to the brink of the supernatural. But here his art is delicate. The
old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition for modern credulity.
The modern ghost is a "clot on the brain." Recall the ghosts in Henry
James's "The Turn of the Screw"--just a suspicion of evil presences. The
true interpretation of that story I have sometimes thought to be, that
the woman who saw the phantoms was mad. Hawthorne is similarly
ambiguous. His apparently preternatural phenomena always admit of a
natural explanation. The water of Maule's well may have turned bitter in
consequence of an ancient wrong; but also perhaps because of a
disturbance in the underground springs. The sudden deaths of Colonel
and Judge Pyncheon may have been due to the old wizard's curse that "God
would give them blood to drink"; or simply to an inherited tendency to
apoplexy. _Did_ Donatello have furry, leaf-shaped ears, or was this
merely his companions' teasing? Did old Mistress Hibben, the sister of
Governor Bellingham of Massachusetts, attend witch meetings in the
forest, and inscribe her name in the Black Man's book? Hawthorne does
not say so, but only that the people so believed; and it is historical
fact that she was executed as a witch. Was a red letter A actually seen
in the midnight sky, or was it a freak of the aurora borealis? What did
Chillingworth see on Dimmesdale's breast? The author will not tell us.
But if it was the mark of the Scarlet Letter, may we not appeal to the
phenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of
Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth
of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a
legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on
natural grounds--what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having
become mesmerism or hypnotism in the nineteenth.
Fifty years after his death, Hawthorne is already a classic. For even
Mr. Brownell allows him one masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an
immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter"
is his _chef-d'oeuvre_. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived
work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free
from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into
his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's
unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some
of his inferior works; and I think he was right in preferring "The House
of the Seven Gables," as more fully representing all sides of his
genius. The difference between the two is the difference between tragedy
and romance. While we are riding the high horse of criticism and feeling
virtuous, we will concede the superiority of the former _genre_; but
when we give our literary conscience the slip, we yield ourselves again
to the fascination of the haunted twilight.
The antique gabled mansion in its quiet back street has the charm of the
still-life sketches in the early books, such as "Sights from a Steeple,"
"A Rill from the Town Pump," "Sunday at Home," and "The Toll-gatherer's
Day." All manner of quaint figures, known to childhood, pass along that
visionary street: the scissors grinder, town crier, baker's cart,
lumbering stage-coach, charcoal vender, hand-organ man and monkey, a
drove of cattle, a military parade--the "trainers," as we used to call
them. Hawthorne had no love for his fellow citizens and took little part
in the modern society of Salem. But he had struck deep roots into the
soil of the old witch town, his birthplace and the home of generations
of his ancestors. Does the reader know this ancient seaport, with its
decayed shipping and mouldering wharves, its silted up harbor and idle
custom-house, where Hawthorne served three years as surveyor of the
port? Imposing still are the great houses around the square, built by
retired merchants and shipmasters whose fortunes were made in the East
India trade: with dark old drawing-rooms smelling of sandalwood and
filled with cabinets of Oriental curiosities. Hawthorne had little to do
with the aristocracy of Salem. But something of the life of these old
families may be read in Mrs. Stoddard's novel "The Morgesons,"--a book
which I am perpetually recommending to my friends, and they as
perpetually refusing to read, returning my copy after a superficial
perusal, with uncomplimentary comments upon my taste in fiction.
Hawthorne's academic connections are of particular interest. It is
wonderful that he and Longfellow should have been classmates at Bowdoin.
Equally wonderful that Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Mosses"
should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse at
Concord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and in
how narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was a
little country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twenty
years old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among the
pine stumps. Hawthorne's class--1825--graduated but thirty-seven strong.
And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college but
belonged to different sets. And twelve years afterward, when Longfellow
wrote a friendly review of "Twice-Told Tales" in _The North American
Review_, his quondam classmate addressed him in a somewhat formal letter
of thanks as "Dear Sir." Later the relations of the two became closer,
though never perhaps intimate. It was Hawthorne who handed over to
Longfellow that story of the dispersion of the Acadian exiles of
Grandpré, which became "Evangeline": a story which his friend Conolly
had suggested to Hawthorne, as mentioned in "The American Note Books."
The point which arrested Hawthorne's attention was the incident in the
Bayou Teche, where Gabriel's boat passes in the night within a few feet
of the bank on which Evangeline and her company are sleeping.
This was one of those tricks of destiny that so often engaged
Hawthorne's imagination: like the tale of "David Swan" the farmer's boy
who, on his way to try his fortune in the city, falls asleep by a
wayside spring. A rich and childless old couple stop to water their
horse, are taken by his appearance and talk of adopting him, but drive
away on hearing someone approaching. A young girl comes by and falls so
much in love with his handsome face that she is tempted to waken him
with a kiss, but she too is startled and goes on. Then a pair of tramps
arrive and are about to murder him for his money, when they in turn are
frightened off. Thus riches and love and death have passed him in his
sleep; and he, all unconscious of the brush of the wings of fate,
awakens and goes his way. Again, our romancer had read the common
historical accounts of the great landslide which buried the inn in the
Notch of the White Mountains. The names were known of all who had been
there that night and had consequently perished--with one exception. One
stranger had been present, who was never identified: Hawthorne's fancy
played with this curious problem, and he made out of it his story of
"The Ambitious Guest," a youth just starting on a brilliant career,
entertaining the company around the fire, with excited descriptions of
his hopes and plans; and then snuffed out utterly by ironic fate, and
not even numbered among the missing.
Tales like these are among the most characteristic and original of the
author's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we call
it Hawthornish. "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," is Hawthornish; so is
"Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow"; or Balzac's "Peau de
Chagrin"; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne,
like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde"; or Edward Bellamy's "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"--a process for
ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things--a modern water of Lethe.
Even some of James's early stories like "The Madonna of the Future" and
"The Last of the Valerii," as well as Mr. Howells's "Undiscovered
Country," have touches of Hawthorne.
Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow townsmen for some years at Concord,
and held each other in high regard. One was a philosophical idealist:
the other, an artist of the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether the
tree on the bank, or its image in the stream was the more real. But they
took no impress from one another's minds. Emerson could not read his
neighbor's romances. Their morbid absorption in the problem of evil
repelled the resolute optimist. He thought the best thing Hawthorne ever
wrote was his "Recollections of a Gifted Woman," the chapter in "Our Old
Home" concerning Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian theory of
Shakespeare, whom Hawthorne befriended with unfailing patience and
courtesy during his Liverpool consulship.
Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emerson in the introduction to "Mosses
from an Old Manse," and even paid him the honor of quotation, contrary
to his almost invariable practice. I cannot recall a half dozen
quotations in all his works. I think he must have been principled
against them. But he said he had come too late to Concord to fall under
Emerson's influence. No risk of that, had he come earlier. There was a
jealous independence in Hawthorne which resented the too close approach
of an alien mind: a species of perversity even, that set him in
contradiction to his environment. He always fought shy of literary
people. During his Liverpool consulship, he did not make--apparently did
not care to make--acquaintance with his intellectual equals. He did not
meet Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade,
George Eliot, or any other first-class minds. He barely met the
Brownings, but did not really come to know them till afterwards in
Italy. Surrounded by reformers, abolitionists, vegetarians, comeouters
and radicals of all gospels, he remained stubbornly conservative. He
held office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaign
life of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran for
President. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made the
gallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was a
blood-stained fanatic and justly hanged.
This conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and
moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale
Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to
his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically
Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and
its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House
of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and
Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do
anything directly to improve the condition of things. God will bring
about amendment in his own good time. And this fatalism again is subtly
connected with New England's ancestral creed--Calvinism. Hawthorne--it
has been pointed out a hundred times--is the Puritan romancer. His tales
are tales of the conscience: he is obsessed with the thought of sin,
with the doctrines of foreordination and total depravity. In the
theological library which he found stowed away in the garret of the Old
Manse, he preferred the seventeenth-century folio volumes of Puritan
divinity to the thin Unitarian sermons and controversial articles in the
files of _The Christian Examiner_. The former, at least, had once been
warm with a deep belief, however they had now "cooled down even to the
freezing point." But "the frigidity of the modern productions" was
"inherent." Hawthorne was never a church-goer and adhered to no
particular form of creed. But speculatively he liked his religion thick.
The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,
The songs that dared to go
Down searching through the abyss of man,
His deeps of conscious woe--
spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberal
Christianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm,
not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, but
attracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and by
the interesting varieties of human nature there assembled: literary
material which he used in "The Blithedale Romance." He complains slyly
of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows
(though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only a
symbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of any
kind).
Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irving
_plus_ something of his own. The resemblances and differences between
Poe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physical
horror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while once
only--in the story entitled "William Wilson"--Poe enters that field of
ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in
common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the
careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy
manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or
colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it
that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne
irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of
the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded
periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has
taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our
own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to
short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the
descriptions, cut out the reflections, _coupez vos phrases_. Hawthorne's
style was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure--"fine old leisure,"
whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On the
walls of his study at the "Wayside" was written--though not by his own
hand--the motto, "There is no joy but calm."
Sentiment and humor do not lie so near the surface in Hawthorne as in
Irving. He had a deep sense of the ridiculous, well shown in such
sketches as "P's Correspondence" and "The Celestial Railroad"; or in the
description of the absurd old chickens in the Pyncheon yard, shrunk by
in-breeding to a weazened race, but retaining all their top-knotted
pride of lineage. Hawthorne's humor was less genial than Irving's, and
had a sharp satiric edge. There is no merriment in it. Do you remember
that scene at the Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break into
a dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join with
them? The author meant this to be a burst of wild mænad gaiety. As such
I do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it.
It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf
mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible
scrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler.
Henry James says that Hawthorne's stories are the only good American
historical fiction; and Woodberry says that his method here is the same
as Scott's. The truth of this may be admitted up to a certain point. Our
Puritan romancer had certainly steeped his imagination in the annals of
colonial New England, as Scott had done in his border legends. He was
familiar with the documents--especially with Mather's "Magnalia," that
great source book of New England poetry and romance. But it was not the
history itself that interested him, the broad picture of an extinct
society, the _tableau large de la vie_, which Scott delighted to paint;
rather it was some adventure of the private soul. For example, Lowell
had told him the tradition of the young hired man who was chopping wood
at the backdoor of the Old Manse on the morning of the Concord fight;
and who hurried to the battlefield in the neighboring lane, to find both
armies gone and two British soldiers lying on the ground, one dead, the
other wounded. As the wounded man raised himself on his knees and stared
up at the lad, the latter, obeying a nervous impulse, struck him on the
head with his axe and finished him. "The story," says Hawthorne, "comes
home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral
exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent
career and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain.... This
one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells
us of the fight." How different is this bit of pathology from the public
feeling of Emerson's lines:
Spirit that made those heroes dare
To die and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
A PILGRIM IN CONCORD
Rura quae Liris quietâ
Mordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis.
The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summer
of 1879. The dust of late July lay velvet soft and velvet deep on all
the highways; or, stirred by the passing wheel, rose in slow clouds, not
unemblematic of the transcendental haze which filled the mental
atmosphere thereabout.
Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorne
and Thoreau had been dead many years--I saw their graves in Sleepy
Hollow;--and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on Fire
Island Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and Ellery
Channing--Thoreau's biographer--was alive. Above all, the sage of
Concord, "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,"
still walked his ancient haunts; his mind in many ways yet unimpaired,
though sadly troubled by aphasia, or the failure of verbal memory. It
was an instance of pathetic irony that in his lecture on "Memory,"
delivered in the Town Hall, he was prompted constantly by his daughter.
It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival--the Fitchburg Railroad.
One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, at
worst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexington
pike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that April
day, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand. But I
remembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs of
Irish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad,
consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made the
intruder a part of herself. The embankment runs along one end of the
pond, and the hermit only said:
It fills a few hollows
And makes banks for the swallows,
And sets the sand a-blowing
And the black-berries growing.
Afterwards I witnessed, and participated in, a more radical profanation
of these crystal waters, when two hundred of the dirtiest children in
Boston, South-enders, were brought down by train on a fresh-air-fund
picnic and washed in the lake just in front of the spot where Thoreau's
cabin stood, after having been duly swung in the swings, teetered on
the see-saws, and fed with a sandwich, a slice of cake, a pint of
peanuts, and a lemonade apiece, by a committee of charitable ladies--one
of whom was Miss Louisa Alcott, certainly a high authority on "Little
Women" and "Little Men."
Miss Alcott I had encountered on the evening of my first day in Concord,
when I rang the door bell of the Alcott residence and asked if the seer
was within. I fancied that there was a trace of acerbity in the manner
of the tall lady who answered my ring, and told me abruptly that Mr.
Alcott was not at home, and that I would probably find him at Mr.
Sanborn's farther up the street. Perspiring philosophers with dusters
and grip-sacks had been arriving all day and applying at the Alcott
house for addresses of boarding houses and for instructions of all
kinds; and Miss Louisa's patience may well have been tried. She did not
take much stock in the School anyway. Her father was supremely happy.
One of the dreams of his life was realized, and endless talk and
soul-communion were in prospect. But his daughter's view of philosophy
was tinged with irony, as was not unnatural in a high-spirited woman who
had borne the burden of the family's support, and had even worked out in
domestic service, while her unworldly parent was transcendentalizing
about the country, holding conversation classes in western towns, from
which after prolonged absences he sometimes brought home a dollar, and
sometimes only himself. "Philosophy can bake no bread, but it can give
us God, freedom, and immortality" read the motto--from Novalis--on the
cover of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, published at Concord
in those years, under the editorship of Mr. William T. Harris; but bread
must be baked, for even philosophers must eat, and an occasional
impatience of the merely ideal may be forgiven in the overworked
practician.
On Mr. Frank Sanborn's wide, shady verandah, I found Mr. Alcott, a most
quaint and venerable figure, large in frame and countenance, with
beautiful, flowing white hair. He moved slowly, and spoke deliberately
in a rich voice. His face had a look of mild and innocent solemnity, and
he reminded me altogether of a large benignant sheep or other ruminating
animal. He was benevolently interested when I introduced myself as the
first fruits of the stranger and added that I was from Connecticut. He
himself was a native of the little hill town of Wolcott, not many miles
from New Haven, and in youth had travelled through the South as a Yankee
peddler. "Connecticut gave him birth," says Thoreau; "he peddled first
her wares, afterwards, he declares, his brains."
Mr. Sanborn was the secretary of the School, and with him I enrolled
myself as a pupil and paid the very modest fee which admitted me to its
symposia. Mr. Sanborn is well known through his contributions to Concord
history and biography. He was for years one of the literary staff of
_The Springfield Republican_, active in many reform movements, and an
efficient member of the American Social Science Association. Almost from
his house John Brown started on his Harper's Ferry raid, and people in
Concord still dwell upon the exciting incident of Mr. Sanborn's arrest
in 1860 as an accessory before the fact. The United States deputy
marshal with his myrmidons drove out from Boston in a hack. They lured
the unsuspecting abolitionist outside his door, on some pretext or
other, clapped the handcuffs on him, and tried to get him into the hack.
But their victim, planting his long legs one on each side of the
carriage door, resisted sturdily, and his neighbors assaulted the
officers with hue and cry. The town rose upon them. Judge Hoar hastily
issued a habeas corpus returnable before the Massachusetts Supreme
Court, and the baffled minions of the slave power went back to Boston.
The School assembled in the Orchard House, formerly the residence of Mr.
Alcott, on the Lexington road. Next door was the Wayside, Hawthorne's
home for a number of years, a cottage overshadowed by the steep hillside
that rose behind it, thick with hemlocks and larches. On the ridge of
this hill was Hawthorne's "out door study," a foot path worn by his own
feet, as he paced back and forth among the trees and thought out the
plots of his romances. In 1879 the Wayside was tenanted by George
Lathrop, who had married Hawthorne's daughter, Rose. He had already
published his "Study of Hawthorne" and a volume of poems, "Rose and
Rooftree." His novel, "An Echo of Passion," was yet to come, a book
which unites something of modern realism with a delicately symbolic art
akin to Hawthorne's own.
A bust of Plato presided over the exercises of the School, and
"Plato-Skimpole"--as Mr. Alcott was once nicknamed--made the opening
address. I remember how impressively he quoted Milton's lines:
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute.