NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
1804-1864
In 1804 the town of Salem, in Massachusetts, was the most important
seaport in America. With the regularity of the tides its ships sailed
to China, the East Indies, the Feejee Islands, South America, and the
West Indies, and its seamen were as well known in the harbors of these
distant places as in their native town. Throughout the Revolution
Salem, with some neighboring smaller ports, was the hope of the
colonists. No American navy existed; but the merchants and marines
turned their vessels into ships of war, and under the name of
privateers swept the seas of British cruisers, capturing in six years
over four hundred and fifty prizes. During the war of 1812, again,
the naval service was led by the hardy Salem captains, and the brave
little seaport gave generously to the cause of the nation. Salem
from the first was identified with American independence. Upon her
hillsides one memorable day the inhabitants gathered to watch the
fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon, and through her streets,
a few weeks later, the body of the heroic Lawrence was borne in
state. Among the thronging crowds that day must have wandered the boy
Nathaniel Hawthorne, then in his tenth year. Born in Salem, he came of
a line of seafaring men who had fought their way to fame and fortune
in the teeth of wind and wave; his family having its American
beginning at the time when Indian and white man alike made their homes
in the shadowy aisles of the New-England forests. These ocean-roving
ancestors were among the first to take an American ship to St.
Petersburg, Sumatra, Australia, and Africa. They fought pirates,
overcame savages, suffered shipwreck and disaster, and many of them
found their graves in the waters of some foreign sea. Hawthorne's own
father was lost on a voyage.
From this race of hardy sailors Hawthorne inherited the patience,
courage, and endurance which were the basis of his character, a
character touched besides by that melancholy and love of solitude
which is apt to distinguish those born by the sea. It is this
combination, perhaps, of Puritan steadfastness of purpose and wild
adventurous life that descended to Hawthorne in the form of the most
exquisite imagination tinctured with the highest moral aspirations.
It was the sturdy, healthy plant of Puritanism blossoming into a
beautiful flower.
In this old town of Salem, with its quaint houses, with their carved
doorways and many windows, with its pretty rose-gardens, its beautiful
overshadowing elms, its dingy court-house and celebrated town-pump,
Hawthorne passed his early life, his picturesque surroundings forming
a suitable environment for the handsome, imaginative boy who was to
create the most beautiful literary art that America had yet known.
Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with memories
of the witches hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the
sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves and warehouses held
priceless stores of merchandise. Between this haunting spirit of the
past and the broader, newer life of the future, Hawthorne walked
with the serene hope of the youth of that day. The old, intolerant
Puritanism had passed away. Only the fine gold remained as the
priceless treasure of the new generation.
Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town.
He went to school and to church, loved the sea and prophesied that he
should go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading,
and ready to fight with any school-fellows who had, as he expressed
it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, finding
life a good thing whether he was roaming the streets, sitting idly
on the wharves, or stretched on the floor at home reading a favorite
author.
Almost all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and
Hawthorne, like his fellows, lived in the magic world of Shakespeare
and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Bunyan. _The Pilgrim's Progress_
was an especial favorite with him, its lofty spirit carrying his soul
into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without
understanding. For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in
the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Me., where the family lived for a
time. Here, he says, he led the life of a bird of the air, with no
restraint and in absolute freedom. In the summer he would take his
gun and spend days in the forest, doing whatever pleased his vagabond
spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters
through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake
with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes
pass the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, warmed by the
blaze of the fallen evergreens.
But he had to return to Salem to prepare for college, whither he went
in 1821, in his seventeenth year. He entered Bowdoin, and had among
his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce,
afterward President of the United States. Here Hawthorne spent happy
days, and long afterward, in writing to an old college friend, he
speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place
when he gathered blueberries in study hours, watched the great
logs drifting down the current of the Androscoggin from the lumber
districts above, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and
squirrels in hours which should have been devoted to the classics.
In this same letter, which forms the dedication to one of his books,
he adds that it is this friend, if any one, who is responsible for
his becoming a writer, as it was here, in the shadow of the tall pines
which sheltered Bowdoin College, that the first prophecy concerning
his destiny was made. He was to be a writer of fiction, the friend
said, little dreaming of the honors that were to crown one of the
great novelists of the world.
After leaving Bowdoin Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the
next twelve years of his life. Here he produced, from time to time,
stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals and won
for him a narrow reputation. But the years which a man usually devotes
to his best work were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of
a great future, for good as is some of the work produced at this time,
it never would have won for the author the highest place in American
literature. These stories and sketches were afterward collected and
published under the title _Twice-Told Tales_ and _The Snow Image_.
Full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, they were the best
imaginative work yet produced in America, but in speaking of them
Hawthorne himself says that in this result of twelve years there is
little to show for its thought and industry.
But the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when
Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance.
Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of Puritan times in
New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created
a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty. In the days of
which he wrote, a Puritan town was exactly like a large family bound
together by mutual interests, the acts of each life being regarded as
affecting the whole community. Hawthorne has preserved this spirit of
colonial New England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears, and
the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only
in public records and church histories, was given new life. In
Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian
fights, village pillories, town-meetings, witch-burnings, and
church-councils was already a memory. With his steeple-crowned hat and
his matchlock at his side he had left the pleasant New-England farm
lands and was found only in the court-houses, where his deeds were
recorded. Hawthorne brought him back from the past, set him in the
midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and showed him a sufferer
for conscience' sake.
This first romance, published under the title _The Scarlet Letter_,
revealed to Hawthorne himself, as well as to the world outside, the
transcendent power of his genius. Hawthorne, who was despondent of the
little popularity of his other books, told the publisher who saw the
first sketch of _The Scarlet Letter_, that he did not know whether
the story was very good or very bad. The publisher, however, at once
perceived its worth and brought it out one year from that time,
and the public saw that it had been entertaining a genius unawares.
Hawthorne's next book, _The House of the Seven Gables_, is a story
of the New England of his own day. A clever critic has called it an
impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New-England town.
Through its pages flit quaint contrasting figures that one might find
in New England and nowhere else. The old spinster of ancient family,
obliged to open a toy and gingerbread shop, but never forgetting
the time when the house with seven gables was a mansion of limitless
hospitality, is a pathetic picture of disappointed hope and
broken-down fortune. So is her brother, who was falsely imprisoned
for twenty years, and who in his old age must lean upon his sister for
support; and the other characters are equally true to the life that
has almost disappeared in the changes of the half-century since its
scenes were made the inspiration of Hawthorne's romance.
_The House of the Seven Gables_ was followed by two beautiful volumes
for children, _The Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_. In _The Wonder
Book_ Hawthorne writes as if he were a child himself, so simple is the
charm that he weaves around these old, old tales. Not content with
the Greek myths, he created little incidents and impossible characters
that glance in and out with elfin grace. One feels that these were
the very stories that were told by the centaurs, fauns, and satyrs
themselves in the shadows of the old Attic forests. Here we learn that
King Midas not only had his palace turned to gold, but that his
own little daughter, Marigold, a fancy of Hawthorne's own, was also
converted into the same shining metal. We learn, too, the secrets of
many a hero and god of this realm of fancy which had been unsuspected
by any other historian of their deeds. Every child who reads _The
Wonder Book_ doubts not that Hawthorne had hobnobbed many a moonlit
night with Pan and Bacchus in their vine-covered grottos by the
riverside. This dainty, ethereal touch appears in all his work for
children.
A like quality gives distinction to his fourth great novel, which
deals with a man supposed to be a descendant of the old fauns. This
creation, named Donatello, from his resemblance to the celebrated
statue of the Marble Faun, is not wholly human, although he has
human interests and feeling. Hawthorne makes Donatello ashamed of his
pointed ears, though his spirit is as wild and untamed as that of his
rude ancestors. In this book there is a description of a scene where
Count Donatello joins in a peasant dance around a public fountain. And
so vividly is his half-human nature here brought out that Hawthorne
seems to have witnessed somewhere the mad revels of the veritable
fauns and satyrs in the days of their life upon the earth. Throughout
this story Hawthorne shows the same subtle sympathy with uncommon
natures, the mystery of such souls having the same fascination for
him that the secrets of the earth and air have for the scientist and
philosopher.
The book coming between _The House of the Seven Gables_ and _The
Marble Faun_ is called _The Blithedale Romance_. It is in part the
record of a period of Hawthorne's life when he joined a community
which hoped to improve the world by combining healthy manual labor
with intellectual pursuits, and proving that self-interest and all
differences in rank must be hurtful to the commonwealth. This little
society lived in a suburb of Boston, and called their association
Brook Farm. Each member performed daily some manual labor on the
farm or in the house, hours being set aside for study. Here Hawthorne
ploughed the fields and joined in the amusements, or sat apart while
the rest talked about art and literature, danced, sang, or read
Shakespeare aloud. Some of the cleverest men and women of New England
joined this community, the rules of which obliged the men to
wear plaid blouses and rough straw hats, and the women to content
themselves with plain calico gowns.
These serious-minded men and women, who tried to solve a great problem
by leading the lives of Arcadian shepherds, at length dispersed,
each one going back to the world and working on as bravely as if the
experiment had been a great success. The experiences of Brook Farm
were shadowed forth in _The Blithedale Romance_, although it was not a
literal narrative.
Immediately after this Hawthorne was married and went to live in
Concord, near Boston, in a quaint old dwelling called The Manse. And
as all his work partakes of the personal flavor of his own life, so
his existence here is recorded in a delightful series of essays called
_Mosses from an Old Manse_. Here we have a description of the old
house itself, and of the author's family life, of the kitchen-garden
and apple-orchards, of the meadows and woods, and of his friendship
with that lover of nature, Henry Thoreau, whose writings form a
valuable contribution to American literature. The _Mosses from an Old
Manse_ must ever be famous as the history of the quiet hours of one of
the greatest American men of letters. They are full of Hawthorne's own
personality, and reveal more than any other of his books the depth and
purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.
In 1853 his old friend and schoolmate, President Pierce, appointed
Hawthorne American Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad seven
years, spending the last four on the Continent, some transcriptions
of his experience being found in the celebrated _Marble Faun_ and
in several volumes of _Note-Books_. _The Marble Faun_, published in
Europe under the title _Transformation_, was written in Rome, and was
partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa which he occupied near
Florence. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower, "haunted," as
Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "by owls and by the ghost of
a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century previous to
being burnt at the stake in the principal square in Florence." He also
states in the same letter that he meant to put the old castle bodily
in a romance that was then in his head, which he did by making the
villa the old family castle of Donatello, although the scene of the
story is laid in Rome.
After Hawthorne's return to America he began two other novels, one
founded upon the old legend of the elixir of life. This story was
probably suggested to him by Thoreau, who spoke of a house in which
Hawthorne once lived at Concord having been, a century or two before,
the abode of a man who believed that he should never die. This subject
was a charming one for Hawthorne's peculiar genius, but the story,
with another, _The Dolliver Romance_, was interrupted by the death of
Hawthorne in 1864.
In point of literary art the romances of Hawthorne are the finest work
yet done in America, and their author was a man of high imagination,
lofty morality, and pure ideals; an artist in the noblest meaning of
the word.