human faith that fills the heart of every manly genius; and if
discouraging truth made him suffer, it was all the more because his
ideals--and at first his trust in their realization--were so generous
and so high. Two of his observations as to Brook Farm, transferred to
the "The Blithedale Romance," show the wisdom on which his withdrawal
was based. The first relates to himself: "No sagacious man will long
retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and
progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system
of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
standpoint." He had too much imagination to feel safe in giving free
rein to it, in a special direction of theoretic conduct; he also
remembered that, as the old system of things was full of error, it was
possible that a new one might become so in new ways, unless watched. The
second observation touches the real weakness of the Brook Farm
institution: "It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first
questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling,
self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the
advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But
to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, _as regarded
society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility rather than
new brotherhood._" And, in fact, the real good which Mr. Ripley's
attempt did, was to implant the co-operative idea in the minds of men
who have gone out into the world to effect its gradual application on a
grander scale. It is by introducing it into one branch of social energy
after another that the regenerative agency of to-day can alone be made
effectual. The leaders of that community have been broad-minded, and
recognize this truth. None of them, however, have ever taken the trouble
to formulate it as Hawthorne did, on perceiving it some years in
advance.
The jocose tone, it maybe added, seems to have been a characteristic
part of the Brook Farm experiment, despite the sober earnest and rapt
enthusiasm that accompanied it. The members had their laughing
allusions, and talked--in a strain of self-ridicule precisely similar
to Coverdale's--of having bands of music to play for the
field-laborers, who should plough in tune. This merely proves that they
were people who kept their wits whole, and had the humor that comes with
refinement; while it illustrates by the way the naturalness of the tone
Hawthorne has given to Coverdale.
The Priscilla of Blithedale was evidently founded upon the little
seamstress whom he describes in the Note-Books as coming out to the
farm, and Old Moodie's spectre can be discerned in a brief memorandum of
a man seen (at Parker's old bar-room in Court Square) in 1850. It has been
thought that Zenobia was drawn from Margaret Fuller, or from a lady at
Brook Farm, or perhaps from both: a gentleman who was there says that he
traces in her a partial likeness to several women. It is as well to
remember that Hawthorne distinctly negatived the idea that he wrote with
any one that he knew before his mind; and he illustrated it, to one of
his most intimate friends, by saying that sometimes in the course of
composition it would suddenly occur to him, that the character he was
describing resembled in some point one or more persons of his
acquaintance. Thus, I suppose that when the character of Priscilla had
developed itself in his imagination, he found he could give her a
greater reality by associating her with the seamstress alluded to; and
that the plaintive old man at Parker's offered himself as a good figure
to prop up the web-work of pure invention which was the history of
Zenobia's and Priscilla's father. There is a conviction in the minds of
all readers, dearer to them than truth, that novelists simply sit down
and describe their own acquaintances, using a few clumsy disguises to
make the thing tolerable. When they do take a hint from real persons the
character becomes quite a different thing to them from the actual
prototype. It was not even so definite as this with Hawthorne. Yet no
doubt, his own atmosphere being peculiar, the contrast between that and
the atmosphere of those he met stimulated his imagination; so that,
without his actually seeing a given trait in another person, the meeting
might have the effect of _suggesting_ it. Then he would brood over
this suggestion till it became a reality, a person, to his mind; and
thus his characters were conceived independently in a region somewhere
between himself and the people who had awakened speculation in his mind.
He had a very sure instinct as to when a piece of reality might be
transferred to his fiction with advantage. Mr. Curtis has told the story
of a young woman of Concord, a farmer's daughter, who had had her
aspirations roused by education until the conflict between these and the
hard and barren life she was born to, made her thoroughly miserable and
morbid; and one summer's evening she sought relief in the quiet, homely
stream that flowed by the Old Manse, and found the end of earthly
troubles in its oozy depths. Hawthorne was roused by Curtis himself
coming beneath his window (precisely as Coverdale comes to summon
Hollingsworth), and with one other they went out on the river, to find
the poor girl's body. "The man," writes his friend, "whom the villagers
had only seen at morning as a musing spectre in the garden, now appeared
among them at night to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their
service."
By this dark memory is the powerful climax of "The Blithedale Romance"
bound to the sphere of a reality as dread.
VI.
THE OLD MANSE.
1842-1846.
There is a Providence in the lives of men who act sincerely, which makes
each step lead, with the best result, to the next phase of their
careers. By his participation in the excellent endeavor at Brook Farm,
Hawthorne had prepared himself to enjoy to the full his idyllic
retirement at the Old Manse, in Concord. "For now, being happy," he
says, "I felt as if there were no question to be put."
Hawthorne was married in July, 1842, and went at once to this his first
home. Just before going to Brook Farm he had written "Grandfather's
Chair," the first part of a series of sketches of New England history
for children, which was published by Miss Peabody in Boston, and Wiley
and Putnam in New York; but the continuation was interrupted by his stay
at the farm. In 1842 he wrote a second portion, and also some
biographical stories, all of which gained an immediate success. He also
resumed his contributions to the "Democratic Review," the most brilliant
periodical of the time, in which Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, and
other noted authors made their appearance. It was published at
Washington, and afterward at New York, and made considerable pretensions
to a national character. Hawthorne had been engaged as a contributor, at
a fair rate, in 1838, and his articles had his name appended (not always
Hie practice at that time) in a way that shows the high estimation into
which he had already grown. "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," "The
Celestial Railroad," "The Procession of Life," "Fire Worship," "Buds and
Bird Voices," and "Roger Malvin's Burial," all appeared in the
"Democratic" in 1843. "Rappaccini's Daughter" and other tales followed
in the next year; and in 1845 the second volume of "Twice-Told Tales"
was brought out at Boston. During the same year Hawthorne edited the
"African Journals" of his friend Bridge, then an officer in the navy,
who had just completed a cruise. The editor's name evidently carried
great weight, even then. "The mere announcement, 'edited by Nathaniel
Hawthorne,'" said one of the critics, "is enough to entitle this book to
a place among the American classics." I dwell upon this, because an
attempt has been made to spread the idea that Hawthorne up to the time
of writing "The Scarlet Letter" was still obscure and discouraged, and
that only then, by a timely burst of appreciation in certain quarters,
was he rescued from oblivion. The truth is, that he had won himself an
excellent position, was popular, and was himself aware by this time of
the honor in which he was held. Even when he found that the small
profits of literature were forcing him into office again, he wrote to
Bridge: "It is rather singular that I should need an office: for
nobody's scribblings seem to be more acceptable than mine." The
explanation of this lies in the wretchedly dependent state of native
authorship at that time. The law of copyright had not then attained to
even the refined injustice which it has now reached. "I continue," he
wrote, in 1844, "to scribble tales with good success so far as regards
empty praise, some notes of which, pleasant enough to my ears, have come
from across the Atlantic. But the pamphlet and piratical system has so
broken up all regular literature, that I am forced to work hard for
small gains."
Besides the labors already enumerated, he edited for the "Democratic"
some "Papers of an old Dartmoor Prisoner" (probably some one of his
"sea-dog" acquaintance in Salem). He was in demand among the publishers.
A letter from Evert Duyckinck (New York, October 2, 1845), who was then
in the employ of Wiley and Putnam, publishers of the "African Cruiser,"
says of that book: "The English notices are bounteous in praise. No
American book in a long time has been so well noticed." The same firm
were now eager to bring out his recent tales, and were also, as appears
in the following from Duyckinck, urging the prosecution of another
scheme: "I hope you will not think me a troublesome fellow," he writes,
"if I drop you another line with the vociferous cry, MSS.! MSS.! Mr.
Wiley's American series is athirst for the volumes of tales; and how
stands the prospect for the History of Witchcraft, I whilom spoke of?"
The History Hawthorne wisely eschewed; but early in 1846 the "Mosses
from an Old Manse" was issued at New York, in two volumes. This
attracted at once a great deal of praise, and it certainly shows a
wider range and fuller maturity than the first book of "Twice-Told
Tales"; yet I doubt whether the stories of this group have taken such
intimate hold of any body of readers as those, although recommending
themselves to a larger audience. Hawthorne's life at the Old Manse was
assuredly one of the brightest epochs of his career: an unalloyed
happiness had come to him, he was full of the delight of first
possession in his home, a new and ample companionship was his, and the
quiet course of the days, with their openings into healthful outdoor
exercise, made a perfect balance between creation and recreation. The
house in which he dwelt was itself a little island of the past, standing
intact above the flood of events; all around was a mild, cultivated
country, broken into gentle variety of "hills to live with," and touched
with just enough wildness to keep him from tiring of it: the stream that
flowed by his orchard was for him an enchanted river. He renewed the
pleasant sports of boyhood with it, fishing and boating in summer, and
in winter whistling over its clear, black ice, on rapid skates. In the
more genial months, the garden gave him pleasant employment; and in his
journal-musings, the thought gratifies him that he has come into a
primitive relation with nature, and that the two occupants of the Manse
are in good faith a new Adam and Eve, so far as the happiness of that
immemorial pair remained unbroken. The charm of these experiences has
all been distilled into the descriptive chapter which prefaces the
"Mosses"; and such more personal aspects of it as could not be mixed in
that vintage have been gathered, like forgotten clusters of the harvest,
into the Note-Books. It remains to comment, here, on the contrast
between the peaceful character of these first years at Concord and the
increased sombreness of some of the visions there recorded.
The reason of this is, that Hawthorne's genius had now waxed to a
stature which made its emanations less immediately dependent on his
actual mood. I am far from assuming an exact autobiographical value for
the "Twice-Told Tales"; a theory which the writer himself condemned. But
they, as he has also said, require "to be read in the clear brown
twilight atmosphere in which they were written"; while the "Mosses" are
the work of a man who has learned to know the world, and the atmosphere
in which they were composed seems almost dissonant with the tone of some
of them. "The Birthmark," "The Bosom Serpent," "Rappaccini's Daughter,"
and that terrible and lurid parable of "Young Goodman Brown," are made
up of such horror as Hawthorne has seldom expressed elsewhere. "The
Procession of Life" is a fainter vibration of the same chord of
awfulness. Such concentration of frightful truth do these most graceful
and exquisitely wrought creations contain, that the intensity becomes
almost poisonous. What is the meaning of this added revelation of evil?
The genius of Hawthorne was one which used without stint that costliest
of all elements in production,--time; the brooding propensity was
indispensable to him; and, accordingly, as some of these conceptions had
occurred to him a good while before the carrying out, they received
great and almost excessive elaboration. The reality of sin, the
pervasiveness of evil, had been but slightly insisted upon in the
earlier tales: in this series, the idea bursts up like a long-buried
fire, with earth-shaking strength, and the pits of Hell seem yawning
beneath us. Dismal, too, is the story of "Roger Malvin's Burial," and
dreary "The Christmas Banquet," with its assembly of the supremely
wretched. In "Earth's Holocaust" we get the first result of Hawthorne's
insight into the demonianism of reformatory schemers who forget that the
centre of every true reform is the heart. And, incidentally, this marks
out the way to "The Scarlet Letter" on the one hand, and "The Blithedale
Romance" on the other, in which the same theme assumes two widely
different phases. Thus we find the poet seeking more and more certainly
the central fountain of moral suggestion from which he drew his best
inspirations. The least pleasing quality of the work is, I think, its
overcharged allegorical burden. Some of the most perfect of all his
tales are here, but their very perfection makes one recoil the more at
the supremacy of their purely intellectual interest. One feels a certain
chagrin, too, on finishing them, as if the completeness of embodiment
had given the central idea a shade of too great obviousness. Hawthorne
is most enjoyable and most true to himself when he offers us the chalice
of poetry filled to the very brim with the clear liquid of moral truth.
But, at first, there seems to have been a conflict between his aesthetic
and his ethical impulse. Coleridge distinguishes the symbolical from the
allegorical, by calling it a part of some whole which it represents.
"Allegory cannot be other than spoken consciously; whereas in the symbol
it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working
unconsciously in the writer's mind.... The advantage of symbolical
writing over allegory is that it presumes no disjunction of faculties,
but simple predominance." Now in the "Allegories of the Heart,"
collected in the "Mosses," there is sometimes an extreme consciousness
of the idea to be illustrated; and though the ideas are in a measure
symbolical, yet they are on the whole too disintegrating in their effect
to leave the artistic result quite generous and satisfying. Allegory
itself, as an echo of one's thought, is often agreeable, and pleases
through surprise; yet it is apt to be confusing, and smothers the poetic
harmony. In his romances, Hawthorne escapes into a hugely significant,
symbolic sphere which relieves the reader of this partial vexation. "The
Celestial Railroad," of course, must be excepted from censure, being the
sober parody of a famous work, and in itself a masterly satirical
allegory. And in two cases, "Drowne's Wooden Image," and "The Artist of
the Beautiful," we find the most perfect imaginable symbolism. In one,
the story of Pygmalion compressed and Yankeefied, yet rendered
additionally lovely by its homeliness; and the essence of all artistic
life, in the other, presented in a form that cannot be surpassed. "Mrs.
Bullfrog" is a sketch which is ludicrously puzzling, until one recalls
Hawthorne's explanation: "The story was written as a mere experiment in
that style; it did not come from any depth within me,--neither my heart
nor mind had anything to do with it." [Footnote: American Note-Books,
Vol. II.] It is valuable, in this light, as a distinct boundary-mark in
one direction. But the essay vein which had produced some of the
clearest watered gems in the "Twice-Told Tales," begins in the "Mosses"
to yield increase of brilliance and beauty; and we here find, with the
gathering strength of imagination,--the enlarged power for bringing the
most unreal things quite into the circle of realities,--a compensating
richness in describing the simply natural, as in "Buds and Bird Voices,"
"Fire Worship," "The Old Apple-Dealer."
Everything in these two volumes illustrates forcibly the brevity, the
absolutely right proportion of language to idea, which from the first
had marked Hawthorne with one trait, at least, quite unlike any
displayed by the writers with whom he was compared, and entirely foreign
to the mood of the present century. This _sense of form_, the
highest and last attribute of a creative writer, provided it comes as
the result of a deep necessity of his genius, and not as a mere
acquirement of art, is a quality that has not been enough noticed in
him; doubtless because it is not enough looked for anywhere by the
majority of critics and readers, in these days of adulteration and of
rapid manufacture out of shoddy and short-fibred stuffs. We demand a
given measure of reading, good or bad, and producers of it are in great
part paid for length: so that with much using of thin and shapeless
literature, we have forgotten how good is that which is solid and has
form. But, having attained this perfection in the short story, Hawthorne
thereafter abandoned it for a larger mould.
The "Mosses," as I have said, gained him many admirers. In them he for
the first time touched somewhat upon the tendencies of the current
epoch, and took an entirely independent stand among the philosophers of
New England. Yet, for a while, there was the oddest misconception of his
attitude by those at a distance. A Whig magazine, pleased by his manly
and open conservatism, felt convinced that he must be a Whig, though he
was, at the moment of the announcement, taking office under a Democratic
President. On the other hand, a writer in "The Church Review" of New
Haven, whom we shall presently see more of, was incited to a tilt
against him as a rabid New England theorist, the outcome, of
phalansteries, a subverter of marriage and of all other holy things. In
like manner, while Hawthorne was casting now and then a keen dart at the
Transcendentalists, and falling asleep over "The Dial" (as his journals
betray), Edgar Poe, a literary _Erinaceus_, wellnigh exhausted his
supply of quills upon the author, as belonging to a school toward which
he felt peculiar acerbity. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, in his
most high-pitched strain of personal abuse, "get a bottle of visible
ink, hang (if possible) the editor of 'The Dial,' cut Mr. Alcott, and
throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of the 'North
American Review.'" This paper of Poe's is a laughable and pathetic case
of his professedly punctilious analysis covering the most bitter
attacks, with traces of what looks like envy, and others of a resistless
impulse to sympathize with a literary brother as against the average
mind. He begins with a discussion of originality and peculiarity: "In
one sense, to be peculiar is to be original," he says, but the true
originality is "not the uniform but the continuous peculiarity, ...
giving its own hue to everything it touches," and touching everything.
From this flimsy and very uncertain principle, which seems to make two
different things out of the same thing, he goes on to conclude that,
"the fact is, if Mr. Hawthorne were really original, he could not fail
of making himself felt by the public. But the fact is, he is _not_
original in any sense." He then attempts to show that Hawthorne's
peculiarity is derivative, and selects Tieck as the source of this
idiosyncrasy. Perhaps his insinuation may be the origin of Hawthorne's
effort to read some of the German author, while at the Old Manse,--an
attempt given up in great fatigue. Presently, the unhappy critic brings
up his favorite charge of plagiarism; and it happens, as usual, that the
writer borrowed from is Poe himself! The similarity which he discovers
is between "Howe's Masquerade" and "William Wilson," and is based upon
fancied resemblances of situation, which have not the least foundation
in the facts, and upon the occurrence in both stories of the phrase,
"Villain, unmuffle yourself!" In the latter half of his review, written
a little later, Mr. Poe takes quite another tack:--
"Of Mr. Hawthorne's tales we would say emphatically that they belong to
the highest region of art,--an art subservient to genius of a very lofty
order. We had supposed, with good reason for so supposing, that he had
been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent
_cliques_ who beset our literature; ... but we have been most
agreeably mistaken.... Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention,
creation, imagination, originality,--a trait which, in the literature of
fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of the
originality ... is but imperfectly understood.... The inventive or
original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of _tone_ as
in novelty of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original in _all_ points."
This, certainly, is making generous amends; but before he leaves the
subject, the assertion is repeated, that "he is peculiar, and _not_
original."
Though an extravagant instance, this tourney of Poe's represents pretty
well the want of understanding with which Hawthorne was still received
by many readers. His point of view once seized upon, nothing could be
more clear and simple than his own exposition of refined and evasive
truths; but the keen edge of his perception remained quite invisible to
some. Of the "Twice-Told Tales" Hawthorne himself wrote:--
"The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound; but it
is rather more remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design
on the writer's part to make them so.... Every sentence, so far as it
embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody
who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book
in a proper mood."
But it was hard for people to find that mood, because in fact the Tales
_were_ profound. Their language was clear as crystal; but all the
more dazzlingly shone through the crystal that new light of Hawthorne's
gaze.
After nearly four years, Hawthorne's tenancy of the Manse came to an
end, and he returned to Salem, with some prospect of an office there
from the new Democratic government of Polk. It is said that President
Tyler had at one time actually appointed him to the Salem post-office,
but was induced to withdraw his name. There were local factions that
kept the matter in abeyance. The choice, in any case, lay between the
Naval Office and the surveyorship, and Bridge urged Hawthorne's
appointment to the latter. "Whichever it be," wrote Hawthorne, "it is to
you that I shall owe it, among so many other solid kindnesses. I have as
true friends as any man has, but you have been the friend in need and
the friend indeed." At this time he was seriously in want of some
profitable employment, for he had received almost nothing from the
magazine. It was the period of credit, and debts were hard to collect.
His journal at the Old Manse refers to the same trouble. I have been
told that, besides losing the value of many of his contributions to the
"Democratic," through the failure of the magazine, he had advanced money
to the publishers, which was never repaid; but this has not been
corroborated, and as he had lost nearly everything at Brook Farm, it is
a little doubtful. At length, he was installed as surveyor in the Salem
Custom-House, where he hoped soon to begin writing at ease.
VII.
THE SCARLET LETTER.
1846-1850.