Part 16

When Bancroft became Collector of the Port of Boston, he appointed Hawthorne as weigher and gauger (1839). Thrown out by the change of administration (1841), Hawthorne invested his savings in the Brook Farm enterprise. This move (described by his latest biographer as ‘the only apparently freakish action of his life’) was made in the hope of providing a home for his betrothed, Sophia Peabody. He threw himself with good humor into the life of the community, planted potatoes, cut straw, milked three cows night and morning, and signed his letters to his sister ‘Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman.’ Reports circulated that the author of the _Twice-Told Tales_ might be seen dressed in a farmer’s frock, carrying milk to Boston every morning; also that he was ‘to do the travelling in Europe _for the Community_.’

Brook Farm proved ‘thralldom and weariness,’ and Hawthorne abandoned it, losing, as he later discovered, the one thousand dollars he had invested. In July, 1842, he married and settled in the ‘Old Manse’ at Concord.

He had now enough and to spare of the leisure which a deliberate writer finds indispensable. In a room overlooking the battlefield (the room in which Emerson had written _Nature_) Hawthorne penned many of the tales afterwards incorporated in _Mosses from an Old Manse_. The period of his residence at Concord will always seem to those who have studied its many charming records not undeserving the characterization of idyllic. It was brought to a close in 1845, when there seemed a likelihood (made a certainty the following year) of his becoming Surveyor of Customs for the Port of Salem. Hawthorne held this post until June, 1849. His removal gave him time for the working out of an idea that had possessed him for many months, and which took shape in the form of his great romance, _The Scarlet Letter_.

From the spring of 1850 to the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne lived at Lenox in the Berkshire Hills, and there wrote _The House of the Seven Gables_. He then removed to West Newton, where, during the winter of 1851–52, he wrote _The Blithedale Romance_. In June, 1852, he took possession of a house in Concord, which he had bought of Alcott. He had but fairly settled himself in his new home (‘The Wayside’ he called it) when his friend Franklin Pierce, now President of the United States, made him consul at Liverpool.

Hawthorne assumed his charge in July, 1853, and conducted its affairs with energy and skill until September, 1857. The period of his English residence was rich in experiences, of which social honors formed the least part. The quiet, brooding observer had no wish to be lionized and apparently discouraged the few well-meant advances that were made. He once saw Tennyson at the Arts’ Exhibition at Manchester, and rejoiced in him more than in all the other wonders of the place; but it was like Hawthorne to have been content merely to gaze at the laureate without presuming on his own achievements as ground for claiming acquaintance.

After leaving Liverpool, Hawthorne spent two winters in Italy, where _The Marble Faun_ was conceived. The greater part of the actual writing was done in England, at Redcar on the North Sea.

At this point it will be well to take note of Hawthorne’s principal writings subsequent to the publication of the second edition of the _Twice-Told Tales_. They are: _The Celestial Railroad_, 1843; _Mosses from an Old Manse_, 1846;[38] _The Scarlet Letter_, 1850; _The House of the Seven Gables_, 1851; _A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys_, 1852; _The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales_, 1852; _The Blithedale Romance_, 1852; _Life of Franklin Pierce_, 1852; _Tanglewood Tales_, 1853; _The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni_, 1860;[39] _Our Old Home_, 1863.

The posthumous publications are: _Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, 1868; _Passages from the English Note-Books_ ..., 1870; _Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books_ ..., 1872; _Septimius Felton_, 1872; _The Dolliver Romance_, 1876; _Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret_, 1883.

In June, 1860, after an absence of seven years, Hawthorne returned to ‘The Wayside.’ He felt the burden of the political situation now culminating in civil war. With little sympathy for the cause of Abolition, Hawthorne, when the conflict had actually begun, found it ‘delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time’ and to feel that he had a country.[40]

His health began to decline and he was spiritless and depressed. In March, 1864, accompanied by his friend W. D. Ticknor, he started southward, hoping for benefit from the change. Ticknor, who was seemingly in perfect health, died suddenly in Philadelphia. Hawthorne was unnerved by the shock. In May he undertook a carriage journey among the New Hampshire hills with Pierce. The friends proceeded by easy stages, reaching Plymouth in the evening of May 18. Hawthorne was growing visibly weaker and Pierce had already determined that he would send for Mrs. Hawthorne. Shortly after midnight he went into his friend’s room. Hawthorne was apparently sleeping. He went again between three and four in the morning. Hawthorne was dead.

II

HAWTHORNE’s CHARACTER

‘I am a man, and between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf,’ said Kenyon in _The Marble Faun_.

Hawthorne might have been speaking through Kenyon’s lips, so accurately does the saying voice his private thought. He lived in a world apart. No experience of custom-house, consulate, or farm could bring him quite out of his world into the common world of men. Hawthorne had more reason than Emerson to complain of the wall between him and his fellow-mortals. When glib talkers were displaying no end of conversational change, Hawthorne kept his hands in his pockets. He had no mind to indulge in that form of matching pennies known as small talk.

Observers have voiced their impressions of him in different ways; their testimony is not discordant. The romantically inclined described Hawthorne as mysterious. Plain people thought him queer. Even his brother authors found him odd. Longfellow described Hawthorne as ‘a strange owl, a very peculiar individual, with a dash of originality about him very pleasant to behold.’ Yet Hawthorne was without a grain of affectation, and took keen interest in the homely facts of life. His books everywhere betray this interest. He who wrote that description of his kitchen garden in _The Old Manse_ would seem to be just the man to lean over the fence and talk cabbages and squashes with some neighborhood farmer. And perhaps he did.

He was not fond of men of letters as a class--which is not surprising. The friends who stood close to him were not literary. Bridge was a naval officer. Pierce was a politician, representative of a type for which Hawthorne had contempt. Hillard was a lawyer, a man of the world.

Hawthorne was not without his share of ‘human nature,’ as we say. He had his prejudices, and they were sometimes deeply rooted. When smarting under a sense of injustice he could wield a caustic pen. He was a good hater, but not narrow-minded. He hated spirit-rapping, table-tipping, and all the vulgar machinery and manifestations of a vulgar delusion. He hated noise, brawling, and dissension. He loved his home. His letters to his wife reveal a nature of exquisite delicacy. He loved children, Nature, and he was chivalrous in his attitude towards the animal creation.

A trait of Hawthorne’s character comes out in the following incident. He proposed to dedicate _Our Old Home_ to Franklin Pierce. This was in 1863. The publishers, it is said, were filled with ‘consternation and distress.’ The ex-president’s name was not one to conjure with. Hawthorne explained his position: ‘I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter.... If Pierce is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do.... As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I see fit to give it, or let it alone.’

Friendship sometimes has in it an element of perversity, and has been known to delight in petty martyrdom. There was nothing of this in Hawthorne. All he notes is that friendship is not a commodity.

III

THE WRITER

Hawthorne knew the secret of producing magical effects by quiet means. He had perfect command of the materials by which are rendered the half tones, the delicate shadings, the mysterious opalescent hues of beautiful prose. Yet his manner is unostentatious and his vocabulary simple. There are writers in whose work the feeling excited of pleasurable surprise can be traced to a particular word glittering like a diamond or a sapphire. With Hawthorne the effects are elusive, not always to be apprehended at the moment.

The beauty of his prose is best explained by the beauty of the ideas; the natural phrasing serves but to define it, as physical loveliness may be accentuated by simplicity of dress. Hawthorne’s thoughts, being exquisite in themselves, make ornament superfluous.

There is no trace of effort in his writing. _The Scarlet Letter_, for example, reads as if it had come ‘like a breath of inspiration.’ Such directness and precision of touch must always be a source of wonder and delight, not alone to writers who fumble their sentences but to skilled literary craftsmen as well. In Henry James’s admirable story ‘The Death of the Lion’[41] is a paragraph which suggests Hawthorne’s manner. The regal way in which the famous novelist, Neil Paraday, adds perfect sentence to perfect sentence is altogether like Hawthorne.

Economy of phrase is one of his virtues. In Hawthorne there are no wasted or superfluous sentences, not even a word in excess. Something inexorably logical enters into his work, as in the poetic art. This economy extends to his books as a whole. For stories so rich in ideas, so heavy with suggestion, they are short rather than long. Yet the movement is always leisurely. There is no haste or eagerness. A few strokes of the pen, made with restful deliberation, serve to carry the reader into the very heart of a tragedy. He cannot but admire the superb strength which with so little visible effort could bring him so far.

IV

THE SHORT STORIES

_TWICE-TOLD TALES_, _MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE_, _THE SNOW-IMAGE_

Hawthorne’s real entrance into literature dates from the publication of the _Twice-Told Tales_, a series of harmoniously framed narratives which have maintained their rank unmoved by the capriciousness of popular taste.

The sources are in part colonial history or historical legend and tradition. ‘The Gray Champion’ is an incident of the tyranny of Andros. ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount’ celebrates the madcap revelries of the first settlers at Wollaston. In ‘Endicott and the Red Cross’ Hawthorne records a dramatic incident in the history of his native town, and introduces, by the way, a motive that later was to develop into his masterpiece.

The ‘Legends of the Province House’ (‘Howe’s Masquerade,’ ‘Edward Randolph’s Portrait,’ ‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,’ and ‘Old Esther Dudley’) have their warp of historical truth, but the imaginative element is dominant. ‘The Gentle Boy’ is Hawthorne’s sympathetic tribute to the persecuted sect of the Quakers. ‘Sunday at Home,’ ‘Snow-Flakes,’ ‘Sights from a Steeple,’ ‘Footprints on the Seashore,’ represent a type of literature which former generations enjoyed, and which modern magazine editors would decline with energy and quite perfunctory thanks.

There are stories of horror and psychological mystery. The author of ‘Markheim’ might have chosen a theme like that treated in ‘Wakefield,’ or in ‘The Prophetic Pictures.’ His handling would have been different. We do not gladly suffer an obvious moral in these days. No one would now dare to put ‘A Parable’ for the explanatory title of his narrative, as Hawthorne has done in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ or advise the reader that the experiences of David Swan (if experiences those can be called where a man sleeps and things _do not_ happen to him) argue ‘a superintending Providence.’

In _Mosses from an Old Manse_ Hawthorne’s gain in power is marked. He still ‘moralizes’ his legends; but the force of the conception and the richness of the imagery drive the philosophy into the background. The grim and uncanny humor of which Hawthorne had a masterful command is displayed to the full in this book. No better illustration can be cited than the scene where the old witch Mother Rigby exhorts the scarecrow, she had so cunningly fashioned, to be a man. It is a grotesque, a gruesome, and a mirth-provoking scene.

Hawthorne had brooded long over the superstitious past with which his own history was so singularly linked. Among the fruit of these meditations was the story of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ Like the minister in the fearful narrative of ‘Thrawn Janet,’ Goodman Brown had been in the presence of the powers of evil; but unlike the minister, he no longer believed in virtue.

_Mosses from an Old Manse_ also includes odd conceits such as ‘The Celestial Railroad,’ a new enterprise built from the famous City of Destruction, a ‘populous and flourishing town,’ to the Celestial City. The dreamer in this modern Pilgrim’s Progress takes the journey under the personal conduct of Mr. Smooth-it-away and notes with interest the improvements in methods of transportation since Bunyan’s time. Less ingenious but no less amusing are ‘The Hall of Fantasy,’ ‘The Procession of Life,’ and ‘The Intelligence Office.’ Monsieur de l’Aubépine loved an allegorical meaning.

Between the _Twice-Told Tales_ and the _Mosses_ Hawthorne published a group of children’s stories. _Grandfather’s Chair_ and the two succeeding volumes consist of little narratives of colonial history, in which our national exploits are celebrated in the tone of confident Americanism so much deplored by Professor Goldwin Smith. There are ‘asides’ for grown people, as when Grandfather tells the children that Harvard College was founded to rear up pious and learned ministers, and that old writers called it ‘a school of the prophets.’

‘Is the college a school of the prophets now?’ asked Charley.

‘You must ask some of the recent graduates,’ answered Grandfather.

The _Wonder-Book_ and its sequel, the _Tanglewood Tales_, contain new versions of old classical myths, the Gorgon’s Head, the Minotaur, the Golden Fleece, and nine more. Here the adult reader has a chance to feel the magic of Hawthorne’s art in a form where it seems most tangible but is no less elusive. He will be astonished at the air of reality given these old legends.

The perfect example of his work in this genre (the child’s story) is the initial fantasy of _The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales_. Such complete interweaving of the imaginative and the realistic is little short of marvellous. And yet there are people who say that perfect art cannot subsist in company with a moral. They may be commended to the account of the common-sensible man who in the goodness of his heart brought the odd, glittering, little snow-fairy into the house and put her down in front of the hot stove.

V

THE GREAT ROMANCES

_SCARLET LETTER_, _HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES_, _BLITHEDALE ROMANCE_, _MARBLE FAUN_

In addition to being an engrossing narrative and in every way a supreme illustration of Hawthorne’s art, _The Scarlet Letter_ is a study in will power. Of the four human lives involved in this tragedy, that of Hester Prynne is the most absorbing, as her character is the loftiest. Carried to the place of shame, her dark Oriental beauty irradiates all about her, and she bears herself like a queen. Her punishment is her own, she will ask none to share it. Her sacrifice has been infinite, but it asks nothing in return. She bears with regal patience slight and insult, and that worst punishment of all, the wondering terror of little children, who flee her approach as of an evil thing.

Hawthorne has brought out with infinite skill the dreariness of the years following the public disgrace when Hester has no longer the help of a rebellious pride such as carried her almost exultantly through the first crises of the dungeon and the pillory. With a refinement of art the author adds one last bitter drop to Hester Prynne’s cup of bitterness in the wasting away of her superb beauty. But as the lines of her face hardened and the natural and external graces disappeared, the great soul waxed greater, more capable of love and pity and tenderness. She became a ministering angel whose coming was looked for as if she had indeed been sent from Heaven.

It was a singular fancy of Hawthorne’s to give Hester a child like Pearl, precocious, fitful, enigmatic, a will-o’-the-wisp, more akin to the ‘good people’ of legendary lore than to the offspring of human men and women. This too was a part of Hester’s discipline, that this _un_-human, elf-like creature should have sprung from her, with a power transcending that of other children to mix pain with pleasure in a mother’s life.

Looking at Roger Chillingworth as he appears in his ordinary life, one sees only the wise, benevolent physician, infinitely solicitous for the welfare of his young friend Arthur Dimmesdale. Surprise him when the mask of deep-thoughted benevolence is for the moment laid aside and it is the face of a demon that one beholds.

Without a grain of pity for his victim he probes the minister’s soul. Morbidly eager, he welcomes every sign that makes for his theory of a hidden, a mental rather than a physical sickness. He gloats with malignant joy over the discovery that this spiritually minded youth has inherited a strong animal nature. Here is a deep and resistless undercurrent of passion which has led to certain results. An unflinching and cruel analysis will make clear what those results have been. Suspicion becomes certainty, but proof is still wanting.

For terrible suggestiveness there are but few scenes in American fiction comparable with that where Chillingworth bends over the sleeping minister in his study and puts aside the garment that always closely covered his breast. The poor victim shuddered and slightly stirred. ‘After a brief pause, the physician turned away. But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Thus Satan might have comported himself when a precious human soul is lost to heaven and won into his kingdom. But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!’

Dimmesdale is the deeply pathetic figure in this tragedy of souls. Seven years of hypocrisy might well bring the unhappy man to the pitiable condition in which he is found when the lines of interest in the story draw to a focus. Day by day, month by month, his was a life of lies. No course of action seemed open to the wretched minister which did not involve piling higher the mountain of falsehood. To lie and to scourge himself for lying--this was his whole existence. We praise Hester Prynne’s courage. Not less extraordinary was Dimmesdale’s wonderful display of will power. A weaker man would have confessed at once, or fled, or committed suicide. The minister may not be accused of stubbornly holding to his course from fear. He feared but one thing: the shock to the great cause for which he stood, the shame that the revelation of his guilt would bring upon the church, the loss of his power to do good, the spectacle, for the eyes of mocking unbelievers, of the ‘full-fraught man and best indued’ proved the guiltiest. This were indeed ‘another fall of man.’

Incomparable as _The Scarlet Letter_ undoubtedly is, there are admirers of Hawthorne’s genius who have pronounced _The House of the Seven Gables_ the better story of the two. The judgment may be erroneous, it is at least not eccentric.

In handling the genealogical details of the first chapter, Hawthorne showed a deft touch. The descendants of the proud old Colonel Pyncheon are as clearly defined as if the name and station of each had been enumerated. With no less ease does one follow the fortunes of the humble house of Matthew Maule. This progenitor of an obscure race had been executed for witchcraft. All of his descendants bore the stamp of this event. They were ‘marked out from other men.’ In spite of an exterior of good fellowship, there was a circle about the Maules, and no man had ever stepped foot inside of it. Unfortunate in its early history, this family was never other than unfortunate. It had an inheritance of sombre recollections, which it brooded upon, though unresentfully.

Its life was linked with that of the proud house whose visible mansion was founded on property wrested from the old martyr to superstition. For Colonel Pyncheon had shown acrimonious zeal in the witchcraft persecutions, and unbecoming speed in seizing on the wizard’s little plot of ground with its spring of soft and pleasant water. Inseparable as substance and shadow, wherever there was a Pyncheon there was also a Maule. An endless chain of dark events depended from that crime of witchcraft days. On the scaffold the condemned wizard prophesied concerning his accuser: ‘God will give him blood to drink.’ Men shook their heads when Colonel Pyncheon built the House of the Seven Gables, on the site of Matthew Maule’s hut. They had not long to wait for the fulfilment of the prophecy. The spring became bitter, and on the day when the stately dwelling was first opened to guests Colonel Pyncheon was found dead in his study, with blood-bedabbled ruff and beard. Against this tragedy of old colonial days as a background Hawthorne projects the later story of _The House of the Seven Gables_.

In its simplest aspect the narrative concerns the persecution of an unfortunate and weak representative of the Pyncheon family by a powerful and unscrupulous representative. At intervals through the centuries the spirit of the great Puritan ancestor made its appearance in the flesh, as if the Colonel ‘had been gifted with a sort of intermittent immortality.’ Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon stands as a modern reincarnation of the old persecutor of witches. Clifford, his cousin, is a victim of the law at one of those moments when the law seems to operate almost automatically. Suspected of murder, he might have been cleared had Jaffrey but told what he knew, the real manner of their uncle’s death. This were to disclose certain of his own moral delinquencies, and Jaffrey keeps silent. And thus it happens that, both being in their young manhood, the one is incarcerated and the other enters on a path leading to influence, wealth, and good repute.

To the ‘somber dignity of an inherited curse’ the Pyncheons added yet another dignity in the form of a shadowy claim to an almost princely tract of land in the North. The connecting link, some parchment signed with Indian hieroglyphics, had been lost when the Colonel died; but the poorest of his race felt an accession of pride as he contemplated that possible inheritance. And the richest of modern Pyncheons, the Judge, was not proof against ambitious dreams excited by the same thought.