Part 17

Affecting to believe that Clifford knows where the lost document is hidden, the Judge tries to force himself on his victim, who, made almost an imbecile by long imprisonment, is now, after his release, harbored in the House of the Seven Gables and cared for by his aged sister Hepzibah and his fair young cousin Phœbe. And while the Judge is waiting, watch in hand, for the terror-stricken Clifford to come to him, Death comes instead. Maule’s curse is fulfilled in yet another generation. The suspicion that would have fallen anew on Clifford is averted by Holgrave. But Holgrave, as he chooses to call himself, is the last living representative of the family of Maule the wizard. And it was for one of the persecuted race to save the unhappiest member of the family by which his own had suffered. Holgrave marries Phœbe Pyncheon and the blood of the two families is united.

Holgrave’s sole inheritance from his wizard ancestor, as he laughingly explained, was a knowledge of the hiding-place of the now worthless Indian deed. For this secret a Pyncheon had bartered his daughter’s life and happiness in former years.

The Judge Pyncheon of the story has been pronounced ‘somewhat of a stage villain, a puppet.’ This may possibly be due less to Hawthorne’s handling of the character than to the inherent weakness of the hypocrite as presented in fiction or drama. The patrician old woman turned shop-keeper is so perfect a study that praise of the delineation is almost an impertinence. And there is the great silent but living and breathing House of the Seven Gables, in the creation of which Hawthorne expended the wealth of his powers. It will always be a question whether in the spiritual significance he attaches to or draws from some physical fact this great literary artist does not show his highest power. And many a time one finishes the reading of this particular book with the feeling that the House of the Seven Gables is the real protagonist of the drama.

In respect that it is a beautiful example of Hawthorne’s art _The Blithedale Romance_ is deserving of all the praise lavished upon it; in respect that it is a picture of Brook Farm it is naught. The author himself freely admitted that he chose the socialist community merely as a theatre where the creatures of his brain might ‘play their phantas-magorical antics’ without their being exposed to the rigid test of ‘too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives.’

The antics played are such as we witness daily when human puppets are swayed by various passions of love, jealousy, self-will, pride, humility, the instinct for art, or the instinct for reform. The bearded Hollingsworth, whose ‘dark shaggy face looked really beautiful with its expression of thoughtful benevolence,’ was, without being conscious of it, a brutal egoist, capable of bending all people and all things to the accomplishment of his idea. He illustrates the weakness of strength, as Priscilla, so frail, nervous, and impressionable, illustrates the strength of weakness.

That Hawthorne intended to show in Coverdale the insufficiency of the profession of minor poet to make anything of a man, we shall not pretend; but his distrust of the worth of literature is well known. Coverdale’s failure was no greater than Hollingsworth’s, and he at least never played with hearts.

Zenobia is at once the most human, the most attractive, and the most pathetic figure in the drama. ‘But yet a woman,’ and too much woman, so that her imperial beauty and grace, her wealth, her skill to command, her magnetic charm, and her intellectual gifts were insufficient to save her. No less regal in endowment than was Hester Prynne, she sank under a burden infinitely lighter than Hester’s. Her nature was strong but impulsive, and impulsiveness was Zenobia’s ruin.

Rome is the scene of _The Marble Faun_, the longest of Hawthorne’s romances, and in his opinion the best. The author professed to have seen, in the studio of an American sculptor, Kenyon, an unfinished portrait bust, certain traits of which led him to ask the history of the original. This face, of a beautiful youth, might have been mistaken for a not fortunate attempt to reproduce the roguish countenance of the Faun of Praxiteles. The resemblance was external merely; the beholder presently detected something inscrutable in the eyes, in the whole expression, as if powers of the soul hitherto dormant were awaking, and with the awakening had come anxiety, longing, grief, remorse, in short a knowledge of good through a sudden apprehension of evil.

It was the portrait of a young Count of Monte Beni (known as Donatello), whose family, an ancient one, was believed to have sprung from the union of one of those fabled woodland creatures, half animal, half god, and an earthly maiden. At long intervals the traits defining the origin of the race were accentuated in a member of the family. He was said to be ‘true Monte Beni.’ He lived on the border line between two worlds, fearless and happy, but also unthinking, a creature incapable of doing wrong because his life was free, natural, instinctive. Such was Donatello.

The idea of a creature who should unite the characteristics of the wild and the human fascinated Hawthorne. The charm is elusive, and must be elusive or it is no longer charming. Hawthorne warns us against letting the idea harden in our grasp or grow coarse from handling. For this reason (and not for the sake of petty mystification) Hawthorne will not disclose the one physical trait which would have completed Donatello’s resemblance to the Faun, the pointed, furry ears. The youth himself will jest with his friends on the subject, but no more; the thick brown curls are never brushed aside.

So in Donatello’s attachment to Miriam, the mysterious beauty of the story, there is something animal-like, at once pathetic and fierce. Love does not awaken the intellect, however; the youth remains a child until the wrathful moment when he holds the mad Capuchin, Miriam’s persecutor, over the edge of the precipice, and reads in the girl’s consenting eyes approval of the deed he is about to commit. At this point Donatello’s real life begins.

The crime is far-reaching in its consequences, blighting for weary months the happiness of the gentle Hilda, a terrified eye-witness; but is most sinister in its effect on Donatello, whose dumb agony and remorse Hawthorne has painted with a strong but subdued touch. Perhaps the most striking of the incidents at Monte Beni is that where the wretched Donatello tries to call the wild creatures of the wood to him as he had been used to do in the days of his innocence, and finds his power gone, only some loathsome reptile coming at his bidding.

Hilda is one of the triumphs of Hawthorne’s art. By what necromancy did he contrive to invest a character so ethereal with life and interest? For the type is by no means one that invariably attracts, and the mere symbolism of the shrine, the doves, together with an innocence which carries its own safeguard, might have been used unsuccessfully a thousand times before being wrought by Hawthorne’s subtile power into enduring form.

Kenyon is a proof of the instinct Hawthorne had for avoiding the realistic fact. One would fancy this a character which would take on realism of its own accord, a character which could be depended on to become human and bohemian, to smoke, swear, tell emphatic stories, and yet be gentle and high-minded withal, like Bret Harte’s angel-miners. But Kenyon is almost as shadowy as Hilda.

Miriam with her rich dark beauty (making her in contrast with Hilda as Night to Day) is the one strong human character, capable of infinite pity and infinite devotion, a woman to die for--if the need were, and such need is not uncommon in romances. The shadow of a nameless crime hangs over her, from which, though innocent, she cannot escape. She has warned Donatello of the fatality that attends her. She holds his love in esteem so light as to be almost contempt until the moment when he shows the force to grapple with her enemy; then love flames up in her own heart. For her Donatello stains his hands with blood, suffers agony indescribable, and then ‘comes back to his original self, with an inestimable treasure of improvement won from an experience of pain.’ And as Miriam contemplates him on the day before he gives himself up to justice, she asks whether the story of the fall of man has not been repeated in the romance of Monte Beni.

The deficiencies and excesses of _The Marble Faun_ have been often pointed out. The superabundance of guide-book description which disturbed Sir Leslie Stephen was noted by Hawthorne as a defect and apologized for in the preface. It is astonishing how it fits into place when, after an interval of several years, one comes to re-read the story. _The Marble Faun_ is a magical piece of work, its very enigmas, mysteries, and its inconclusiveness tending to heighten the effect. And it does not in the least detract from the enjoyment that one cannot follow the author to the extent of believing it his best work.

VI

LATEST AND POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS

_OUR OLD HOME_, _NOTE-BOOKS_, _DOLLIVER ROMANCE_

_Our Old Home_ is a volume of twelve chapters on English life and experiences. Acute, frank, sympathetic, modestly phrased, abounding in humor, it may fairly be accounted one of the best of Hawthorne’s works. The English are said to have been disturbed by a number of the comments on their character and manners. If so, they must be as touchy as Americans. _Our Old Home_ contains nothing that should offend, unless indeed it be an offence to speak of one’s neighbor in any terms not those of unmitigated eulogy. Hawthorne noted certain differences between the national types of the two countries and gave an account of them. But of any disposition to laud his own people at the expense of their British cousins, the book contains not a trace.

_Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne_ is the raw material out of which was fashioned such a charming and perfect literary study as _Our Old Home_. It is idle to dispute over the question whether the fragmentary journalizings of an eminent author should or should not be given to the public. They will always be given to the public, and the public will always be grateful for them, even though it has no deeper cause for gratitude than that involved in satisfaction of mere curiosity. At all events, the passion for looking into the work-shop of a great artist cannot be overcome. Perhaps this most trivial form of hero-worship deserves countenance.

The _Note-Books_ (English, Italian, and American) bear the same relation to _Our Old Home_ that a man talking with his most trusted friend bears to that same man when talking with an agreeable chance acquaintance. In the one case he is wholly unguarded, in the other he keeps himself in check even at the moment he seems most frank and expansive.

_The Dolliver Romance_ is one of a group of studies for an elaborate narrative in which Hawthorne proposed to trace the fortunes of an American family back to those of its English forebears. The idea of connecting the obscure New England branch of the house with the proud Old-World descendants by some vague claim on the ancestral estate is almost too common in fiction. But Hawthorne seems to have been drawn towards it by his life in the consulate at Liverpool, where he had continually to check the exuberance of misguided fellow-countrymen who had appropriated, in mind, not a few of the finest estates in England, and only lacked faint encouragement to attempt entering on actual possession.

The idea of the Bloody Footstep was taken from a tradition connected with Smithell’s Hall in Bolton-le-Moors, and Hawthorne went to see what purported to be the mark made in the stone step by the unhappy man about whose mysterious history the romance gathers. The quest and discovery of an elixir of life is in itself a threadbare motive, but could hardly have been commonplace under Hawthorne’s treatment.

He was not to complete his design. The four versions of the story, _The Dolliver Romance_, _The Ancestral Footstep_, _Septimius Felton_, and _Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret_, furnish another glimpse into Hawthorne’s literary studio, though we are warned not to infer that he always worked in the way the existence of these fragments might suggest.

* * * * *

Hawthorne was the most gifted of our American romancers. In a certain sense his field was a narrow one, but the soil was rich, and there was magic in his husbandry. He himself once declared that he never knew what patriotism was until he met an Englishman; that he was not an American, New England was as big a lump of earth as he could hold in his heart. The defect (if indeed it be a defect) was one of the sources of his power. Hawthorne did indeed love New England, but to suppose that he loved it with a blind and uncritical love is wholly to misunderstand both the man and his work. He was the genius of his little world. He knew its poetry and its prose, its mystery, charm, beauty, and its repellent and sordid features. New England will have no profounder interpreter, though it may be that as the superficial characteristics of the people change, his transcripts of life will increasingly take on the qualities of pure romance.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Enlarged edition, 1854.

[39] Published in England under the absurd title of _Transformation_. Hawthorne wrote to Henry Bright: ‘Smith and Elder do take strange liberties with the titles of books. I wanted to call it the _Marble Faun_, but they insisted on _Transformation_ which will lead the reader to expect a sort of pantomime.’

[40] Letter to Horatio Bridge, May 26, 1861.

[41] Henry James: _Terminations_.

XI

_Henry David Thoreau_

REFERENCES:

=R. W. Emerson=: ‘Thoreau’ in the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ August, 1862.

=W. E. Channing=: _Thoreau: the Poet Naturalist_, 1873.

=F. B. Sanborn=: _Thoreau_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1882.

=H. S. Salt=: _Thoreau_, ‘Great Writers,’ 1896.

I

HIS LIFE

Philippe Thoreau, of the parish of Saint Helier in the Isle of Jersey, had a son John who emigrated to America and opened a store on the Long Wharf in Boston. He married Jane Burns, daughter of a well-to-do Scotchman from the neighborhood of Stirling. John’s son John, a lead-pencil maker of Concord, Massachusetts, married Cynthia Dunbar, daughter of the Reverend Asa Dunbar, of Keene, New Hampshire. Of their four children Henry David Thoreau, the author of _Walden_, was the third. He was born at Concord on July 12, 1817.

After his graduation at Harvard in the Class of 1837, Thoreau taught school, learned surveying and the art of making lead-pencils, and began writing and lecturing. The episode in his life which gave him more than a local reputation was his camping out by the shore of Walden Pond. He spent two years and two months there studying how ‘to live deliberately.’ His hut, built by himself, might have seemed bare and cheerless to a victim of civilization. There was no carpet on the floor, no curtain at the window. Every superfluity was stripped off and life ‘driven into a corner’ in the hope of discovering what it was made of. Thoreau sturdily resisted the efforts of friends and neighbors to burden him with trumpery, refusing the gift of a door-mat on the plea that it was ‘best to avoid the beginnings of evil,’ and throwing a paper-weight out of the window ‘because it had to be dusted every day.’

He raised his own vegetables in a patch of ground near by, made his own bread, and spent his leisure time in recording his observations of nature and in writing his first book, _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_. When he was satisfied with this taste of life ‘reduced to its lowest terms,’ he went back to civilization.

_A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ was a failure, as publishers say; meaning that it did not sell. Having published at his own expense, Thoreau was financially embarrassed when seven hundred and fifty copies of an edition of a thousand came back on his hands. He said to a friend: ‘I have added several hundred volumes to my library lately, all of my own composition.’[42] His second venture, _Walden_, was more fortunate. He printed a few articles in the ‘Boston Miscellany,’ ‘Putnam’s Magazine,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ and the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ but at no time could he be said to live by literature.

His income from his lectures must have been small, and apparently he made no effort to obtain engagements. He had an exalted idea of what constitutes a good lecture, and was suspicious of oratory. He told his English acquaintance Cholmondeley that he was from time to time congratulating himself on his ‘general want of success as a lecturer.... I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again.’

When Hawthorne was corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum, he invited Thoreau in behalf of the managers to give them a lecture. The invitation was accepted. The lecture must have had the fatal defect of being ‘interesting,’ for Thoreau was asked to speak before the Lyceum a second time the same winter.

Thoreau was a radical Abolitionist and for six years refused to pay his poll-tax, on the ground that the tax went indirectly to the support of slavery. For this delinquency he was once lodged in the town-jail over night. In 1857 he made the acquaintance of ‘one John Brown’ as a Southern-born president of a Northern college naïvely describes that terrible old man. When two years later news came of the desperate attempt at Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau gave in a church vestry at Concord his impassioned ‘Plea for Captain John Brown,’ which one of his admirers regards as the most significant of his utterances.

Of the twelve volumes forming his collected writings two only were seen by Thoreau in book form. The remaining ten have been made up of reprinted magazine articles or selections from journals and letters. The list is as follows: _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, 1849; _Walden; or, Life in the Woods_, 1854; _Excursions_ (edited by R. W. Emerson and Sophia Thoreau), 1863; _The Maine Woods_, 1864; _Cape Cod_, 1865; _Letters to Various Persons_ [with Poems], 1865; _A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers_, 1866; _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, 1881; _Summer_, 1884; _Winter_, 1888; _Autumn_, 1892; _Miscellanies_, 1894; _Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau_, 1894.

Thoreau ‘travelled widely’ in Concord and made a few trips elsewhere. Aside from his excursions to the Maine woods, the White Mountains, Cape Cod, and Staten Island, he took no long journey until 1861, when he went as far west as Minnesota. He was in ill health then, and a violent cold terminating in pulmonary consumption brought about his death (May 6, 1862). It has been often mentioned as a strange fact that this man who almost symbolized the out-of-door existence, who chanted its praises, and who was unhappy unless he had at least ‘four hours a day in the woods and fields,’ should have died, at the age of forty-five, of exposure to the elements which (according to his whimsical philosophy) were more friendly than man.

II

THOREAU’S CHARACTER

Without posing, Thoreau contrived somehow to gain the reputation of a poseur. Because his nose was more Emersonian than Emerson’s, because he lived for a time at Emerson’s house (where he was beloved by every member of the family), and because he affected the Orphic and seer-like mode of expression, he was called an imitator. Because he was a recluse and a stoic, and because his letters were edited in a way to emphasize his stoicism, he has been thought to lack the human and friendly qualities.

The charge of imitation has been refuted by those who knew him best. ‘Doubtless his growth was stimulated by kindred ideas. This is all that can be granted. Utter independence, strong individuality distinguished him. His one foible was, not subserviency, but combativeness, mainly from mere love of fence when he found a worthy adversary, as his best friends knew almost too well.’[43]

In many ways Thoreau was much like other men. He was a devoted son, a brotherly brother, a helpful neighbor, a genial companion. We have his own word for it that he could out-sit the longest sitter in the village tap-room if there were occasion.

On the other hand, he was not ‘approachable’ in the common meaning of the word. He puzzled many people. He could be angular, stiff, remote, encrusted. Howells saw him in 1860, ‘a quaint stump figure of a man.’[44] He sat on one side of the room, having first placed his visitor in a chair on the other side. It was more difficult to get near him spiritually than physically. He seemed almost unconscious of his caller’s presence.

Emerson edited Thoreau’s letters so as to present ‘a most perfect piece of stoicism.’ It was the side of his friend’s character in which he most rejoiced. The book should be read exactly as Emerson intended it to be read. Later it should be supplemented by the _Familiar Letters_, which brings into relief the affectionate and winning side of Thoreau’s character.

III

THE WRITER

Thoreau was a painstaking student of the art of expression, but never for its own sake, always as a means to an end. One may conclude that it was not mere author’s vanity which led him to resent editorial tampering with his manuscript. He had good reasons for believing that neither Curtis of ‘Putnam’s’ nor Lowell of ‘The Atlantic’ could change his text to advantage. The question was not one of mere nicety of phrase, but of that subtile quality of style due to the inextricable interweaving of the thought and the language in which the thought is expressed.

An out-of-doors writer, Thoreau’s power to produce was in direct ratio of his intercourse with Nature. If shut up in the house he could not write at all. When he walked he stored up literary virtue. He believed that nothing was so good for the man of letters as work with the hands. It cleared the style of ‘palaver and sentimentality.’

The fresh wild beauty of Thoreau’s style (when he is at his best) may be praised without reserve. There is no danger of exaggerating its perfect novelty and attractiveness; the danger is that we may take the hint of these qualities for the reality. Thoreau could be commonplace when he chose.

IV

THE BOOKS

Early in September, 1839, the Thoreau brothers, John and Henry, made a voyage down the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The boat used was of their own building. It was painted blue and green, had wheels by which it could be dragged around the dams, and must have been as ugly as it was useful. _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ records the unadventurous adventures of the two young men both on this and other excursions.