THE lives of great men are written gradually. It often takes as long to
construct a true biography as it took the person who is the subject of
it to complete his career; and when the work is done, it is found to
consist of many volumes, produced by a variety of authors. We receive
views from different observers, and by putting them together are able to
form our own estimate. What the man really was not even himself could
know; much less can we. Hence all that we accomplish, in any case, is to
approximate to the reality. While we flatter ourselves that we have
imprinted on our minds an exact image of the individual, we actually
secure nothing but a typical likeness. This likeness, however, is
amplified and strengthened by successive efforts to paint a correct
portrait. If the faces of people belonging to several generations of a
family be photographed upon one plate, they combine to form a single
distinct countenance, which shows a general resemblance to them all: in
somewhat the same way, every sketch of a distinguished man helps to fix
the lines of that typical semblance of him which is all that the world
can hope to preserve.
This principle applies to the case of Hawthorne, notwithstanding that
the details of his career are comparatively few, and must be marshalled
in much the same way each time that it is attempted to review them. The
veritable history of his life would be the history of his mental
development, recording, like Wordsworth's "Prelude," the growth of a
poet's mind; and on glancing back over it he too might have said, in
Wordsworth's phrases:--
"Wisdom and spirit of the universe!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up the human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things--
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart."
But a record of that kind, except where an autobiography exists, can be
had only by indirect means. We must resort to tracing the outward facts
of the life, and must try to infer the interior relations.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the Fourth of July, 1804, at Salem,
Massachusetts, in a house numbered twenty-one, Union Street. The house
is still standing, although somewhat reduced in size and still more
reduced in circumstances. The character of the neighborhood has declined
very much since the period when Hawthorne involuntarily became a
resident there. As the building stands to-day it makes the impression
simply of an exceedingly plain, exceedingly old-fashioned, solid,
comfortable abode, which in its prime must have been regarded as proof
of a sufficient but modest prosperity on the part of the occupant. It is
clapboarded, is two stories high, and has a gambrel roof, immediately
beneath which is a large garret that doubtless served the boy-child well
as a place for play and a stimulant for the sense of mystery. A single
massive chimney, rising from the centre, emphasizes by its style the
antiquity of the building, and has the air of holding it together. The
cobble-stoned street in front is narrow, and although it runs from the
house towards the water-side, where once an extensive commerce was
carried on, and debouches not far from the Custom House where Hawthorne
in middle life found plenty of occupation as Surveyor, it is now silent
and deserted.
He was the second of three children born to Nathaniel Hathorne,
sea-captain, and Elizabeth Clarke Manning. The eldest was Elizabeth
Manning Hathorne, who came into the world March 7, 1802; the last was
Maria Louisa, born January 9, 1808, and lost in the steamer Henry Clay,
which was burned on the Hudson River, July 27, 1852. Elizabeth survived
all the members of the family, dying on the 1st of January, 1883, when
almost eighty-one years old, at Montserrat, a hamlet in the township of
Beverly, near Salem. In early manhood, certainly at about the time when
he began to publish, the young Nathaniel changed the spelling of his
surname to Hawthorne; an alteration also adopted by his sisters. This is
believed to have been merely a return to a mode of spelling practised by
the English progenitors of the line, although none of the American
ancestors had sanctioned it.
"The fact that he was born in Salem," writes Dr. George B. Loring, who
knew him as a fellow-townsman, "may not amount to much to other people,
but it amounted to a great deal to him. The sturdy and defiant spirit of
his progenitor, who first landed on these shores, found a congenial
abode among the people of Naumkeag, after having vainly endeavored to
accommodate itself to the more imposing ecclesiasticism of Winthrop and
his colony at Trimountain, and of Endicott at his new home. He was a
stern Separatist ... but he was also a warrior, a politician, a legal
adviser, a merchant, an orator with persuasive speech.... He had great
powers of mind and body, and forms a conspicuous figure in that imposing
and heroic group which stands around the cradle of New England. The
generations of the family that followed took active and prominent part
in the manly adventures which marked our entire colonial period.... It
was among the family traditions gathered from the Indian wars, the
tragic and awful spectre of the witchcraft delusion, the wild life of
the privateer, that he [Nathaniel] first saw the light."
The progenitor here referred to is William Hathorne, who came to America
with John Winthrop in 1630. He had grants of land in Dorchester, but was
considered so desirable a citizen that the town of Salem offered him
other lands if he would settle there; which he did. It has not been
ascertained from what place William Hathorne originally came. His elder
brother Robert is known to have written to him in 1653 from the village
of Bray, in Berkshire, England; but Nathaniel Hawthorne says in the
"American Note-Books" that William was a younger brother of a family
having for its seat a place called Wigcastle, in Wiltshire. He became,
however, a person of note and of great usefulness in the community with
which he cast his lot, in the new England. Hathorne Street in Salem
perpetuates his name to-day, as Lathrop Street does that of Captain
Thomas Lathrop, who commanded one of the companies of Essex militia,
when John Hathorne was quartermaster of the forces; Thomas Lathrop, who
marched his men to Deerfield in 1675, to protect frontier inhabitants
from the Indians, and perished with his whole troop, in the massacre at
Bloody Brook. The year after that, William Hathorne also took the field
against the Indians, in Maine, and conducted a highly successful
campaign there, under great hardships. He had been the captain of the
first military organization in Salem, and rose to be major. He served
for a number of years as deputy in the Great and General Court; was a
tax-collector, a magistrate, and a bold advocate of colonial
self-government. Although opposed to religious persecution, as a
magistrate he inflicted cruelties on the Quakers, causing a woman on one
occasion to be whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham. "The figure of
that first ancestor," Hawthorne wrote in "The Custom House," "invested
by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my
boyish imagination as far back as I can remember;" so that it is by no
means idle to reckon the history of his own family as among the
important elements influencing the bent of his genius. John, the son of
William, was likewise a public character; he, too, became a
representative, a member of the Governor's council, a magistrate and a
military officer, and saw active service as a soldier in the expedition
which he headed against St. John, in 1696. But he is chiefly remembered
as the judge who presided over the witchcraft trials and displayed great
harshness and bigotry in his treatment of the prisoners. His
descendants did not retain the position in public affairs which had been
held by his father and himself; and for the most part they were
sea-faring men. One of them, indeed, Daniel--the grandfather of
Nathaniel--figured as a privateer captain in the Revolution, fighting
one battle with a British troop-ship off the coast of Portugal, in which
he was wounded; but the rest led the obscure though hardy and
semi-romantic lives of maritime traders sailing to Africa, India, or
Brazil. The privateersman had among his eight children three boys, one
of whom, Nathaniel, was the father of the author, and died of fever in
Surinam, in the spring of 1808, at the age of thirty-three.