accurate
and polished than his descriptions and his presentation of the actual
facts; but his fancy rises resilient from these to some dreamy,
far-seeing perception or gentle moral inference. The visible human
pageant is only of value to him as it suggests the viewless host of
heavenly shapes that hang above it like an idealizing mirage. His
attitude at this time recalls a suggestion of his own in "Sights from a
Steeple": "The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a
spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman,
witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing
brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and
retaining no emotion peculiar to himself." He had the longing which
every creative mind must feel, to mix with other beings and share to the
utmost the possibilities of human weal or woe, suppressing his own
experience so far as to make himself a transparent medium for the
emotions of mankind; but he still lacked a definite connection with the
multifarious drama of human fellowship; he could not catch his cue and
play his answering part, and therefore gave voice to a constantly
murmurous, moralizing "aside." He delights to let the current of action
flow around him and beside him; he warms his heart in it; but when he
again withdraws by himself, it is with him as with the old toll-gatherer
at close of day, "mingling reveries of Heaven with remembrances of
earth, the whole procession of mortal travellers, all the dusty
pilgrimage which he has witnessed, seems like a flitting show of
phantoms for his thoughtful soul to muse upon."
"What would a man do," he asks himself, in his journal, "if he were
compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never
bathe himself in cool solitude?" As yet, this bracing influence of
quietude, so essential to his well-being, fascinates him, and he cannot
shake off its influence so far as to enter actively and for personal
interests into any of the common pursuits even of the man who makes a
business of literature. Yet nothing impresses him more than the fact
that every one carries a solitude with him, wherever he goes, like a
shadow. Twice, with an interval of three years between, this idea recurs
in the form of a hint for romance. "Two lovers or other persons, on the
most private business, to appoint a meeting in what they supposed to be
a place of the utmost solitude, and to find it thronged with people."
The idea implied is, that this would in fact be the completest privacy
they could have wished. "The situation of a man in the midst of a crowd,
yet as completely in the power of another, life and all, as if they two
were in the deepest solitude." This contradiction between the
_apparent_ openness that must rule one's conduct among men, and the
real secrecy that may coexist with it, even when one is most exposed to
the gaze of others, excites in his mind a whole train of thought based
on the falsity of appearances. If a man can be outwardly open and
inwardly reserved in a good sense, he can be so in a bad sense; so, too,
he may have the external air of great excellence and purity, while
internally he is foul and unfaithful. This discovery strikes our
perfectly sincere and true-hearted recluse with intense and endless
horror. He tests it, by turning it innumerable ways, and imagining all
sorts of situations in which such contradictions of appearance and
reality might be illustrated. At one time, he conceives of a friend who
should be true by day, and false at night. At another he suggests: "Our
body to be possessed by two different spirits, so that half the visage
shall express one mood, and the other half another." "A man living a
wicked life in one place and simultaneously a virtuous and religious one
in another." Then he perceives that this same uncertainty and
contradiction affects the lightest and seemingly most harmless things in
the world. "The world is so sad and solemn," he muses, "that things
meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become
dreadful earnest." And then he applies this, as in the following: "A
virtuous but giddy girl to attempt to play a trick on a man. He sees
what she is about, and contrives matters so that she throws herself
completely into his power, and is ruined,--all in jest." Likewise, the
most desirable things, by this same law of contradiction, often prove
the least satisfactory. Thus: "A person or family long desires some
particular good. At last it comes in such profusion as to be the great
pest of their lives." And this is equally true, he finds, whether the
desired thing be sought in order to gratify a pure instinct or a wrong
and revengeful one. "As an instance, merely, suppose a woman sues her
lover for breach of promise, and gets the money by instalments, through
a long series of years. At last, when the miserable victim were utterly
trodden down, the triumpher would have become a very devil of evil
passions,--they having overgrown his whole nature; so that a far greater
evil would have come upon himself than on his victim." This theme of
self-punished revenge, as we know, was afterward thoroughly wrought out
in "The Scarlet Letter." Another form in which the thought of this
pervading falsehood in earthly affairs comes to him is the frightful
fancy of people being poisoned by communion-wine. Thus does the
insincerity and corruption of man, the lie that is hidden in nearly
every life and almost every act, rise and thrust itself before him,
whichever way he turns, like a serpent in his path. He is in the
position of the father confessor of whom he at one time thinks, and of
"his reflections on character, and the contrast of the inward man with
the outward, as he looks around his congregation, all whose secret sins
are known to him." But Hawthorne does not let this hissing serpent
either rout him or poison him. He is determined to visit the ways of
life, to find the exit of the maze, and so tries every opening,
unalarmed. The serpent is in all: it proves to be a deathless,
large-coiled hydra, encircling the young explorer's virgin soul, as it
does that of every pure aspirer, and trying to drive him back on
himself, with a sting in his heart that shall curse him with a life-long
venom. It does, indeed, force him to recoil, but not with any mortal
wound. He retires in profound sorrow, acknowledging that earth holds
nothing perfect, that his dream of ideal beings leading an ideal life,
which, in spite of the knowledge of evil, he has been cherishing for so
many years, is a dream to be fulfilled in the hereafter alone. He
confesses to himself that "there is evil in every human heart, which may
remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may
rouse it to activity." It is not a new discovery; but from the force
with which it strikes him, we may guess the strength of his aspiration,
the fine temper of his faith in the good and the beautiful. To be driven
to this dismal conclusion is for him a source of inexpressible dismay,
because he had trusted so deeply in the possibility of reaching some
brighter truth. No; not a new discovery;--but one who approaches it with
so much sensibility _feels_ it to be new, with all the fervor which
the most absolute novelty could rouse. This is the deepest and the true
originality, to possess such intensity of feeling that the oldest truth,
when approached by our own methods, shall be full of a primitive
impressiveness.
But, in the midst of the depression born of his immense sorrow over sin,
Hawthorne found compensations. First, in the query which he puts so
briefly: "The good deeds in an evil life,--the generous, noble, and
excellent actions done by people habitually wicked,--to ask what is to
become of them." This is the motive which has furnished novelists for
the last half-century with their most stirring and pathetic effects. It
is a sort of escape, a safety-valve for the hot fire of controversy on
the soul's fate, and offers in its pertinent indefiniteness a vast
solace to those who are trying to balance the bewildering account of
virtue with sin. Hawthorne found that here was a partial solution of the
problem, and he enlarged upon it, toward the end of his life, in "The
Marble Faun." But it was a second and deeper thought that furnished him
the chief compensation. In one of the "Twice-Told Tales," "Fancy's
Show-Box," he deals with the question, how far the mere thought of sin,
the incipient desire to commit it, may injure the soul. After first
strongly picturing the reality of certain sinful impulses in a man's
mind, which had never been carried out,--"A scheme of guilt," he argues,
taking up the other side, "till it be put in execution, greatly
resembles a train of incidents in a projected tale.... Thus a
novel-writer, or a dramatist, in creating the villain of romance, and
fitting him with evil deeds, and the villain of actual life in
projecting crimes that will be perpetrated, may almost meet each other
half-way between reality and fancy. It is not until the crime is
accomplished that guilt clinches its gripe upon the heart, and claims it
for its own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and
acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousand-fold
more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it considered, also, that
men often overestimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while its
attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice, its results are
dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it.... In truth, there is no
such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve, either for
good or evil, except at the very moment of execution. Let us hope,
therefore, that all the dreadful consequences of sin will not be
incurred, unless the act have set its seal upon the thought. Yet ...
_man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest_,
since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by
the flitting phantoms of iniquity." That is, purity is too spotless a
thing to exist in absolute perfection in a human being, who must often
feel at least the dark flush of passionate thoughts falling upon him,
however blameless of life he may be. From this lofty conception of
purity comes that equally noble humility of always feeling "his
brotherhood, even with the guiltiest." What more logical issue from the
Christian idea, what more exquisitely tender rendering of it than this?
"Let the whole world be cleansed, or not a man or woman of us can be
clean!" was his exclamation, many years later, in that English workhouse
which he describes in a heart-rending chapter of "Our Old Home" called
"Outside Glimpses of English Poverty." And it was then that he revealed
the vast depth and the reality of his human sympathy toward the wretched
and loathsome little foundling child that silently sued to him for
kindness, till he took it up and caressed it as tenderly as if he had
been its father.
Armed with these two perceptions, of the good that still persists in
evil persons, and the deep charity which every one must feel towards
even the most abject fellow-being, Hawthorne moves forth again to trace
the maze; and lo, the serpent drops down, cowering. He has found a charm
that robs sin and crime of their deadly hurt, and can handle them
without danger. It is said by some that Hawthorne treats wrong and
corruption too shrinkingly, and his mood of never-lessened and acute
sensibility touching them is contrasted with that of "virile" writers
like Balzac and George Sand. But these incline to make a menagerie of
life, thrusting their heads into the very lion's mouth, or boldly
embracing the snake of sin. They are indeed superior in strong dramatic
and realistic effects; but, unvicious as may be their aim, they are not
filled with a robust morality: they deliberately choose unclean elements
to heighten the interest,--albeit using such elements with magnificent
strength and skill. Let us be grateful that Hawthorne does not so covet
the applause of the clever club-man or of the unconscious vulgarian, as
to junket about in caravan, carrying the passions with him in gaudy
cages, and feeding them with raw flesh; grateful that he never loses the
archangelic light of pure, divine, dispassionate wrath, in piercing the
dragon!
We see now how, in this early term of probation, he was finding a
philosophy and an unsectarian religiousness, which ever stirred below
the clear surface of his language like the bubbling spring at bottom of
a forest pool. It has been thought that Hawthorne developed late. But
the most striking thing about the "Twice-Told Tales" and the first
entries in the "American Note-Books" is their evidence of a calm and
mellow maturity. These stories are like the simple but well-devised
theme which a musician prepares as the basis of a whole composition:
they show the several tendencies which underlie all the subsequent
works. First, there are the scenes from New England history,--"Endicott
and the Red Cross," "The Maypole of Merry Mount," "The Gray Champion,"
the "Tales of the Province House."
Then we have the psychological vein, in "The Prophetic Pictures," "The
Minister's Black Veil," "Dr. Heidegger," "Fancy's Show-Box"; and along
with this the current of delicate essay-writing, as in "The Haunted
Mind," and "Sunday at Home." "Little Annie's Ramble," again, foreshadows
his charming children's tales. It is rather remarkable that he should
thus have sounded, though faintly, the whole diapason in his first
works. Moreover, he had already at this time attained a style at once
flowing and large in its outline, and masterly in its minuteness.
But this maturity was not won without deep suffering and long-deferred
hope.
If actual contact with men resulted in such grave and sorrowful
reflection as we have traced, how drearily trying must have been the
climaxes of solitary thought after a long session of seclusion! And much
the larger portion of his time was consumed amid an absolute silence, a
privacy unbroken by intimate confidences and rife with exhausting and
depressing reactions from intense imagination and other severe
intellectual exercise. Not only must the repression of this period have
amounted at times to positive anguish, but there was also the perplexing
perception that his life's fairest possibilities were still barren.
"Every individual has a place in the world, and is important to it in
some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not." So runs one of the
extracts from the "American Note-Books"; and now and then we get from
the same source a glimpse of the haunting sense that he is missing his
fit relation to the rest of the race, the question whether his pursuit
was not in some way futile like all the human pursuits he had
noticed,--whether it was not to be nipped by the same perversity and
contradiction that seemed to affect all things mundane. Here is one of
his proposed plots, which turns an inner light upon his own frame of
mind: "Various good and desirable things to be presented to a young man,
and offered to his acceptance,--as a friend, a wife, a fortune; but he
to refuse them all, suspecting that it is merely a delusion. Yet all to
be real, and he to be told so when too late." Is this not, in brief,
what he conceives may yet be the story of his own career? Another
occurs, in the same relation: "A man tries to be happy in love; he
cannot sincerely give his heart, and the affair seems all a dream. In
domestic life the same; in politics, a seeming patriot: but still he is
sincere, and all seems like a theatre." These items are the merest
indicia of a whole history of complex emotions, which made this epoch
one of continuous though silent and unseen struggle. In a Preface
prefixed to the tales, in 1851, the author wrote: "They are the
memorials of very tranquil and not unhappy years." Tranquil they of
course were; and to the happy and successful man of forty-seven, the
vexing moods and dragging loneliness of that earlier period would seem
"not unhappy," because he could then see all the good it had contained.
I cannot agree with Edwin Whipple, who says of them, "There was audible
to the delicate ear a faint and muffled growl of personal discontent,
which showed they were not mere exercises of penetrating imaginative
analysis, but had in them the morbid vitality of a despondent mood." For
this applies to only one of the number, "The Ambitious Guest." Nor do I
find in them the "misanthropy" which he defines at some length. On the
contrary, they are, as the author says, "his attempts to open an
intercourse with the world," incited by an eager sympathy, but also
restrained by a stern perception of right and wrong.