sketched. When his friend Miss Peabody first penetrated his retirement,
his pent-up sympathies flowed forth in a way that showed how they had
longed for relief. He returned constantly to the discussion of his
peculiar mode of living, as if there could be no understanding between
himself and another, until this had been cleared up and set aside. Among
other things, he spoke of a dream by which he was beset, that he was
walking abroad, and that all the houses were mirrors which reflected him
a thousand times and overwhelmed him with mortification. This gives a
peculiar insight into his sensitive condition.
The noiseless, uneventful weeks slipped by, each day disguising itself
in exact semblance of its fellow, like a file of mischievous maskers.
Hawthorne sat in his little room under the eaves reading, studying,
voicelessly communing with himself through his own journal,
or--mastered by some wild suggestion or mysterious speculation--feeling his
way through the twilight of dreams, into the dusky chambers of that
house of thought whose haunted interior none but himself ever visited.
He had little communication with even the members of his family.
Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it
was not often that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion
met in family circle. He never read his stories aloud to his mother and
sisters, as might be imagined from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of
the young author reciting his new productions to his listening family;
though, when they met, he sometimes read older literature to them. It
was the custom in this household for the several members to remain very
much by themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous
recluses as himself; and, speaking of the isolation which reigned among
them, Hawthorne once said, "We do not even _live_ at our house!"
But still the presence of this near and gentle feminine element is not
to be underrated as forming a very great compensation in the cold and
difficult morning of Hawthorne's life.
If the week-day could not lure him from his sad retreat, neither could
the Sunday. He had the right to a pew in the First Church, which his
family had held since 1640, but he seldom went to service there after
coming from college. His religion was supplied from sources not always
opened to the common scrutiny, and it never chanced that he found it
essential to join any church.
The chief resource against disappointment, the offset to the pain of so
much lonely living and dark-veined meditation was, of course, the
writing of tales. Never was a man's mind more truly a kingdom to him.
This was the fascination that carried him through the weary
waiting-time. Yet even that pleasure had a reverse side, to which the
fictitious Oberon has no doubt given voice in these words: "You cannot
conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has had upon me.
I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I
am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me by aping the
realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the
world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude ... where nobody
wished for what I do, nor thinks or feels as I do." Alluding to this
season of early obscurity to a friend who had done much to break it up,
he once said, "I was like a person talking to himself in a dark room."
To make his own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story was one of
his projects then formed, which he carried out in the "Mosses." With
that image of the dark room, and this suggested reflection in the
mirror, we can rehabilitate the scene of which the broken lights and
trembling shadows are strewn through the "Twice-Told Tales." Sober and
weighty the penumbrous atmosphere in which the young creator sits; but
how calm, thoughtful, and beautiful the dim vision of his face, lit by
the sheltered radiance of ethereal fancies! Behind his own form we catch
the movement of mysterious shapes,--men and women wearing aspects of joy
or anger, calm or passionate, gentle and pitiable, or stern, splendid,
and forbidding. It is not quite a natural twilight in which we behold
these things; rather the awesome shadowiness of a partial eclipse; but
gleams of the healthiest sunshine withal mingle in the prevailing tint,
bringing reassurance, and receiving again a rarer value from the
contrast. There are but few among the stories of this series afterward
brought together by the author which are open to the charge of
morbidness. In "The White Old Maid" an indefinable horror, giving the
tale a certain shapelessness, crowds out the compensating brightness
which in most cases is not wanting; perhaps, too, "The Ambitious Guest"
leaves one with too hopeless a downfall at the end; and "The Wedding
Knell" cannot escape a suspicion of disagreeable gloom. But these
extremes are not frequent. The wonder is that Hawthorne's mind could so
often and so airily soar above the shadows that at this time hung about
him; that he should nearly always suggest a philosophy so complete, so
gently wholesome, and so penetrating as that which he mixes with even
the bitterest distillations of his dreams. Nor is the sadness of his
tone disordered or destructive, more than it is selfish; he does not
inculcate despair, nor protest against life and fate, nor indulge in
gloomy or weak self-pity. The only direct exposition of his own case is
contained in a sketch, "The Journal of a Solitary Man," not reprinted
during his life. One extract from this I will make, because it sums up,
though more plaintively than was his wont, Hawthorne's view of his own
life at this epoch:--
"It is hard to die without one's happiness; to none more so than myself,
whose early resolution it had been to partake largely of the joys of
life, but never to be burdened with its cares. Vain philosophy! The very
hardships of the poorest laborer, whose whole existence seems one long
toil, has something preferable to my best pleasures. Merely skimming the
surface of life, I know nothing by my own experience of its deep and
warm realities, ... so that few mortals, even the humblest and weakest,
have been such ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I
must. Even a young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand
vagrant fantasies, I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed
to loneliness throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my
soul has never married itself to the soul of woman."
The touch about avoiding the cares of life is no doubt merely
metaphorical; but the self-imposed doom of eternal loneliness reveals
the excess of sombreness in which he clothed his condition to his own
perception. One may say that the adverse factors in his problem at this
time were purely imaginary; that a little resolution and determined
activity would have shaken off the incubus: but this is to lose sight of
the gist of the matter. The situation in itself,--the indeterminateness
and repression of it, and the denial of any satisfaction to his warm and
various sympathies, and his capacity for affection and
responsibility,--must be allowed to have been intensely wearing. Hawthorne
believed himself to possess a strongly social nature, which was cramped,
chilled, and to some extent permanently restrained by this long seclusion
at the beginning of his career. This alone might furnish just cause for
bitterness against the fate that chained him. It was not a matter of
option; for he knew that his battle must be fought through as he had
begun it, and until 1836 no slightest loophole of escape into action
presented itself. It lay before him to act out the tragedy of isolation
which is the lot of every artist in America still, though greatly
mitigated by the devotion of our first generation of national writers.
If he had quitted his post sooner, and had tried by force to mould his
genius according to theory, he might have utterly distorted or stunted
its growth. All that he could as yet do for himself was to preserve a
certain repose and harmony in the midst of uncertainty and delay; and
for this he formed four wise precepts: "To break off customs; to shake
off spirits ill disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against
one's genius." [Footnote: American Note-Books, Vol. I.] Thus he kept
himself fresh and flexible, hopeful, ready for emergency. But that
I have not exaggerated the severity and import of his long vigil, let
this revery of his show, written at Liverpool, in 1855: "I think I have
been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own fireside, and
with my wife and children about me; more content to enjoy what I have,
less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was
perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having
been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favorably with it.
For a long, long while I have been occasionally visited with a singular
dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have
been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even
at school,--and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably
long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries
have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and
depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This
dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one
of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for
twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and
left me behind." Experiences which leave effects like this must bite
their way into the heart and soul with a fearful energy! This precursive
solitude had tinged his very life-blood, and woven itself into the
secret tissues of his brain. Yet, patiently absorbing it, he wrote late
in life to a friend: "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill
of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when
I bore it alone." It was under such a guise that the test of his genius
and character came to him. Every great mind meets once in life with a
huge opposition that must somehow be made to succumb, before its own
energies can know their full strength, gain a settled footing, and make
a roadway to move forward upon. Often these obstacles are viewless to
others, and the combat is unsuspected; the site of many a Penuel remains
untraced; but none the less these are the pivots on which entire
personal histories turn. Hawthorne's comparatively passive endurance was
of infinitely greater worth than any active irruption into the outer
world would have been. It is obvious that we owe to the innumerable
devious wanderings and obscure sufferings of his mind, under the
influences just reviewed, something of his sure and subtle touch in
feeling out the details of morbid moods; for though his mind remained
perfectly healthy, it had acquired acute sympathy with all hidden
tragedies of heart and brain.
But another and larger purpose was not less well served by this
probation. The ability of American life to produce a genius in some
sense exactly responding to its most distinctive qualities had yet to be
demonstrated; and this could only be done by some one who would stake
life and success on the issue, for it needed that a soul and brain of
the highest endowment should be set apart solely for the experiment,
even to the ruin of it if required, before the truth could be
ascertained. Hawthorne, the slowly produced and complex result of a line
of New-Englanders who carried American history in their very limbs,
seemed providentially offered for the trial. It was well that
temperament and circumstance drew him into a charmed circle of reserve
from the first; well, also, that he was further matured at a simple and
rural college pervaded by a homely American tone; still more fortunate
was it that nothing called him away to connect him with European
culture, on graduating. To interpret this was the honorable office of
his classmate Longfellow, who, with as much ease as dignity and charm,
has filled the gap between the two half-worlds. The experiment to be
tried was, simply, whether with books and men at his command, and
isolated from the immediate influence of Europe, this American could
evolve any new quality for the enrichment of literature. The conditions
were strictly carried out; even after he began to come in contact with
men, in the intervals of his retirement, he saw only pure American
types. A foreigner must have been a rare bird in Salem, in those days;
for the maritime element which might have brought him was still
American. Hawthorne, as we have seen, and as his Note-Books show, pushed
through the farming regions and made acquaintance with the men of the
soil; and probably the first alien of whom he got at all a close view
was the Monsieur S---- whom he found at Bridge's, on his visit to the
latter, in 1837, described at length in the Note-Books. So much did
Hawthorne study from these types, and so closely, that he might, had his
genius directed, have written the most homely and realistic novels of
New England life from the material which he picked up quite by the way.
But though he did not translate his observations thus, the originality
which he was continuously ripening amid such influences was radically
affected by them. They established a broad, irrepressible republican
sentiment in his mind; they assisted his natural, manly independence and
simplicity to assert themselves unaffectedly in letters; and they had
not a little to do, I suspect, with fostering his strong turn for
examining with perfect freedom and a certain refined shrewdness into
everything that came before him, without accepting prescribed opinions.
The most characteristic way, perhaps, in which this American nurture
acted was by contrast; for the universal matter-of-fact tone which he
found among his fellow-citizens was an incessant spur to him to maintain
a counteracting idealism. Thus, singularly enough, the most salient
feature of the new American product was its apparent denial of the
national trait of practical sagacity. It is not to be supposed that
Hawthorne adhered consciously to the aim of asserting the American
nature in fiction. These things can be done only half consciously, at
the most. Perhaps it is well that the mind on which so much depends
should not be burdened with all the added anxiety of knowing how much is
expected from it by the ages. Therefore, we owe the triumphant assertion
of the American quality in this novel genius to Hawthorne's quiet,
unfaltering, brave endurance of the weight that was laid upon him,
unassisted by the certainty with which we now perceive that a great end
was being served by it. But, although unaware of this end at the time,
he afterward saw some of the significance of his youth. Writing in 1840,
he speaks thus of his old room in Union Street:--
"This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon
thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them
have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he
ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so
much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and _here my mind and
character were formed_; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and
here I have been despondent.... And now I begin to understand why I was
imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never
break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my
escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and my heart
might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But
living in solitude till the fulness of time, I still kept the dew of my
youth and the freshness of my heart."
Yes, and more than this, Hawthorne! It was a young nation's faith in its
future which--unsuspected by any then, but always to be remembered
henceforth--had found a worthy answer and after-type in this faithful
and hopeful heart of yours! Thus was it that the young poet who, in the
sense we have observed, stood for old New England, absorbed into himself
also the atmosphere of the United States. The plant that rooted in the
past had put forth a flower which drew color and perfume from to-day. In
such wise did Hawthorne prove to be the unique American in fiction.
I have examined the librarian's books at the Salem Athenaeum, which
indicate a part of the reading that the writer of the "Twice-Told Tales"
went through. The lists from the beginning of 1830 to 1838 include
nearly four hundred volumes taken out by him, besides a quantity of
bound magazines. This gives no account of his dealings with books in the
previous five years, when he was not a shareholder in the Athenaeum, nor
does it, of course, let us know anything of what he obtained from other
sources. When Miss E. P. Peabody made his acquaintance, in 1836-37, he
had, for example, read all of Balzac that had then appeared; and there
is no record of this in the library lists. These lists alone, then,
giving four hundred volumes in seven years, supply him with one volume a
week,--not, on the whole, a meagre rate, when we consider the volumes of
magazines, the possible sources outside of the library, and the
numberless hours required for literary experiment. I do not fancy that
he plodded through books; but rather that he read with the easy energy
of a vigorous, original mind, though he also knew the taste of severe
study. "Bees," he observes in one place, "are sometimes drowned (or
suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in
their collected learning." He did not find it necessary to mount upon a
pyramid of all learning previous to his epoch, in order to get the
highest standpoint for his own survey of mankind. Neither was he "a man
of parts," precisely; being in himself a distinct whole. His choice of
reading was ruled by a fastidious need. He was fond of travels for a
rainy day, and knew Mandeville; but at other times he took up books
which seem to lie quite aside from his known purposes. [Footnote: See
Appendix III.] Voltaire appears to have attracted him constantly; he
read him in the original, together with Rousseau. At one time he
examined Pascal, at another he read something of Corneille and a part of
Racine. Of the English dramatists, he seems at this time to have tried
only Massinger; "Inchbald's Theatre" also occurs. The local American
histories took his attention pretty often, and he perused a variety of
biography,--"Lives of the Philosophers," "Plutarch's Lives," biographies
of Mohammed, Pitt, Jefferson, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats,
Baxter, Heber, Sir William Temple, and others. Brewster's "Natural
Magic" and Sir Walter Scott's essay on "Demonology and Witchcraft" are
books that one would naturally expect him to read; and he had already
begun to make acquaintance with the English State Trials, for which he
always had a great liking. "Colquhoun on the Police" would seem not
entirely foreign to one who mentally pursued so many malefactors; but it
is a little surprising that he should have found himself interested in
"Babbage on the Economy of Machinery." He dipped, also, into botany and
zoölogy; turned over several volumes of Bayle's "Critical Dictionary,"
read Mrs. Jameson, and the "London Encyclopaedia of Architecture"; and
was entertained by Dunlap's "History of the Arts of Design in America."
It was from this last that he drew the plot of "The Prophetic Pictures,"
in the "Twice-Told Tales." Some Boston newspapers of the years 1739 to
1783 evidently furnished the material for an article called "Old News,"
reprinted in "The Snow Image." Hawthorne seems never to have talked much
about reading: 'tis imaginable that he was as shy in his choice of books
and his discussion of them, as in his intercourse with men; and there is
no more ground for believing that he did not like books, than that he
cared nothing for men and women. Life is made up, for such a mind, of
men, women, and books; Hawthorne accepted all three estates.
Gradually, from the midst of the young author's obscurity, there issued
an attraction which made the world wish to know more of him. One by one,
the quiet essays and mournful-seeming stories came forth, like drops
from a slow-distilling spring. The public knew nothing of the internal
movement which had opened this slight fountain, nor suspected the dark
concamerations through which the current made its way to the surface.
The smallest mountain rill often has a thunder-storm at its back; but
the average reader of that day thought he had done quite enough, when he
guessed that the new writer was a timid young man fabling under a
feigned name, excellent in his limited way, who would be a great deal
better if he could come out of seclusion and make himself more like
other people.
The first contributions were made to the "Salem Gazette" and the "New
England Magazine"; then his attempts extended to the "Boston Token and
Atlantic Souvenir," edited by S. G. Goodrich; and later, to other
periodicals. Mr. Goodrich wrote to his young contributor (October,
1831): "I am gratified to find that all whose opinion I have heard agree
with me as to the merit of the various pieces from your pen." But for
none of these early performances did Hawthorne receive any considerable
sum of money. And though his writings began at once to attract an
audience, he had slight knowledge of it. Three young ladies--of whom his
future sister-in-law, Miss Peabody, was one--were among the first
admirers; and though Hawthorne baffled his readers and perhaps retarded
his own notoriety by assuming different names in print, [Footnote: Among
these were "Oberon" and "Ashley Allen Royce," or "The Rev. A. A. Royce."
The latter was used by him in the Democratic Review, so late as March,
1840.] they traced his contributions assiduously, cut them out of
magazines, and preserved them. But they could not discover his personal
identity. One of them who lived in Salem used constantly to wonder, in
driving about town, whether the author of her favorite tales could be
living in this or in that house; for it was known that he was a Salem
resident. Miss Peabody, who had in girlhood known something of the
Hathorne family (the name was still written either way, I am told), was
misled by the new spelling, and by the prevalent idea that Nathaniel
Hawthorne was an assumed name. This trio were especially moved by "The
Gentle Boy" when it appeared, and Miss Peabody was on the point of
addressing "The Author of 'The Gentle Boy,'" at Salem, to tell him of
the pleasure he had given. When afterward told of this, Hawthorne said,
"I wish you had! It would have been an era in my life." Soon after, the
Peabodys returned to Salem, and she learned from some one that the new
romancer was the son of the Widow Hathorne. Now it so chanced that her
family had long ago occupied a house on Union Street, looking off into
the garden of the old Manning family mansion; and she remembered no son,
though a vague image came back to her of a strong and graceful boy's
form dancing across the garden, at play, years before. Her mind
therefore fastened upon one of the sisters, who, she knew, had shown
great facility in writing: indeed, Hawthorne used at one time to say
that it was she who should have been the follower of literature. Full of
this conception, she went to carry her burden of gratitude to the
author, and after delays and difficulties, made her way into the retired
and little-visited mansion. It was the other sister into whose presence
she came, and to her she began pouring out the reason of her intrusion,
delivering at once her praises of the elder Miss Hathorne's fictions.
"My brother's, you mean," was the response.
"It _is_ your brother, then." And Miss Peabody added: "If your
brother can write like that, he has no right to be idle."
"My brother never is idle," answered Miss Louisa, quietly.