THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
By Frank Preston Stearns
Author Of “The Real And Ideal In Literature,” “Life Of Tintoretto,” “Life Of Bismarck,” “True Republicanism,” “Cambridge Sketches,” Etc.
INSCRIBED
TO
EMILIA MACIEL STEARNS
“In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,—
For the gods see everywhere.”
—Longfellow
“Oh, happy dreams of such a soul have I,
And softly to myself of him I sing,
Whose seraph pride all pride doth overwing;
Who stoops to greatness, matches low with high,
And as in grand equalities of sky,
Stands level with the beggar and the king.”
—Wasson
PREFACE
The simple events of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life have long been before the public. From 1835 onward they may easily be traced in the various Note-books, which have been edited from his diary, and previous to that time we are indebted for them chiefly to the recollections of his two faithful friends, Horatio Bridge and Elizabeth Peabody. These were first systematised and published by George P. Lathrop in 1872, but a more complete and authoritative biography was issued by Julian Hawthorne twelve years later, in which, however, the writer has modestly refrained from expressing an opinion as to the quality of his father’s genius, or from attempting any critical examination of his father’s literary work. It is in order to supply in some measure this deficiency, that the present volume has been written. At the same time, I trust to have given credit where it was due to my predecessors, in the good work of making known the true character of so rare a genius and so exceptional a personality.
The publication of Horatio Bridge’s memoirs and of Elizabeth Manning’s account of the boyhood of Hawthorne have placed before the world much that is new and valuable concerning the earlier portion of Hawthorne’s life, of which previous biographers could not very well reap the advantage. I have made thorough researches in regard to Hawthorne’s American ancestry, but have been able to find no ground for the statements of Conway and Lathrop, that William Hathorne, their first ancestor on this side of the ocean, was directly connected with the Quaker persecution. Some other mistakes, like Hawthorne’s supposed connection with the duel between Cilley and Graves, have also been corrected.
F. P. S.
CONTENTS
[ THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ]
[ CHAPTER I. — SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800 ]
[ CHAPTER II. — BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821 ]
[ CHAPTER III. — BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825. ]
[ CHAPTER IV. — LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835 ]
[ CHAPTER V. — EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839 ]
[ CHAPTER VI. — PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841 ]
[ CHAPTER VII. — HAWTHORNE AS A SOCIALIST: 1841-1842 ]
[ CHAPTER VIII. — CONCORD AND THE OLD MANSE: 1842-1845 ]
[ CHAPTER IX. — “MOSSES PROM AN OLD MANSE”: 1845 ]
[ CHAPTER X. — FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849 ]
[ CHAPTER XI. — PEGASUS IS FREE: 1850-1852 ]
[ CHAPTER XII. — THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE: 1852-1854 ]
[ CHAPTER XIII. — HAWTHORNE IN ENGLAND: 1854-1858 ]
[ CHAPTER XV. — HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858 ]
[ CHAPTER XVI. — “THE MARBLE FAUN”: 1859-1860 ]
[ CHAPTER XVII. — HOMEWARD BOUND: 1860-1862 ]
[ CHAPTER XVIII. — IMMORTALITY ]
THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
CHAPTER I. — SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800
The three earliest settlements on the New England coast were Plymouth, Boston, and Salem; but Boston soon proved its superior advantages to the two others, not only from its more capacious harbor, but also from the convenient waterway which the Charles River afforded to the interior of the Colony. We find that a number of English families, and among them the ancestors of Gen. Joseph Warren and Wendell Phillips, who crossed the ocean in 1640 in the “good ship Arbella,” soon afterward migrated to Watertown on Charles River for the sake of the excellent farming lands which they found there. Salem, however, maintained its ascendency over Plymouth and other neighboring harbors on the coast, and soon grew to be the second city of importance in the Colony during the eighteenth century, when the only sources of wealth were fishing, shipbuilding, and commerce. Salem nourished remarkably. Its leading citizens became wealthy and developed a social aristocracy as cultivated, as well educated, and, it may also be added, as fastidious as that of Boston itself. In this respect it differed widely from the other small cities of New England, and the exclusiveness of its first families was more strongly marked on account of the limited size of the place. Thus it continued down to the middle of the last century, when railroads and the tendency to centralization began to draw away its financial prosperity, and left the city to small manufactures and its traditional respectability.
The finest examples of American eighteenth century architecture are supposed to exist in and about the city of Salem, and they have the advantage, which American architecture lacks so painfully at the present time, of possessing a definite style and character—edifices which are not of a single type, like most of the houses in Fifth Avenue, but which, while differing in many respects, have a certain general resemblance, that places them all in the same category. The small old country churches of Essex County are not distinguished for fine carving or other ornamentation, and still less by the costliness of their material, for they are mostly built of white pine, but they have an indefinable air of pleasantness about them, as if they graced the ground they stand on, and their steeples seem to float in the air above us. If we enter them on a Sunday forenoon—for on week-days they are like a sheepfold without its occupants—we meet with much the same kind of pleasantness in the assemblage there. We do not find the deep religious twilight of past ages, or the noonday glare of a fashionable synagogue, but a neatly attired congregation of weather-beaten farmers and mariners, and their sensible looking wives, with something of the original Puritan hardness in their faces, much ameliorated by the liberalism and free thinking of the past fifty years. Among them too you will see some remarkably pretty young women; and young men like those who dug the trenches on Breed’s Hill in the afternoon of June 16, 1775. There may be veterans in the audience who helped Grant to go to Richmond. Withal there is much of the spirit of the early Christians among them, and virtue enough to save their country in any emergency.
These old churches have mostly disappeared from Salem city and have been replaced by more aristocratic edifices, whose square or octagonal towers are typical of their leading parishioners,—a dignified class, if somewhat haughty and reserved; but they too will soon belong to the past, drawn off to the great social centres in and about Boston. In the midst of Salem there is a triangular common, “with its never-failing elms,” where the boys large and small formerly played cricket—married men too—as they do still on the village greens of good old England, and around this enclosure the successful merchants and navigators of the city built their mansion houses; not half houses like those in the larger cities, but with spacious halls and rooms on either side going up three stories. It is in the gracefully ornamented doorways and the delicate interior wood-work, the carving of wainscots, mantels and cornices, the skilful adaptations of classic forms to a soft and delicate material that the charm of this architecture chiefly consists,—especially in the staircases, with their carved spiral posts and slender railings, rising upward in the centre of the front hall, and turning right and left on the story above. It is said that after the year eighteen hundred the quality of this decoration sensibly declined; it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools no longer exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones would have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the false rococo taste of the eighteenth century.
The Salem sea-captains of old times were among the boldest of our early navigators; sailing among the pirates of the Persian Gulf and trading with the cannibals of Polynesia, and the trophies which they brought home from those strange regions, savage implements of war and domestic use, clubs, spears, boomerangs, various cooking utensils, all carved with infinite pains from stone, ebony and iron-wood, cloth from the bark of the tapa tree, are now deposited in the Peabody Academy, where they form one of the largest collections of the kind extant. Even more interesting is the sword of a sword-fish, pierced through the oak planking of a Salem vessel for six inches or more. No human force could do that even with a spear of the sharpest steel. Was the sword-fish roused to anger when the ship came upon him sleeping in the water; or did he mistake it for a strange species of whale?
There is a court-house on Federal Street, built in Webster’s time, of hard cold granite in the Grecian fashion of the day, not of the white translucent marble with which the Greeks would have built it. Is it the court-house where Webster made his celebrated argument in the White murder case, or was that court-house torn down and a plough run through the ground where it stood, as Webster affirmed that it ought to be? Salem people were curiously reticent in regard to that trial, and fashionable society there did not like Webster the better for having the two Knapps convicted.
Much more valuable than such associations is William Hunt’s full-length portrait of Chief Justice Shaw, which hangs over the judge’s bench in the front court-room. “When I look at your honor I see that you are homely, but when I think of you I know that you are great.” it is this combination of an unprepossessing physique with rare dignity of character which Hunt has represented in what many consider the best of American portraits. It is perhaps too much in the sketchy style of Velasquez, but admirable for all that.
Time has dealt kindly with Salem, in effacing all memorials of the witchcraft persecution, except a picturesque old house at the corner of North and Essex Streets, where there are said to have been preliminary examinations for witchcraft,—a matter which concerns us now but slightly. The youthful associations of a genius are valuable to us on account of the influence which they may be supposed to have had on his early life, but associations which have no determining consequences may as well be neglected. The hill where those poor martyrs to superstition were executed may be easily seen on the left of the city, as you roll in on the train from Boston. It is part of a ridge which rises between the Concord and Charles Rivers and extends to Cape Ann, where it dives into the ocean, to reappear again like a school of krakens, or other marine monsters, in the Isles of Shoals.
New England has not the fertile soil of many sections of the United States, and its racking climate is proverbial, but it is blessed with the two decided advantages of pure water and fine scenery. There is no more beautiful section of its coast than that between Salem Harbor and Salisbury Beach, long stretches of smooth sand alternating with bold rocky promontories. A summer drive from Swampscott to Marblehead reminds one even of the Bay of Naples (without Vesuvius), and the wilder coast of Cape Ann, with its dark pines, red-roofed cottages, and sparkling surf, is quite as delightful. William Hunt went there in the last sad years of his life to paint “sunshine,” as he said; and Whittier has given us poetic touches of the inland scenery in elevated verse:
“Fleecy clouds casting their shadows
Over uplands and meadows;
And country roads winding as roads will,
Here to a ferry, there to a mill.”
Poets arise where there is poetic nourishment, internal and external, for them to feed on; and it is not surprising that a Whittier and a Hawthorne should have been evolved from the environment in which they grew to manhood.
It is a common saying with old Boston families that their ancestors came to America in the “Arbella” with Governor Winthrop, but as a matter of fact there were at least fifteen vessels that brought colonists to Massachusetts in 1630, and I cannot discover that any lists of their passengers have been preserved. The statement that certain persons came over at the same time with Governor Winthrop might soon become a tradition that they came in the same ship with him; but all that we know certainly is that Governor Winthrop landed about the middle of June, 1630, and that his son arrived two weeks later in the “Talbot,” and was drowned July 2, while attempting to cross one of the tide rivers at Salem. Who arrived in the thirteen other vessels that year we know not. Ten years later Sir Richard Saltonstall emigrated to Boston with the Phillips and Warren families in the “Arbella” (or “Arabella”), and there is no telling how much longer she sailed the ocean.
Hawthorne himself states that his ancestors came from Wig Castle in Wigton in Warwickshire, {Footnote: Diary, August 22, 1837.} but no such castle has been discovered, and the only Wigton in England appears to be located in Cumberland. {Footnote: Lathrop’s “Study of Hawthorne,” 46.} He does not tell us where he obtained this information, and it certainly could not have been from authentic documents,—more likely from conversation with an English traveller. Hawthorne never troubled himself much concerning his ancestry, English or American; while he was consul at Liverpool, he had exceptional advantages for investigating the subject, but whatever attempt he made there resulted in nothing. It is only recently that Mr. Henry F. Waters, who spent fifteen years in England searching out the records of old New England families, succeeded in discovering the connecting link between the first American Hawthornes and their relatives in the old country. It was a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds drawn by William Hathorne, of Salem, payable to Robert Hathorne in London, and dated October 19, 1651, which first gave Mr. Waters the clue to his discovery. Robert not only accepted his brother’s draft, but wrote him this simple and business-like but truly affectionate epistle in return:
“GOOD BROTHER: Remember my love to my sister, my brother John and sister, my brother Davenport and sister and the rest of our friends.
“In haste I rest
“Your loving brother,
“From Bray this 1 April, 1653.
“ROBERT HATHORNE.”
From this it appears that Major William Hathorne not only had a brother John, who established himself in Lynn, but a sister Elizabeth, who married Richard Davenport, of Salem. Concerning Robert Hathorne we only know further that he died in 1689; but in the probate records of Berkshire, England, there is a will proved May 2, 1651, of William Hathorne, of Binfield, who left all his lands, buildings and tenements in that county to his son Robert, on condition that Robert should pay to his father’s eldest son, William, one hundred pounds, and to his son John twenty pounds sterling. He also left to another son, Edmund, thirty acres of land in Bray, and there are other legacies; but it cannot be doubted that the hundred pounds mentioned in this will is the same that Major William Hathorne drew for five months later, and that we have identified here the last English ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His wife’s given name was Sarah, but her maiden name still remains unknown. The family resided chiefly at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Park, and evidently were in comfortable circumstances at that time. From William Hathorne, senior, their genealogy has been traced back to John Hathorne (spelled at that time Hothorne), who died in 1520, but little is known of their affairs, or how they sustained themselves during the strenuous vicissitudes of the Reformation. {Footnote: “Hawthorne Centenary at Salem,” 81.}
Emmerton and Waters {Footnote: “English Records about New England Families."} state that William Hathorne came to Massachusetts Bay in 1630, and this is probable enough, though by no means certain, for they give no authority for it. We first hear of him definitely as a freeholder in the settlement of Dorchester in 1634, but his name is not on the list of the first twenty-four Dorchester citizens, dated October 19, 1630. All accounts agree that he moved to Salem in 1636, or the year following, and Nathaniel Hawthorne believed that he came to America at that time. Upham, the historian of Salem witchcraft, who has made the most thorough researches in the archives of old Salem families, says of William Hathorne:
“William Hathorne appears on the church records as early as 1636. He died in June, 1681, seventy-four years of age. No one in our annals fills a larger space. As soldier, commanding important and difficult expeditions, as counsel in cases before the courts, as judge on the bench, and innumerable other positions requiring talent and intelligence, he was constantly called to serve the public. He was distinguished as a public speaker, and is the only person, I believe, of that period, whose reputation as an orator has come down to us. He was an Assistant, that is, in the upper branch of the Legislature, seventeen years. He was a deputy twenty years. When the deputies, who before sat with the assistants, were separated into a distinct body, and the House of Representatives thus came into existence, in 1644, Hathorne was their first Speaker. He occupied the chair, with intermediate services on the floor from time to time, until raised to the other House. He was an inhabitant of Salem Village, having his farm there, and a dwelling-house, in which he resided when his legislative, military, and other official duties permitted. His son John, who succeeded him in all his public honors, also lived on his own farm in the village a great part of the time.” {Footnote: “Salem Witchcraft,” i. 99.}
Evidently he was the most important person in the colony, next to Governor Winthrop, and unequalled by any of his descendants, except Nathaniel Hawthorne, and by him in a wholly different manner; for it is in vain that we seek for traits similar to those of the great romance writer among his ancestors. We can only say that they both possessed exceptional mental ability, and there the comparison ends.
The attempt has been made to connect William Hathorne with the persecution of the Quakers, {Footnote: Conway’s “Life of Hawthorne,” 15.} and it is true that he was a member of the Colonial Assembly during the period of the persecution; it is likely that his vote supported the measures in favor of it, but this is not absolutely certain. We do not learn that he acted at any time in the capacity of sheriff; the most diligent researches in the archives of the State House at Boston have failed to discover any direct connection on the part of William Hathorne with that movement; and the best authorities in regard to the events of that time make no mention of him. {Footnote: Sewel, Hallowell, Ellis.} It was the clergy who aroused public opinion and instigated the prosecutions against both the Quakers and the supposed witches of Salem, and the civil authorities were little more than passive instruments in their hands. Hathorne’s work was essentially a legislative one,—a highly important work in that wild, unsettled country,—to adapt English statutes and legal procedures to new and strange conditions. He was twice Speaker of the House between 1660 and 1671, and as presiding officer he could exert less influence on measures of expediency than any other person present, as he could not argue either for or against them. And yet, after Charles II. had interfered in behalf of the Quakers, William Hathorne wrote an elaborate and rather circuitous letter to the British Ministry, arguing for non-intervention in the affairs of the colony, which might have possessed greater efficacy if he had not signed it with an assumed name. {Footnote: J. Hawthorne’s “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” i. 24.} However strong a Puritan he may have been, William Hathorne evidently had no intention of becoming a martyr to the cause of colonial independence. Yet it may be stated in his favor, and in that of the colonists generally, that the fault was not wholly on one side, for the Quakers evidently sought persecution, and would have it, cost what it might. {Footnote: Hallowell’s “Quaker Invasion of New England."} Much the same may be affirmed of his son John, who had the singular misfortune to be judge in Salem at the time of the witchcraft epidemic. The belief in witchcraft has always had its stronghold among the fogs and gloomy fiords of the North. James I. brought it with him from Scotland to England, and in due course it was transplanted to America. Judge Hathorne appears to have been at the top of affairs at Salem in his time, and it is more than probable that another in his place would have found himself obliged to act as he did. Law is, after all, in exceptional cases little more than a reflex of public opinion. “The common law,” said Webster, “is common-sense,” which simply means the common opinion of the most influential people. Much more to blame than John Hathorne were those infatuated persons who deceived themselves into thinking that the pains of rheumatism, neuralgia, or some similar malady were caused by the malevolent influence of a neighbor against whom they had perhaps long harbored a grudge. They were the true witches and goblins of that epoch, and the only ones, if any, who ought to have been hanged for it.
What never has been reasoned up cannot be reasoned down. It seems incredible in this enlightened era, as the newspapers call it, that any woman should be at once so inhuman and so frivolous as to swear away the life of a fellow-creature upon an idle fancy; and yet, even in regard to this, there were slightly mitigating conditions. Consider only the position of that handful of Europeans in this vast wilderness, as it then was. The forests came down to the sea-shore, and brought with them all the weird fancies, terrors and awful forebodings which the human mind could conjure up. They feared the Indians, the wild beasts, and most of all one another, for society was not yet sufficiently organized to afford that repose and contentment of spirit which they had left behind in the Old World. They had come to America to escape despotism, but they had brought despotism in their own hearts. They could escape from the Stuarts, but there was no escape from human nature.
It is likely that their immediate progenitors would not have carried the witchcraft craze to such an extreme. The emigrating Puritans were a fairly well-educated class of men and women, but their children did not enjoy equal opportunities. The new continent had to be subdued physically and reorganized before any mental growth could be raised there. Levelling the forest was a small matter beside clearing the land of stumps and stones. All hands were obliged to work hard, and there was little opportunity for intellectual development or social culture. As a logical consequence, an era ensued not unlike the dark ages of Europe. But this was essential to the evolution of a new type of man, and for the foundation of American nationality; and it was thus that the various nationalities of Europe arose out of the ruins of the Roman Empire.
The scenes that took place in Judge Hathorne’s court-room have never been equalled since in American jurisprudence. Powerful forces came into play there, and the reports that have been preserved read like scenes from Shakespeare. In the case of Rebecca Nurse, the Judge said to the defendant:
“‘You do know whether you are guilty, and have familiarity with the Devil; and now when you are here present to see such a thing as these testify,—and a black man whispering in your ear, and devils about you,—what do you say to it?’”
To which she replied:
“‘It is all false. I am clear.’ Whereupon Mrs. Pope, one of the witnesses, fell into a grievous fit.” {Footnote: Upham’s “Salem Witchcraft,” ii. 64.}
Alas, poor beleaguered soul! And one may well say, “What imaginations those women had!” Tituba, the West Indian Aztec who appears in this social-religious explosion as the chief and original incendiary,—verily the root of all evil,—gave the following testimony:
“Q. ‘Did you not pinch Elizabeth Hubbard this morning?’
“A. ‘The man brought her to me, and made me pinch her.’
“Q. ‘Why did you go to Thomas Putnam’s last night and hurt his child?’
“A. ‘They pull and haul me, and make me go.’
“Q. ‘And what would they have you do?’
“A. ‘Kill her with a knife.’
“(Lieutenant Fuller and others said at this time, when the child saw these persons, and was tormented by them, that she did complain of a knife,—that they would have her cut her head off with a knife.)
“Q. ‘How did you go?’
“A. ‘We ride upon sticks, and are there presently.’
“Q. ‘Do you go through the trees or over them?’
“A. ‘We see nothing, but are there presently.’
“Q. ‘Why did you not tell your master?’
“A. ‘I was afraid. They said they would cut off my head if I told.’
“Q. ‘Would you not have hurt others, if you could?’
“A. ‘They said they would hurt others, but they could not.’
“Q. ‘What attendants hath Sarah Good?’
“A. ‘A yellow-bird, and she would have given me one.’
“Q. ‘What meat did she give it?’
“A. ‘It did suck her between her fingers.’”.
This might serve as an epilogue to “Macbeth,” and the wonder is that an unlettered Indian should have had the wit to make such apt and subtle replies. It is also noteworthy that these strange proceedings took place after the expulsion of the royal governor, and previous to the provincial government of William III. If Sir Edmund Andros had remained, the tragedy might have been changed into a farce.
After all, it appears that John Hathorne was not a lawyer, for he describes himself in his last will, dated June 27, 1717, as a merchant, and it is quite possible that his legal education was no better than that of the average English squire in Fielding’s time. It is evident, however, from the testimony given above, that he was a strong believer in the supernatural, and here if anywhere we find a relationship between him and his more celebrated descendant. Nathaniel Hawthorne was too clear-sighted to place confidence in the pretended revelations of trance mediums, and he was not in the least superstitious; but he was remarkably fond of reading ghost stories, and would have liked to believe them, if he could have done so in all sincerity. He sometimes felt as if he were a ghost himself, gliding noiselessly in the walks of men, and wondered that the sun should cast a shadow from him. However, we cannot imagine him as seated in jurisdiction at a criminal tribunal. His gentle nature would have recoiled from that, as it might from a serpent.
In the Charter Street burial-ground there is a slate gravestone, artistically carved about its edges, with the name, “Col. John Hathorne Esq.,” upon it. It is somewhat sunken into the earth, and leans forward as if wishing to hide the inscription upon it from the gaze of mankind. The grass about it and the moss upon the stone assist in doing this, although repeatedly cut and cleaned away. It seems as if Nature wished to draw a kind of veil over the memory of the witch’s judge, himself the sorrowful victim of a theocratic oligarchy. The lesson we learn from his errors is, to trust our own hearts and not to believe too fixedly in the doctrines of Church and State. It must be a dull sensibility that can look on this old slate-stone without a feeling of pathos and a larger charity for the errors of human nature.
It is said that one of the convicted witches cursed Judge Hathorne,—himself and his descendants forever; but it is more than likely that they all cursed him bitterly enough, and this curse took effect in a very natural and direct manner. Every extravagant political or social movement is followed by a corresponding reaction, even if the movement be on the whole a salutary one, and retribution is sure to fall in one shape or another on the leaders of it. After this time the Hathornes ceased to be conspicuous in Salem affairs. The family was not in favor, and the avenues of prosperity were closed to them, as commonly happens in such cases. Neither does the family appear to have multiplied and extended itself like most of the old New England families, who can now count from a dozen to twenty branches in various places. Of John Hathorne’s three sons only one appears to have left children. The name has wholly disappeared from among Salem families, and thus in a manner has the witch’s curse been fulfilled.
Joseph Hathorne, the son of the Judge, was mostly a farmer, and that is all that we now know of him. His son Daniel, however, showed a more adventurous spirit, becoming a shipmaster quite early in life. It has also been intimated that he was something of a smuggler, which was no great discredit to him in a time when the unfair and even prohibitory measures of the British Parliament in regard to American commerce made smuggling a practical necessity. Even as the captain of a trading vessel, however, Daniel Hathorne was not likely to advance the social interests of his family. It is significant that he should have left the central portion of Salem, where his ancestors had lived, and have built a house for himself close to the city wharves,—a house well built and commodious enough, but not in a fashionable location.
But Daniel Hathorne had the advantage over fashionable society in Salem, in being a thorough patriot. Boston and Salem were the two strongholds of Toryism during the war for Independence, which was natural enough, as their wealthy citizens were in close mercantile relations with English houses, and sent their children to England to be educated. Daniel Hathorne, however, as soon as hostilities had begun, fitted out his bark as a privateer, and spent the following six years in preying upon British merchantmen. How successful he was in this line of business we have not been informed, but he certainly did not grow rich by it; although he is credited with one engagement with the enemy, in which his ship came off with honor, though perhaps not with a decisive victory. This exploit was celebrated in a rude ballad of the time, which has been preserved in “Griswold’s Curiosities of American Literature,” and has at least the merit of plain unvarnished language. {Footnote: Also in Lathrop’s “Hawthorne."}
There is a miniature portrait of Daniel Hathorne, such as was common in Copley’s time, still in the possession of the Hawthorne family, and it represents him as rather a bullet-headed man, with a bright, open, cheery face, a broad English chin and strongly marked brows,—an excellent physiognomy for a sea-captain. He appears besides to have had light brown or sandy hair, a ruddy complexion and bright blue eyes; but we cannot determine how truthful the miniature may be in respect to coloring. At all events, he was of a very different appearance from Nathaniel Hawthorne, and if he resembled his grandson in any external respect, it was in his large eyes and their overshadowing brows. He has not the look of a dare-devil. One might suppose that he was a person of rather an obstinate disposition, but it is always difficult to draw the line between obstinacy and determination.
A similar miniature of his son Nathaniel, born in 1775, and who died at Surinam in his thirty-fourth year, gives us the impression of a person somewhat like his father, and also somewhat like his son Nathaniel. He has a long face instead of a round one, and his features are more delicate and refined than those of the bold Daniel. The expression is gentle, dreamy and pensive, and unless the portrait belies him, he could not have been the stern, domineering captain that he has been represented. He had rather a slender figure, and was probably much more like his mother, who was a Miss Phelps, than the race of Judge Hathorne. He may have been a reticent man, but never a bold one, and we find in him a new departure. His face is more amiable and attractive than his father’s, but not so strong. In 1799 he was married to Miss Elizabeth Clarke Manning, the daughter of Richard Manning, and then only nineteen years of age. She appears to have been an exceptionally sensitive and rather shy young woman—such as would be likely to attract the attention of a chivalrous young mariner—but with fine traits of intellect and character.
The maternal ancestry of a distinguished man is quite as important as the paternal, but in the present instance it is much more difficult to obtain information concerning it. The increasing fame of Hawthorne has been like a calcium-light, illuminating for the past fifty years everything to which that name attaches, and leaving the Manning family in a shadow so much the deeper. All we can learn of them now is, that they were descended from Richard Manning, of Dartmouth in Devonshire, England, whose son Thomas emigrated to Salem with his widowed mother in 1679, but afterwards removed to Ipswich, ten miles to the north, whence the family has since extended itself far and wide,—the Reverend Jacob M. Manning, of the Old South Church, the fearless champion of practical anti-slaveryism, having been among them. It appears that Thomas’s grandson Richard started in life as a blacksmith, which was no strange thing in those primitive times; but, being a thrifty and enterprising man, he lived to establish a line of stage-coaches between Salem and Boston, and this continued in the possession of his family until it was superseded by the Eastern Railway. After this catastrophe, Robert Manning, the son of Richard and brother of Mrs. Nathaniel Hathorne, became noted as a fruit-grower (a business in which Essex County people have always taken an active interest), and was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The Mannings were always respected in Salem, although they never came to affluent circumstances, nor did they own a house about the city common. Robert Manning, Jr., was Secretary of the Horticultural Society in Boston for a long term of years, a pleasant, kindly man, with an aspect of general culture. Hawthorne’s maternal grandmother was Miriam Lord, of Ipswich, and his paternal grandmother was Rachel Phelps, of Salem. His father was only thirty-three when he died at Surinam.
In regard to the family name, there are at present Hawthornes and Hathornes in England, and although the two names may have been identical originally, they have long since become as distinct as Smith and Smythe. I have discovered only two instances in which the first William Hathorne wrote his own name, and in the various documents at the State House in which it appears written by others, it is variously spelled Hathorn, Hathorne, Hawthorn, Haythorne, and Harthorne,—from which we can only conclude that the a was pronounced broadly. It was not until the reign of Queen Anne, when books first became cheap and popular, that there was any decided spelling of either proper or common names. Then the printers took the matter into their own hands and made witch-work enough of it. The word “sovereign,” for instance, which is derived from the old French souvrain, and which Milton spelled “sovran,” they tortured into its present form,—much as the clerks of Massachusetts Colony tortured the name of William Hathorne. This, however, was spelled Hathorne oftener than in other ways, and it was so spelled in the two signatures above referred to, one of which was attached as witness to a deed for the settlement of the boundary between Lynn and Salem, {Footnote: Also in Lathrop’s “Hawthorne."} and the other to a report of the commissioners for the investigation of the French vessels coming to Salem and Boston in 1651, the two other commissioners being Samuel Bradstreet and David Denison. {Footnote: Massachusetts Archives, x. 171.}The name was undoubtedly Hathorne, and so it continued with one or two slight variations during the eighteenth century down to the time of Nathaniel Hathorne, Jr., who entered and graduated at Bowdoin College under that name, but who soon afterward changed it to Hawthorne, for reasons that have never been explained.
All cognomens would seem to have been derived originally from some personal peculiarity, although it is no longer possible to trace this back to its source, which probably lies far away in the Dark Ages,—the formative period of languages and of families. Sometimes, however, we meet with individuals whose peculiarities suggest the origin of their names: a tall, slender, long-necked man named Crane; or a timid, retiring student named Leverett; or an over-confident, supercilious person called Godkin In the name of Hawthorne also we may imagine a curious significance: “When the may is on the thorn,” says Tennyson. The English country people call the flowering of the hawthorn “the may.” It is a beautiful tree when in full bloom. How sweet-scented and delicately colored are its blossoms! But it seems to say to us, “Do not come too close to me.”
CHAPTER II. — BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821
Salem treasures the memory of Hawthorne, and preserves everything tangible relating to him. The house in which he was born, No. 27 Union Street, is in much the same style and probably of the same age as the Old Manse at Concord, but somewhat smaller, with only a single window on either side of the doorway—five windows in all on the front, one large chimney in the centre, and the roof not exactly a gambrel, for the true gambrel has a curve first inward and then outward, but something like it. A modest, cosy and rather picturesque dwelling, which if placed on a green knoll with a few trees about it might become a subject for a sketching class. It did not belong to Hawthorne’s father, after all, but to the widow of the bold Daniel, It was the cradle of genius, and is now a shrine for many pilgrims. Long may it survive, so that our grandchildren may gaze upon it.
Here Nathaniel Hawthorne first saw daylight one hundred years ago {Footnote: 1804.} on the Fourth of July, as if to make a protest against Chauvinistic patriotism; here his mother sat at the window to see her husband’s bark sail out of the harbor on his last voyage; and here she watched day after day for its return, only to bring a life-long sorrow with it. The life of a sea-captain’s wife is always a half-widowhood, but Mrs. Hathorne was left at twenty-eight with three small children, including a daughter, Elizabeth, older than Nathaniel, and another, Louisa, the youngest. The shadow of a heavy misfortune had come upon them, and from this shadow they never wholly escaped.
Lowell criticised a letter which John Brown wrote concerning his boyhood to Henry L. Stearns, as the finest bit of autobiography of the nineteenth century.{Footnote: North American Review, April 1860.} It is in fact almost the only literature of the kind that we possess. A frequent difficulty that parents find in dealing with their children is, that they have wholly forgotten the sensations and impressions of their own childhood. The instructor cannot place himself in the position of the pupil. A naturalist will spend years with a microscope studying the development of a plant from the seed, but no one has ever applied a similar process to the budding of genius or even of ordinary intellect. We have the autobiography of one of the greatest geniuses, written in the calm and stillness of old age, when youthful memories come back to us involuntarily; yet he barely lifts the veil from his own childhood, and has much more to say of external events and older people than of himself and his young companions. How valuable is the story of George Washington and his hatchet, hackneyed as it has become! What do we know of the boyhood of Franklin, Webster, Seward and Longfellow? Nothing, or next to nothing.
{Illustration: WINDOW OF THIS CHAMBER}
Goethe says that the admirable woman is she who, when her husband dies, becomes a father to his children; but in the case of Hawthorne’s mother, this did not happen to be necessary. Her brother, Robert Manning, a thrifty and fairly prosperous young man, immediately took Mrs. Hathorne and her three children into his house on Herbert Street, and made it essentially a home for them afterward. To the fatherless boy he was more than his own father, away from home ten months of the year, ever could have been; and though young Nathaniel must have missed that tenderness of feeling which a man can only entertain toward his own child, there was no lack of kindness or consideration on Robert Manning’s part, to either the boy or his sisters.
It was Mrs. Hathorne who chiefly suffered from this change of domicile. She would seem to have been always on good terms with her brother’s wife, and on the whole they formed a remarkably harmonious family,—at least we hear nothing to the contrary,—but she was no longer mistress of her own household. She had her daughters to instruct, and to train up in domestic ways, and she could be helpful in various matters, large and small; but the mental occupation which comes from the oversight and direction of household affairs, and which might have served to divert her mind from sorrowful memories, was now gone from her. Her widowhood separated her from the outside world and from all society, excepting a few devoted friends, {Footnote: Wide Awake, xxxiii. 502.} so that under these conditions it is not surprising that her life became continually more secluded and reserved. It is probable that her temperament was very similar to her son’s; but the impression which has gone forth, that she indulged her melancholy to an excess, is by no means a just one. The circumstances of her case should be taken into consideration.
Rebecca Manning says:
“I remember aunt Hawthorne as busy about the house, attending to various matters. Her cooking was excellent, and she was noted for a certain kind of sauce, which nobody else knew how to make. We always enjoyed going to see her when we were children, for she took great pains to please us and to give us nice things to eat. Her daughter Elizabeth resembled her in that respect. In old letters and in the journal of another aunt, which has come into our possession, we read of her going about making visits, taking drives, and sometimes going on a journey. In later years she was not well, and I do not remember that she ever came here, but her friends always received a cordial welcome when they visited her.”
This refers to a late period of Madam Hathorne’s life, and if she absented herself from the table, as Elizabeth Peabody states, {Footnote: Lathrop’s “Study of Hawthorne."} there was good reason for it.
Hawthorne himself has left no word concerning his mother, of favorable or unfavorable import, but it seems probable that he owed his genius to her, if he can be said to have owed it to any of his ancestors. In after life he affirmed that his sister Elizabeth, who appears to have been her mother over again, could have written as well as he did, and although we have no palpable evidence of this—and the letter which she wrote Elizabeth Peabody does not indicate it,—we are willing to take his word for it. With the shyness and proud reserve which he inherited from his mother, there also came that exquisite refinement and feminine grace of style which forms the chief charm of his writing. The same refinement of feeling is noticeable in the letters of other members of the Manning family. Where his imagination came from, it would be useless to speculate; but there is no good art without delicacy.
Doctor Nathaniel Peabody lived near the house on Herbert Street, and his daughter Elizabeth (who afterward became a woman of prodigious learning) soon made acquaintance with the Hathorne children. She remembers the boy Nathaniel jumping about his uncle’s yard, and this is the first picture that we have of him. When we consider what a beautiful boy he must have been, with his wavy brown hair, large wistful eyes and vigorous figure, without doubt he was a pleasure to look upon. We do not hear of him again until November 10, 1813, when he injured his foot in some unknown manner while at play, and was made lame by it more or less for the three years succeeding. After being laid up for a month, he wrote this pathetic little letter to his uncle, Robert Manning, then in Maine, which I have punctuated properly so that the excellence of its composition may appeal more plainly to the reader.
“SALEM, Thursday, December, 1813.
“DEAR UNCLE:
“I hope you are well, and I hope Richard is too. My foot is no better. Louisa has got so well that she has begun to go to school, but she did not go this forenoon because it snowed. Mama is going to send for Doctor Kitridge to-day, when William Cross comes home at 12 o’clock, and maybe he will do some good, for Doctor Barstow has not, and I don’t know as Doctor Kitridge will. It is about 4 weeks yesterday since I have been to school, and I don’t know but it will be 4 weeks longer before I go again. I have been out of the office two or three times and have set down on the step of the door, and once I hopped out into the street. Yesterday I went out in the office and had 4 cakes. Hannah carried me out once, but not then. Elizabeth and Louisa send their love to you. I hope you will write to me soon, but I have nothing more to write; so good-bye, dear Uncle.
“Your affectionate Nephew,
“NATHANIEL HATHORNE.”
{Footnote: Elizabeth Manning in Wide Awake, Nov. 1891.}
This is not so precocious as Mozart’s musical compositions at the same age, but how could the boy Hawthorne have given a clearer account of himself and his situation at the time, without one word of complaint? It is worth noting also that his prediction in regard to Doctor Kitridge proved to be correct and even more.
It is evident that neither of his doctors treated him in a physio-logical manner. Kitridge was a water-cure physician, and his method of treatment deserves to be recorded for its novelty. He directed Nathaniel to project his naked foot out of a sitting-room window, while he poured cold water on it from the story above. This, however, does not appear to have helped the case, and the infirmity continued so long that it was generally feared that his lameness would be permanent.
Horatio Bridge considered this a fortunate accident for Nathaniel, since it prevented him from being spoiled by his female relatives, as there is always danger that an only son with two or more sisters will be spoiled. But it was an advantage to the boy in a different manner from this. He learned from it the lesson of suffering and endurance, which we all have to learn sooner or later; and it compelled him, perhaps too young, to seek the comfort of life from internal sources. There were excellent books in the house,—Shakespeare and Milton, of course, but also Pope’s “Iliad,” Thomson’s “Seasons,” the “Spectator,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the “Faerie Queene,” and the time had now come when these would be serviceable to him. He was not the only boy that has enjoyed Shakespeare at the age of ten, but that he should have found interest in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” is somewhat exceptional. Even among professed littérateurs there are few that read that long allegory, and still fewer who enjoy it; and yet Miss Manning assures us that Hawthorne would muse over it for hours. Its influence may be perceptible in some of his shorter stories, but “Pilgrim’s Progress” evidently had an effect upon him; and so had Scott’s novels, as we may judge from the first romance that he published.
At the age of twelve years and seven months he composed a short poem, so perfect in form and mature in judgment that it is difficult to believe that so young a person could have written it. Not so poetic as it is philosophical, it is valuable as indicating that the boy had already formed a moral axis for himself,—a life principle from which he never afterward deviated; and it is given herewith: {Footnote: A facsimile of the original can be found in Wide Awake, November, 1891.}
“MODERATE VIEWS.
“With passions unruffled, untainted by pride,
By reason my life let me square;
The wants of my nature are cheaply supplied,
And the rest are but folly and care.
How vainly through infinite trouble and strife,
The many their labours employ,
Since all, that is truly delightful in life,
Is what all if they please may enjoy.
“NATHANIEL HATHORNE.
“SALEM, February 13, 1817.”
He wrote this with the greatest nicety, framing it in broad black lines, and ornamenting the capitals in a manner that recalls the decoration of John Hathorne’s gravestone. He composed a number of poems between his thirteenth and seventeenth years, quite as good as those of Longfellow at the same age; but after he entered Bowdoin College he dropped the practice altogether and never resumed it, although one would suppose that Longfellow’s example would have stimulated him to better efforts. Neither does he appear to have tried his hand in writing tales, as boys who have no thought of literary distinction frequently do. During the years of his lameness he sometimes invented extemporaneous stories, which invariably commenced with a voyage to some foreign country, from which his hero never returned. This shows how continually his father’s fate was in his mind, although he said nothing of it.
Robert Manning’s interest in the stage-company afforded the boy fine opportunities for free rides, and he probably also frequented the stables; although neither as youth nor as man did he take much interest in driving or riding. He was more fond of playing upon the wharves, a good healthy place,—and watching the great ships sailing forth to far-off lands, and returning with their strange cargoes,—enough to stimulate any boy’s imagination, if he has it in him. It is likely that if Nathaniel’s father had lived, he would also have followed a seafaring life, and would never have become useful to the world in the way that he did.
Somewhere about the close of the eighteenth century, Richard Manning, the father of Mrs. Hathorne, purchased a large tract of land in Cumberland County, Maine, between Lake Sebago and the town of Casco; and in 1813 Robert Manning built a house near the lake, in the township of Raymond, and his brother Richard, who had become much of an invalid, went to live there, partly for his health and partly to keep an oversight on the property. In 1817 Mrs. Hathorne also went there, taking her children with her, and remaining, with some intermissions, until 1822. Meanwhile the Mannings sold some thousands of acres of land, although not, as we may suppose, at very good prices, and the name of Elizabeth Hathorne was repeatedly attached to the deeds of conveyance. The house that Robert built was the plainest sort of structure, of only two stories, and with no appearance of having been painted; but the farmers in the vicinity criticised it as “Manning’s folly,”—exactly why, does not appear clearly, unless they foresaw what actually happened, that the house could be neither sold nor rented after the Mannings had left it. For many years, it served as a meeting-house,—one could not call it a church,—and now it has become a Hawthorne museum, the town of Raymond very laudably keeping it in repair.
Although none of the events in the early life of Hawthorne ought to be considered positive misfortunes, as they all contributed to make him what he was, yet upon general principles it is much to be regretted that he should have passed the best years of his boyhood in this out-of-the-way place. His good uncle supplied him with a boat and a gun, and he enjoyed the small shooting, fishing, sailing and skating that the place afforded; but in later years he wrote to Bridge, “It was at Sebago that I learned my cursed habit of solitude,” and this pursued him through life like an evil genius, placing him continually at a disadvantage with his fellow-men. It has been supposed that this mode of life assisted in developing his individuality, but quite as strong individualities have been developed in the midst of large cities. “Speech is more refreshing than light.”
When will parents learn wisdom in regard to their children? A conscientious, tender-hearted boy will be sent to a rough country school, to be scoffed at and maltreated there, before he is twelve years old; while another of a coarser and harder nature will be kept at home, to be petted and pampered until all the vigor and manliness are sapped out of him. Parents who prefer to live in a modest, humble manner, in order that their children may have better advantages, deserve the highest commendation, but in this respect good instruction is less important than favorable associations. From fourteen to twenty-one is the formative period of character, and the influences which may be brought to bear on the growing mind are of the highest importance. Lake Sebago served as an excellent gymnasium for young Hawthorne, and may have helped to develop his sense of the beautiful, but he found few companions there, and those not of the most suitable kind. He was exceedingly fond of skating—so much so that when the ice was smooth he sometimes remained on the lake far into the night. This we can envy him, for skating is the poetry of motion.
The captain of the “Hawthorne,” which plies back and forth across the lake in summer, regularly points out to his passengers the house where the Hathornes lived. It is easily seen from the steamer,—a severely plain, unpainted building, in appearance much like the Manning house on Herbert Street. Nearly in line with it a great cliff-like rock juts out from the centre of the lake, on which the Indians centuries ago etched and painted great warlike figures, whose significance is now known to no one. It is said that Hawthorne frequently sailed or rowed to Indian Rock, and to a sort of grotto there which was large enough for his boat to enter. Both the rock and the Manning house are now difficult of access. Longfellow wrote a pretty descriptive poem of a voyage on Sebago, and it is remarkable how he has made use of every feature of the landscape, every incident of the excursion, to fill his verses. The lake has much the shape of an hour-glass, the northern and southern portions being connected by a winding strait, so crooked that it requires the constant effort of the pilot to prevent the little steamer from running aground. There used to be fine fishing in it,—large perch, bass, and a species of fresh-water salmon often weighing from six to eight pounds.
Strangely enough, one of Hawthorne’s acquaintances on the shores of Sebago was a mulatto boy named William Symmes, the son of a Virginia slave, foisted by his father upon a Maine sea-captain named Britton, who lived in the half-wilderness around Raymond. Symmes afterwards became a sailor, and continued in that vocation until the Civil War, when he went to live in Alexandria, Va. In 1870 he published in the Portland Transcript what pretended to be a series of extracts from a diary which young Hawthorne had kept while at Raymond, and which was found there, after the departure of the Manning family, by a man named Small, while moving a load of furniture which had been sold to another party. Small preserved it until 1864, and then made a present of it to Symmes.
Doubts have been cast on the genuineness of this diary, as was natural enough under the circumstances; for the original manuscript was never produced by Symmes, who died the following year, and no one knows what has become of it. It may also be asked, why should Small have disposed so readily of this manuscript to Symmes after preserving it sedulously for more than forty years? Why did he not return it to its rightful owner; or, if he felt ashamed of his original abstraction, why did not Symmes restore it to the Hawthorne family after Hawthorne’s death, when every newspaper in the country was celebrating Hawthorne’s genius? It also might have occurred to one of them that such property would have a marketable value, and could be disposed of at a high price to some collector of literary curiosities; but Symmes did not even ask to be remunerated for the portion that he contributed to the Portland Transcript. Neither did he harbor the slightest ill feeling toward Hawthorne, whom he claimed to have met several times in the course of his wanderings,—once at Salem, and again at Liverpool,—and was always treated by him with exceptional kindness and civility.
The only answer that can be made to these queries is, that men in Symmes’s position in life do not act according to any method that can be previously calculated. In a case like the present, there could be no predicting it; and it is possible that this mulatto valued the diary above all price, as a souvenir of the one white man who had ever been kind and good to him. Who knows what a heart there may have been in William Symmes?
The internal evidence of this diary is so strongly in its favor as to be almost conclusive. Lathrop, who made a special study of it, says:
“The fabrication of the journal by a person possessed of some literary skill and familiar with the localities mentioned, at dates so long ago as 1816 to 1819, might not be an impossible feat, but it is an extremely improbable one.”
To which it might be added, that it could be only a Hawthorne that could accomplish such a fabrication. Few things in literature are more difficult than to make a boy talk like a boy, and the tone of this Sebago journal is not only boyish, but sweet and pleasant to the ear, such as we might imagine the talk of the youthful Hawthorne. Not only this, but there is a gradated improvement of intelligence in the course of it,—rather too much so for entire credibility. It is quite possible that there is more of it than Hawthorne ever wrote, but that does not prevent us from having faith in the larger portion of it. The purity of its diction, the nice adaptation of each word to its purpose, and the accuracy of detail are much in its favor; besides which, the personal reflections in it are exactly like Hawthorne. The published portion of the diary in Mr. Pickard’s book makes about fifty rather small pages, but no dates are given except at the close, and that is August, 1818; and as Hawthorne went to Sebago for the first time the preceding year, we may presume that this note-book represents a winter and summer vacation, during which he would seem to have enjoyed himself in a healthy boyish fashion. We have only space for a few extracts from this publication, which serve both to exemplify Hawthorne’s mode of life at Raymond and to illustrate the preceding statement concerning the book.
The first observation in the diary is quoted by Lathrop, and has a decidedly youthful tone.
“Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that flies from one to the other over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be miserable cowards to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet seen one turn to defend himself.”
Kingbirds are the knights-errant of the feathered tribes. They never attack another bird unless it is three times their own size; but when a few years older, the boy Hawthorne would probably have noticed that the kingbirds’ powers of flight are so superior that all other birds are practically at their mercy. This fixes the date of the entry in the early summer of 1817, for kingbirds are not belligerent except during the nesting season. Somewhat later in the year he writes:
“Went yesterday in a sail-boat on the Great Pond with Mr. Peter White, of Windham. He sailed up here from White’s Bridge to see Captain Dingley, and invited Joseph Dingley and Mr. Ring to take a boat-ride out to the Dingley Islands and to the Images. He was also kind enough to say that I might go, with my mother’s consent, which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father, she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water. It is strange that this beautiful body of water is called a ‘pond.’ The geography tells of many in Scotland and Ireland, not near so large, that are called ‘Lakes.’”
Notice his objection to bad nomenclature, and his school-boy argument against it. In his account of this excursion he says further:
“After we got ashore, Mr. White allowed me to fire his long gun at a mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not sure that I saw it at the time the gun went off, but believe rather that I was watching for the noise that I was about to make.
“Mr. Ring said that with practice I could be a gunner, and that now, with a very heavy charge, he thought I could kill a horse at eight paces!”
Here or nowhere do we recognize the budding of Hawthorne’s genius. This clear introspective analysis is the foundation of all true mental power, and Hawthorne might have become a Platonic philosopher, if he had not preferred to be a story-teller.
These sports came to an end in the autumn when he was sent to study with the Reverend Caleb Bradley, a somewhat eccentric graduate of Harvard, who resided at Stroudwater, Maine, and with whom he remained during the winter. {Footnote: S. T. Pickard’s “Hawthorne’s First Diary."}He refers to this period of tuition in the short story of “The Vision of the Fountain,” and whether or no any such vision appeared to him, we can fairly believe that the tale was suggested by some pretty school-girl who made an impression on him, only to disappear in a tantalizing manner. It is to be presumed that he returned to his mother at Raymond, for Christmas; and at that time he heard a story of how an Otisfield man named Henry Turner had killed three hibernating bears which he discovered in a cave near Moose Pond, not a difficult feat when one comes upon them in that torpid condition. This would place the killing of the bears at about the first of December, which would be probable enough, and the fact itself has been substantiated by Samuel Pickard. The next succeeding entry relates to the drowning of a boy while swimming, which could only have happened the following June. Mrs. Hathorne was greatly alarmed, and objected to Nathaniel’s going in bathing with the other boys. He did not like the restriction, but writes that he shall obey his mother.
There is a ghost story in the diary, quite original, and told with an air of excellent credibility; and also a short anthropomorphic romance concerning a badly treated horse, full of genuine pathos and kindly sympathy,—more sympathetic, in fact, than Hawthorne’s later stories, in which he is sometimes almost too reserved and unemotional:
“‘Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?’ ‘Good morning, youngster,’ said he, just as plain as a horse can speak, and then said, ‘I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no breakfast and stand here tied by the head while they are grinding the corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the store, and then drag him and the meal up the Ben Ham hill, and home, and am now so weak that I can hardly stand. Oh, dear, I am in a bad way,’ and the old creature cried,—I almost cried myself.”
The only difficulty in believing this diary to be genuine is the question: If Hawthorne could write with such perspicuity at fourteen, why are there no evidences of it during his college years? But it sometimes happens so.
We cannot refrain from quoting one more extract from the last entry in the Sebago diary, so beautifully tender and considerate as it is of his mother’s position toward her only son. He had been invited by a party of their neighbors to go on an all-day excursion, and though his mother grants his request to be allowed to join them, he feels the reluctance with which she does so and he writes:
“She said ‘Yes,’ but I was almost sorry, knowing that my day’s pleasure would cost her one of anxiety. However, I gathered up my hooks and lines, with some white salted pork for bait, and with a fabulous number of biscuit, split in the middle, the insides well buttered, then skilfully put together again, and all stowed in sister’s large work-bag, and slung over my shoulder, I started, making a wager with Enoch White, as we walked down to the boat, as to which could catch the largest number of fish.” {Footnote: Appendix A.}
This is the only entry that is dated (August, 1818), and as it was on this same occasion that the black ducks were shot, it must have been on one of the last days of August. We may presume that Nathaniel returned to his studies at Stroudwater the following month, for we do not hear of him again at Raymond—or in Salem, either—until March 24, when he writes to his uncle, Robert Manning, who has evidently just returned from Raymond to Salem, and speaks of expecting to go to Portland with a Mr. Linch for the day. On May 16, 1819, he writes to his uncle Robert again:
“The grass and trees are green, the fences finished and the garden planted. Two of the goats are on the island and the other kept for the milk. I have shot a partridge and a hen-hawk and caught eighteen large trout {probably Sebago salmon}. I am sorry that my uncle intends sending me to school again, for my mother can hardly spare me.”
From which it is easy to infer that he had not attended school very regularly of late, and Uncle Robert would seem to have concluded that it would be better to have his fine nephew where he could personally supervise his goings and comings. Accordingly, on July 26 we find Nathaniel attending school in Salem,—a most unusual season for it,—and although his mother remained at Raymond two years longer, he was not permitted to return there again, except possibly for short periods.
Emerson once pointed out to me on Sudbury Street, Boston, an extremely old man with long white locks and the face of a devoted scholar, advancing toward us with slow and cautious steps. “That,” said he, “is Doctor Worcester, the lexicographer.” Hawthorne’s early education remains much of a mystery. In 1819 he complains in a letter to his mother that he has to go to a cheap school,—a good indication that he did not intend to trust to fortune for his future welfare; soon after this we hear that dictionary Worcester is his chief instructor. He could not have found a more amiable or painstaking pedagogue; nor is it likely that the fine qualities of his teacher were ever better appreciated. Hawthorne himself says nothing of this, for it was not his way to express admiration for man or woman, but we can believe that he felt the same affection for the doctor that well-behaved boys commonly do for their old masters. It was from Worcester that he derived his excellent knowledge of Latin, the single study of which he was fond; and it is his preference for words derived from the Latin which gives grace and flexibility to Hawthorne’s style, as the force and severity of Emerson’s style come from his partiality for Saxon words. During his last year at school, Hawthorne took private lessons of a Salem lawyer, Benjamin Oliver, and perhaps studied with him altogether at the finish.
Hawthorne’s life had been so irregular for years that it is creditable to him that he should have succeeded in entering college at all. We hear of him at Sebago in winter and at Salem in July. He writes to his Uncle Robert to look out for the shot-gun which he left in a closet at Sebago, and which has a rather heavy charge of powder in it. He appears to have found as little companionship in Salem as he did in that wilderness,—the natural effect of such a life. He may have been acquainted with half the boys in Salem, but he did not make any warm friends among them. His sister Louisa, who was a more vivacious person than Elizabeth, was his chief companion and comfort. Seated at the window with her on summer evenings, he elaborated the plan of an imaginary society, a club of two, called the “Pin Society,” to which all fees, assessments and fines were paid in pins,—then made by hand and much more expensive than now. He constituted himself its secretary, and wrote imaginary reports of its proceedings, in which Louisa is frequently fined for absence from meetings. We do not hear of their going to parties or dances with other children.
In August, 1820, he started an imaginary newspaper called the Spectator, which he wrote himself with some help from Louisa, and of which there was only one copy of each number. He continued this through five successive issues, and we trace in its pages the commencement of Hawthorne’s peculiar humor,—too quiet and gentle to make us laugh, but with a penetrating tinge of pathos. Take for instance the following:
“There is no situation in life more irksome than that of an editor who is obliged to find amusement for his Readers, from a head which is too often (as is the present predicament with our own) filled with emptiness. Since commencing this paper, we have received no communication of any kind, so that the whole weight of the business devolves upon our own shoulders, a load far too great for them to bear. We hope the Public will reflect on these grievances.”
This is true fiction, and Nathaniel was not the first or the last editor to whom the statement has applied. His difficulties are imaginary, but he realizes what they might be in reality.
In another number he says:
“We know of no news, either domestic or foreign, and we hope our readers will excuse our not inserting any. The law which prohibits paying debts when a person has no money will apply in this case.”
Then he makes this quiet hit against the people of Maine for having separated themselves and their territory from Massachusetts:
“By a gentleman in the state of Maine, we learn that a famine is seriously apprehended owing to the want of rain. Potatoes could not be procured in some places. When children break their leading strings, and run away from their Parent, (as Maine has done) they may expect sometimes to suffer hunger.” {Footnote: Wide Awake, xxxiii. 512.}
Of his religious instruction we hear nothing; but church-going in New England during the first forty years of the nineteenth century was wellnigh universal, and it makes little difference now to which of the various forms of Calvinistic worship the Manning family subscribed. That young Hawthorne was seriously impressed in this way is evident from the following ode, which he may have composed as early as his fifteenth year:
“Oh, I have roamed in rapture wild
Where the majestic rocks are piled
In lonely, stern, magnificence around
The troubled ocean’s steadfast bound;
And I have seen the storms arise
And darkness veil from mortal eyes
The Heavens that shine so fair and bright,
And all was solemn, silent night.
Then I have seen the storm disperse,
And Mercy hush the whirlwind fierce,
And all my soul in transport owned
There is a God, in Heaven enthroned.”
There is more of a rhetorical flourish than of serious religious feeling in this; but genuine piety is hardly to be expected, and not greatly to be desired, in a boy of that age. It represents the desire to be religious, and to express something, he knows not what.
Nathaniel Hawthorne had already decided on his vocation in life before he entered Bowdoin College,—a decision which he afterwards adhered to with inflexible determination, in spite of the most discouraging obstacles. In a memorable letter to his mother, written March 13, 1821, he says:
“I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend my vacations with you. Yet four years of the best part of my life is a great deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I shall not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as tranquil as—a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one-half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then, seems to be ‘Hobson’s choice’; but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And it would weigh very hardly on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient ‘ad infernum,’ which, being interpreted, is ‘to the realms below.’ Oh that I was rich enough to live without profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my hand is very author-like.” {Footnote: Conway, 24.}
Such were the Ides of March for Hawthorne. It was no boyish ambition for public distinction, nor a vain grasping at the laurel wreath, but a calmly considered and clear-sighted judgment.
CHAPTER III. — BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825.
The life of man is not like a game of chess, in which the two players start upon equal terms and can deliberate sufficiently over every move; but more like whist, in which the cards we hold represent our fortunes at the beginning, but the result of the game depends also on the skill with which we play it. Life also resembles whist in this, that we are obliged to follow suit in a general way to those who happen to have the lead.
Why Hawthorne should have entered Bowdoin College instead of Harvard has not been explained, nor is it easily explained. The standard of scholarship maintained at Harvard and Yale has always been higher than that at what Doctor Holmes designated as the “freshwater colleges,” and this may have proved an unfavorable difference to the mind of a young man who was not greatly inclined to his studies; but Harvard College is only eighteen miles from Salem, and he could have returned to his home once a week if he had chosen to do so, and this is a decided moral and social advantage to a young man in those risky years. If Hawthorne had entered Harvard in the next class to Emerson, he could not well have escaped the latter’s attention, and would have come in contact with other vigorous and stimulating minds; but it is of little use to speculate on what might have been.
Boys are encouraged to study for college by accounts of the rare enjoyment of university life, but they commonly find the first term of Freshman year both dismal and discouraging. Their class is a medley of strangers, their studies are a dry routine, and if they are not hazed by the Sophomores, they are at least treated by them with haughtiness and contempt. It is still summer when they arrive, but the leaves soon fall from the trees, and their spirits fall with them.
Hawthorne may have felt this more acutely than any other member of his class, and in addition to the prevailing sense of discomfort he was seized early in November with that disgusting malady, the measles, which boys usually go through with before they are old enough to realize how disagreeable it is. It appears to have been a light attack, however, and in three weeks he was able to attend recitations again. He made no complaint of it, only writing to his uncle for ten dollars with which to pay the doctor. He likes his chum, Mason, of Portsmouth, and does not find his studies so arduous as at Salem before entering. Neither are the college laws so strict as he anticipated.
In the following May he received the present of his first watch, presumably from Uncle Robert, and he writes to his mother, who is still at Sebago, that he is mightily pleased with it, and that it enables him “to cut a great dash” at college. His letters to his relatives are not brilliant, but they indicate a healthful and contented mind.
We will now consider some of the distinguished personages who were Hawthorne’s friends and associates during these four years of his apprenticeship to actual life; and there were rare characters among them.
In the same coach in which Hawthorne left Portland for Brunswick, in the summer of 1821, were Franklin Pierce and Jonathan Cilley. {Footnote: Bridge’s Memoir of Hawthorne, 3.} Two men seated together in a modern railway-carriage will often become better acquainted in three hours than they might as next-door neighbors in three years; and this was still more likely to happen in the old days of coach journeys, when the very tedium of the occasion served as an inducement to frank and friendly conversation. Pierce was the right man to bring Hawthorne out of his hard shell of Sebago seclusion. He had already been one year at Bowdoin, and at that time there was not the same caste feeling between Sophomores and Freshmen—or at least very little of it—that has since arisen in American colleges. He was amiable and kindly, and possessed the rare gift of personal magnetism. Nature sometimes endows men and women with this quality in lieu of all other advantages, and such would seem to have been the case with Franklin Pierce. He was not much above the average in intellect, and, as Hawthorne afterward confessed, not particularly attractive in appearance; with a stiff military neck, features strong but small, and opaque gray eyes,—a rather unimpressive face, and one hardly capable of a decided expression. Yet with such abilities as he had, aided by personal magnetism and the lack of conspicuous faults, he became United States Senator at the age of thirty-five, and President fifteen years later. The best we can say of him is, that he was always Hawthorne’s friend. From the first day that they met he became Hawthorne’s patron and protector—so far as he may have required the latter. There must have been some fine quality in the man which is not easily discernible from his outward acts; a narrow-minded man, but of a refined nature.
Jonathan Cilley was an abler man than Pierce, and a bold party-leader, but not so attractive personally. He always remained Hawthorne’s friend, but the latter saw little of him and rarely heard from him after they had graduated. The one letter of his which has been published gives the impression of an impulsive, rough-and-tumble sort of person, always ready to take a hand in whatever might turn up.
On the same day, Horatio Bridge, who lived at Augusta, was coming down the Kennebec River to Brunswick. Hawthorne did not make his acquaintance until some weeks later, but he proved to be the best friend of them all, and Hawthorne’s most constant companion during the four years they remained together. Pierce, Cilley and Bridge were all born politicians, and it was this class of men with whom it would seem that Hawthorne naturally assimilated.
On the same day, or the one previous, another boy set out from Portland for Brunswick, only fourteen years old, named Henry W. Longfellow,—a name that is now known to thousands who never heard of Franklin Pierce. Would it have made a difference in the warp and woof of Hawthorne’s life, if he had happened to ride that day in the same coach with Longfellow? Who can tell? Was there any one in the breadth of the land with whom he might have felt an equal sympathy, with whom he could have matured a more enduring fellowship? It might have been a friendship like that of Beaumont and Fletcher, or, better still, like that of Goethe and Schiller,—but it was not written in the book of Fate. Longfellow also had tried his hand on the Sebago region, and was fond of the woods and of a gun; but he was too precocious to adapt himself easily to persons of his own age, or even somewhat older. He had no sooner arrived at Bowdoin than he became the associate and favorite of the professors. In this way he missed altogether the storm-and-stress period of youthful life, which is a useful experience of its kind; and if we notice in his poetry a certain lack, the absence of a close contact with reality,—as if he looked at his subject through a glass casement,—this may be assigned as the reason for it.
{Illustration: HORATIO BRIDGE. FROM THE PORTRAIT BY EASTMAN JOHNSON}
During the four years they went back and forth to their instruction together, Hawthorne and Longfellow never became cordially acquainted. They also belonged to rival societies. There were only two principal societies at Bowdoin, which continued through the college course—the Peucinian and the Athenæan, and the difference between them might be described by the words “citified” and “countrified,” without taking either of those terms in an objectionable sense. Pierce was already a leading character in the Athenæan, and was soon followed by Cilley, Bridge and Hawthorne. The Peucinian suffered from the disadvantage of having members of the college faculty on its active list, and this must have given a rather constrained and academic character to its meetings. There was much more of the true college spirit and classmate feeling in the Athenæan.
Horatio Bridge is our single authority in regard to Bowdoin College at this time, and his off-hand sketches of Hawthorne, Pierce and Longfellow are invaluable. Never has such a group of distinguished young men been gathered together at an American college. He says of Hawthorne:
“Hawthorne was a slender lad, having a massive head, with dark, brilliant, and most expressive eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion of dark hair. For his appearance at that time the inquirers must rely wholly upon the testimony of friends; for, I think, no portrait of him as a lad is extant. On one occasion, in our senior years, the class wished to have their profiles cut in silhouette by a wandering artist of the scissors, and interchanged by all the thirty-eight. Hawthorne disapproved the proposed plan, and steadily refused to go into the Class Golgotha, as he styled the dismal collection. I joined him in this freak, and so our places were left vacant. I now regret the whim, since even a moderately correct outline of his features as a youth would, at this day, be interesting.
“Hawthorne’s figure was somewhat singular, owing to his carrying his head a little on one side; but his walk was square and firm, and his manner self-respecting and reserved. A fashionable boy of the present day might have seen something to amuse him in the new student’s appearance; but had he indicated this he would have rued it, for Hawthorne’s clear appreciation of the social proprieties and his great physical courage would have made it as unsafe to treat him with discourtesy then as at any later time.
“Though quiet and most amiable, he had great pluck and determination. I remember that in one of our convivial meetings we had the laugh upon him for some cause, an occurrence so rare that the bantering was carried too far. After bearing it awhile, Hawthorne singled out the one among us who had the reputation of being the best pugilist, and in a few words quietly told him that he would not permit the rallying to go farther. His bearing was so resolute, and there was so much of danger in his eye, that no one afterward alluded to the offensive subject in his presence.” {Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 5.}
Horatio Bridge is a veracious witness, but we have to consider that he was nearly ninety years of age at the time his memoirs were given to the public. It is difficult to imagine Hawthorne as a slender youth, for his whole figure was in keeping with the structure of his head. It is more likely that he had a spare figure. Persons of a lively imagination have always been apt to hold their heads on one side, but not commonly while they are walking. It is for this reason that phrenologists have supposed that the organ of ideality is located on the side of the head,—if there really is any such organ.
Bridge says of Longfellow precisely what one might expect:
“He had decided personal beauty and most attractive manners. He was frank, courteous, and affable, while morally he was proof against the temptations that beset lads on first leaving the salutary restraints of home. He was diligent, conscientious, and most attentive to all his college duties, whether in the recitation-room, the lecture-hall, or the chapel. The word ‘student’ best expresses his literary habit, and in his intercourse with all he was conspicuously the gentleman.”
In addition to those already mentioned, James W. Bradbury of Portland, afterwards United States Senator, and the Reverend Dr. George B. Cheever, the vigorous anti-slavery preacher, were members of this class. Three others, Cilley, Benson and Sawtelle, were afterward members of the United States House of Representatives. Surely there must have been quite a fermentation of youthful intellect at Bowdoin between 1821 and 1825.
Franklin Pierce was so deeply interested in military affairs that it was a pity he should not have had a West Point cadetship. He was captain of the college militia company, in which Hawthorne and Bridge drilled and marched; a healthy and profitable exercise, and better than a gymnasium, if rather monotonous. Pierce was the popular hero and magnus Apollo of his class, as distinguished foot-ball players are now; but just at this time he was neglecting his studies so badly that at the close of his second year he found himself at the very foot of the rank list. The fact became known through the college, and Pierce was so chagrined that he concluded to withdraw from Bowdoin altogether, and it was only by the urgent persuasion of his friends that he was induced to continue his course. “If I remain, however,” he said, “you will witness a change in me.” For months together he burned midnight oil in order to recover lost ground. During his last two years at college, he only missed two recitations, both for sufficient reasons. His conduct was unexceptionable, he incurred no deductions, and finally graduated third in his class. It is an uncommon character that can play fast-and-loose with itself in this manner. The boy Franklin had departed, and Pierce the man had taken his place. {Footnote: Professor Packard’s “History of Bowdoin College."} Horatio Bridge gives a rather more idealized portrait of him than he does of Hawthorne. He says:
“In person Pierce was slender, of medium height, with fair complexion and light hair, erect, with a military bearing, active, and always bright and cheerful. In character he was impulsive, not rash; generous, not lavish; chivalric, courteous, manly, and warm-hearted,—and he was one of the most popular students in the whole college.”
The instruction in American colleges during the first half of the nineteenth century was excellent for Greek, Latin and mathematics,—always the groundwork of a good education,—but the modern languages were indifferently taught by French and German exiles, and other subjects were treated still more indifferently. The two noble studies of history and philosophy were presented to the young aspiring soul in narrow, prejudiced text-books, which have long since been consigned to that bourn from which no literary work ever returns. As already stated, Hawthorne’s best study was Latin, and in that he acquired good proficiency; but he was slow in mathematics, as artistic minds usually are, and in his other studies he only exerted himself sufficiently to pass his examinations in a creditable manner. We may presume that he took the juice and left the rind; which was the sensible thing to do. As might be expected, his themes and forensics were beautifully written, although the arguments in them were not always logical; but it is significant that he never could be prevailed upon to make a declamation. There have been sensitive men, like Sumner and George W. Curtis, who were not at all afraid of the platform, but they were not, like Hawthorne, bashful men. The college faculty would seem to have realized the true difficulty in his case, and treated him in a kindly and lenient manner. No doubt he suffered enough in his own mind on account of this deficiency, and it may have occurred to him what difficulties he might have to encounter in after-life by reason of it. If a student at college cannot bring himself to make a declamation, how can the mature man face an audience in a lecture-room, command a ship, or administer any important office? Such thoughts must have caused Hawthorne no slight anxiety, at that sensitive age.
The out-door sports of the students did not attract Hawthorne greatly. He was a fast runner and a good leaper, but seemed to dislike violent exercise. He much preferred walking in the woods with a single companion, or by the banks of the great river on which Brunswick is situated. There were fine trout-brooks in the neighborhood, and formerly the woods of Maine were traversed by vast flocks of passenger pigeons, which with the large gray squirrels afforded excellent shooting. How skilful Hawthorne became with his fowling-piece we have not been informed, but it is evident from passages in “Fanshawe” that he learned something of trout-fishing; and on the whole he enjoyed advantages at Bowdoin which the present student at Harvard or Oxford might well envy, him. The fish we catch in the streams and lakes of Maine only represent a portion of our enjoyment there. Horatio Bridge says:
“There was one favorite spot in a little ravine, where a copious spring of clear, cold water gushed out from the sandy bank, and joined the larger stream. This was the Paradise Spring, which deserves much more than its present celebrity for the absolute purity of its waters. Of late years the brook has been better known as a favorite haunt of the great romance writer, and it is now often called the Hawthorne Brook.
“Another locality, above the bridge, afforded an occasional stroll through the fields and by the river. There, in spring, we used to linger for hours to watch the giant pine-logs (for there were giants in those days) from the far-off forests, floating by hundreds in the stream until they came to the falls; then, balancing for a moment on the brink, they plunged into the foamy pool below.”
At the lower end of the town there was an old weather-beaten cot, where the railroad track now runs, inhabited by a lone woman nearly as old and time-worn as the dwelling itself. She pretended to be a fortune-teller, and to her Hawthorne and Bridge sometimes had recourse, to lift the veil of their future prospects; which she always succeeded in doing to their good entertainment. The old crone knew her business well, especially the art of giving sufficient variety of detail to the same old story. For a nine-pence she would predict a beautiful blond wife for Hawthorne, and an equally handsome dark-complexioned one for Bridge. Riches were of course thrown in by the handful; and Bridge remarks that although these never came to pass they both happened to be blessed with excellent wives. It is not surprising that the handsome Hawthorne and his tall, elegant-looking companion should have stimulated the old woman’s imagination in a favorable manner. The small coin they gave her may have been the least happiness that their visits brought into her life.
Close by the college grounds there was a miserable little inn, which went by the name of Ward’s Tavern, and thither the more uproarious class of students consorted at intervals for the purpose of keeping care at a distance, and singing, “Landlord, fill your flowing bowls.” Strange to say, the reserved, thoughtful Hawthorne was often to be found among them. It does not seem quite consistent with the gravity of his customary demeanor, but youth has its period of reckless ebullition. Punch-bowl societies exist in all our colleges, and many who disapprove of them join them for the sake of popularity. Hawthorne may have been as grave and well-behaved on these occasions as he was customarily. We have Bridge’s word for this; and the matter would hardly be worth mentioning if it had not led to more serious proceedings. May 29, 1822, President Allen wrote to Mrs. Hathorne at Salem that her son had been fined fifty cents for gaming at cards. {Footnote: In 1864 a Harvard student was fined three dollars for writing on the woodwork with a lead-pencil—erased with a sponge.} Certainly this was not very severe treatment; and if the Bowdoin faculty, being on the spot, concluded that young Hawthorne had only injured his moral nature fifty cents’ worth, I think we shall do well to agree with their decision. At the same time Nathaniel wrote his mother the following manly letter:
“BRUNSWICK, May 30th, 1822.
“MY DEAR MOTHER:—I hope you have safely arrived in Salem. I have nothing particular to inform you of, except that all the card-players in college have been found out, and my unfortunate self among the number. One has been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself, have been fined fifty cents each. I believe the President intends to write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case, you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have the honor of being suspended. When the President asked what we played for, I thought it proper to inform him it was fifty cents, although it happened to be a quart of wine; but if I had told him of that, he would probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no untruth in the case, as the wine cost fifty cents. I have not played at all this term. I have not drank any kind of spirits or wine this term, and shall not till the last week.” {Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 118.}
The clemency with which the college authorities treated Bridge and Hawthorne is a plain indication of the confidence which they felt in them, and speaks more highly for their respective characters than if they had been patterns of good behavior. Some of the others were not so fortunate. One young man, whose name is properly withheld from us, was expelled from the institution. He was supposed to have been the ringleader in this dubious business, but Hawthorne manfully resented the supposition that any one could have influenced him, or did influence him, in this matter. It is more likely that he was influenced by the spirit of investigation, and wished to know what the sensation was like from personal experience.
“Letters home” from college are not commonly interesting to the general public, and those which Hawthorne wrote to his mother and sisters do not differ essentially from such as other young men write under similar conditions. At the age when it is so difficult to decide whether we have become men or are still boys, all our actions partake of a similar uncertainty, and the result of what we do and say is likely to be a rather confused impression. Though college students appear different enough to one another, they all seem alike to the outside world.
University towns always contain more or less cultivated society, and young Hawthorne might have been welcome to the best of it if he had felt so inclined; but he was as shy of the fair sex as Goldsmith’s bashful lover. M. D. Conway, who knew him, doubts if he ever became well acquainted with a young lady until his engagement to Miss Peabody. Considering this, it seems as if Jonathan Cilley made rather a hazardous wager with Hawthorne, before leaving Bowdoin,—a wager of a cask of Madeira, that Hawthorne would become a married man within the next twelve years. Papers to that effect were duly signed by the respective parties, sealed, and delivered for safe-keeping to Horatio Bridge, who preserved them faithfully until the appointed time arrived. Under ordinary conditions the chances of this bet were in Cilley’s favor, for in those primitive days it was much easier for educated young men to obtain a start in life than it is at present, and early marriages were in consequence much more common.{Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 47. The contract was dated November 14, 1824.}
The year 1824 was a serious one in American politics. The Republican-Democratic party, having become omnipotent, broke to pieces of its own weight. The eastern interest nominated John Quincy Adams for the Presidency; the western interest nominated Henry Clay; and the frontier interest nominated Andrew Jackson. Unfortunately the frontier interest included all the unsettled and continually shifting elements in the country, so that Jackson had nearly as strong a support in the East as in the West. Bridge says, “We were all enthusiastic supporters of old Hickory.” It was evidently Pierce who led them into this, and although it proved in a material sense for Hawthorne’s benefit, it separated him permanently from the class to which he properly belonged—the enlightened men of culture of his time; and Cilley’s tragical fate can be directly traced to it. The Jackson movement was in its essence a revolt against civility,—and it seems as if Hawthorne and Bridge might have recognized this.
Hawthorne was well liked in his class in spite of his reserved manners, but he held no class offices that we hear of, except a place on a committee of the Athenæan Society with Franklin Pierce. Class days and class suppers, so prolific of small honors, were not introduced at Bowdoin until some years later. He graduated eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight, but this was not sufficient to give him a part in the commencement exercises. {Footnote: The President informed him that his rank in the class would have entitled him to a part if it had not been for his neglect of declamations; and Hawthorne wrote to his mother that he was perfectly satisfied with this, for it saved him the mortification of appearing in public.} Accordingly Hawthorne, Bridge, and others who were in a like predicament, organized a mock Commencement celebration at Ward’s Tavern, where they elected officers of a comical sort, such as boatswain and sea-cook, and concluded their celebration in a manner suitable to the occasion.
Hawthorne was commonly known among his classmates, as “Hath,” and his friends addressed him in this manner long after he had graduated. His degree was made out in the name of Nathaniel Hathorne, above which he subsequently wrote “Hawthorne,” in bold letters.
The question may well be raised here, how it happened that America produced so many men of remarkable intellect with such slight opportunities for education in former times, while our greatly improved universities have not graduated an orator like Webster, a poet like Longfellow, or a prose-writer equal to Hawthorne during the past forty years. There have been few enough who have risen above mediocrity.
It is the same, more or less, all over the civilized world. We have entered into a mechanical age, which is natural enough considering the rapid advances of science and the numerous mechanical inventions, but which is decidedly unfavorable to the development of art and literature. Everything now goes by machinery, from Harvard University to Ohio politics and the gigantic United States Steel Company; and every man has to find his place in some machine or other, or he is thrown out of line. Individual effort, as well as independence of thought and action, is everywhere frowned upon; but without freedom of thought and action there can be no great individualities, which is the same as saying that there can be no poets like Longfellow, or writers like Hawthorne and Emerson. Spontaneity is the life of the true artist, and in a mechanical civilization there can be neither spontaneity nor the poetic material which is essential to artistic work of a high order. There can be no great orators, for masses of men are no longer influenced by oratory, but by newspapers. Genius is like a plant of slow growth, which requires sunshine and Mother Earth to nourish it, not chemicals and electric lights.
CHAPTER IV. — LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835
During the War of the American Revolution, the officers of the French fleet, which was stationed at Newport, invented a game of cards, called “Boston,” of which one peculiarity was, that under certain conditions, whoever held the lowest hand would win the count. This was called “Little Misery,” and this was the kind of hand which Nathaniel Hawthorne had to play for fifteen years after leaving Bowdoin College. Only his indomitable will could have carried him through it.
A college graduate who lacks the means to study a profession, and who has no influential relative to make a place for him in the world, finds himself in a most discouraging position. The only thing that his education has fitted him to do is, to teach school, and he may not be adapted to this, on account of some personal peculiarity. There was, and I suppose is still, a prejudice among mercantile men against college graduates, as a class of proud, indolent, neglectful persons, very difficult to instruct. Undoubtedly there are many such, but the innocent have to suffer with the guilty. It is natural that a man who has not had a liberal education should object to employing a subordinate who knows Latin and Greek. Whether Hawthorne’s Uncle Robert, who had thus far proved to be his guardian genius, would have educated him for a profession, we have no means of knowing. This would mean of course a partial support for years afterward, and it is quite possible that Mr. Manning considered his duties to his own children paramount to it. What he did for Nathaniel may have been the best he could, to give him the position of book-keeper for the stage-company. This was of course Pegasus in harness (or rather at the hitching-post), but it is excellent experience for every young man; although the compensation in Hawthorne’s case was small and there could be no expectation of future advancement.
In this dilemma he decided to do the one thing for which Nature intended him,—to become a writer of fiction,—and he held fast to this determination in the face of most discouraging obstacles. He composed a series of short stories,—echoes of his academic years,—which he proposed to publish under the title of Wordsworth’s popular poem, “We Are Seven.” One of these is said to have been based on the witchcraft delusion, and it is a pity that it should not have been preserved, but their feminine titles afford no indication of their character. He carried them to a publisher, who received him politely and promised to examine them, but one month passed after another without Hawthorne’s hearing from him, so that he concluded at length to make inquiries. {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 124.} The publisher confessed that he had not even undertaken to read them, and Nathaniel carried them back, with a sinking heart, to his little chamber in the house on Herbert Street,—where he may have had melancholy thoughts enough for the next few weeks.
Youth, however, soon outgrows its chagrins. In less than two years Hawthorne was prepared to enter the literary lists, equipped with a novelette, called “Fanshawe”; but here again he was destined to meet with a rebuff. After tendering it to a number of publishers without encouragement, he concluded to take the risk of publishing it himself. This only cost him a few hundred dollars, but the result was unsatisfactory, and he afterward destroyed all the copies that he could regain possession of.
Hawthorne’s genius was of slow development. He was only twenty-four when he published this rather immature work, and it might have been better if he had waited longer. It was to him what the “Sorrows of Werther” was to Goethe, but while the “Sorrows of Werther” made Goethe famous in many countries, “Fanshawe” fell still-born. The latter was not more imitative of Scott than the “Sorrows of Werther” is of Rousseau, and now that we consider it in the cool critical light of the twentieth century, we cannot but wonder that the “Sorrows of Werther” ever produced such enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to see why “Fanshawe” should not have proved a success. It lacks the grace and dignity of Hawthorne’s mature style, but it has an ingenious plot, a lively action, and is written in sufficiently good English. One would suppose that its faults would have helped to make it popular, for portions of it are so exciting as to border closely on the sensational. It may be affirmed that when a novel becomes so exciting that we wish to turn over the pages and anticipate the conclusion, either the action of the story is too heated or its incidents are too highly colored. The introduction of pirates in a work of fiction is decidely sensational, from Walter Scott downward, and, though Hawthorne never fell into this error, he approaches closely to it in “Fanshawe.” There is some dark secret between the two villains of the piece, which he leaves to the reader as an exercise for the imagination. This is a characteristic of all his longer stories. There is an unknown quantity, an insoluble point, in them, which tantalizes the reader.
What we especially feel in “Fanshawe” is the author’s lack of social experience. His heroine at times behaves in a truly feminine manner, and at others her performances make us shiver. Her leaving her guardian’s house at midnight to go off with an unknown man, whom her maidenly instinct should have taught her to distrust, even if Fanshawe had not warned her against him, might have been characteristic of the Middle Ages, but is certainly not of modern life. Bowdoin College evidently served Hawthorne as a background to his plot, although removed some distance into the country, and it is likely that the portrait of the kindly professor might have been recognized there. Ward’s Tavern serves for the public-house where the various characters congregate, and there is a high rocky ledge in the woods, or what used to be woods at Brunswick, where the students often tried their skill in climbing, and which Hawthorne has idealized into the cliff where the would-be abductor met his timely fate. The trout-brook where Bridge and Hawthorne used to fish is also introduced.
Fanshawe himself seems like a house of which only two sides have been built. There are such persons, and it is no wonder if they prove to be short-lived. Yet the scene in which he makes his noble renunciation of the woman who is devoted to him, purely from a sense of gratitude, is finely and tenderly drawn, and worthy of Hawthorne in his best years. The story was republished after its author’s death, and fully deserves its position in his works.
It was about this time (1827) that Nathaniel Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. No reason has ever been assigned for his doing so, and he had no legal right to do it without an act of the Legislature, but he took a revolutionary right, and as his family and fellow-citizens acquiesced in this, it became an established fact. His living relatives in the Manning family are unable to explain his reason for it. It may have been for the sake of euphony, or he may have had a fanciful notion, that such a change would break the spell which seemed to be dragging his family down with him. Conway’s theory that it was intended to serve him as an incognito is quite untenable. His name first appears with a w in the Bowdoin Triennial Catalogue of 1828.
There are very few data existing as to Hawthorne’s life during his first ten years of manhood, but it must have been a hard, dreary period for him. The Manning children, Robert, Elizabeth and Rebecca, were now growing up, and must have been a source of entertainment in their way, and his sister Louisa was always a comfort; but Horatio Bridge, who made a number of flying visits to him, states that he never saw the elder sister, even at table,—a fact from which we may draw our own conclusions. Hawthorne had no friends at this time, except his college associates, and they were all at a distance,—Pierce and Cilley both flourishing young lawyers, one at Concord, New Hampshire, and the other at Thomaston, Maine,—while Longfellow was teaching modern languages at Bowdoin. He had no lady friends to brighten his evenings for him, and if he went into society, it was only to be stared at for his personal beauty, like a jaguar in a menagerie. He had no fund of the small conversation which serves like oil to make the social machinery run smoothly. Like all deep natures, he found it difficult to adapt himself to minds of a different calibre. Salem people noticed this, and his apparent lack of an object in life,—for he maintained a profound secrecy in regard to his literary efforts,—and concluded that he was an indolent young man without any faculty for business, and would never come to good in this world. No doubt elderly females admonished him for neglecting his opportunities, and small wits buzzed about him as they have about many another under similar conditions. It was Hans Andersen’s story of the ugly duck that proved to be a swan.
No wonder that Hawthorne betook himself to the solitude of his own chamber, and consoled himself like the philosopher who said, “When I am alone, then I am least alone.” He had an internal life with which only his most intimate friends were acquainted, and he could people his room with forms from his own fancy, much more real to him than the palpable ignota whom he passed in the street. Beautiful visions came to him, instead of sermonizing ladies, patronizing money-changers, aggressive upstarts, grimacing wiseacres, and that large class of amiable, well-meaning persons that makes up the bulk of society. We should not be surprised if angels sometimes came to hover round him, for to the pure in heart heaven descends upon earth.
There is a passage in Hawthorne’s diary under date of October 4, 1840, which has often been quoted; but it will have to be quoted again, for it cannot be read too often, and no biography of him would be adequate without it. He says:
“Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber where I used to sit in days gone by....This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,—at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,—at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,—not indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,—and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my solitude till now ... and now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth, and the freshness of my heart.”
During these dismal years Horatio Bridge was Hawthorne’s good genius. The letters that Hawthorne wrote to him have not been preserved, but we may judge of their character by Bridge’s replies to him—always frank, manly, sympathetic and encouraging. Hawthorne evidently confided his troubles and difficulties to Bridge, as he would to an elder brother. Bridge finally destroyed Hawthorne’s letters, not so much on account of their complaining tone as for the personalities they contained; {Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 69.} and this suggests to us that there was still another side to Hawthorne’s life at this epoch concerning which we shall never be enlightened. A man could not have had a better friend than Horatio Bridge. He was to Hawthorne what Edward Irving was to Carlyle; and the world is more indebted to them both than it often realizes.
There is in fact a decided similarity between the lives of Carlyle and Hawthorne, in spite of radical differences in their work and characters. Both started at the foot of the ladder, and met with a hard, long struggle for recognition; both found it equally difficult to earn their living by their pens; both were assisted by most devoted friends, and both finally achieved a reputation among the highest in their own time. If there is sometimes a melancholy tinge in their writings, may we wonder at it? Pericles said, “We need the theatre to chase away the sadness of life,” and it might have benefited the whole Hawthorne family to have gone to the theatre once a fortnight; but there were few entertainments in Salem, except of the stiff conventional sort, or in the shape of public dances open to firemen and shop-girls. Long afterward, Elizabeth Hawthorne wrote of her brother:
“His habits were as regular as possible. In the evening after tea he went out for about an hour, whatever the weather was; and in winter, after his return, he ate a pint bowl of thick chocolate—(not cocoa, but the old-fashioned chocolate) crumbed full of bread: eating never hurt him then, and he liked good things. In summer he ate something equivalent, finishing with fruit in the season of it. In the evening we discussed political affairs, upon which we differed in opinion; he being a Democrat, and I of the opposite party. In reality, his interest in such things was so slight that I think nothing would have kept it alive but my contentious spirit. Sometimes, when he had a book that he particularly liked, he would not talk. He read a great many novels.” {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 125.}
If Elizabeth possessed the genius which her brother supposed, she certainly does not indicate it in this letter; but genius in the ore is very different from genius smelted and refined by effort and experience. The one important fact in her statement is that Hawthorne was in the habit of taking solitary rambles after dark,—an owlish practice, but very attractive to romantic minds. Human nature appears in a more pictorial guise by lamplight, after the day’s work is over. The groups at the street corners, the glittering display in the watchmaker’s windows, the carriages flashing by and disappearing in the darkness, the mysterious errands of foot-passengers, all served as object-lessons for this student of his own kind.
Jonathan Cilley once said:
“I love Hawthorne; I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter.” {Footnote: Packard’s “Bowdoin College,” 306.}
Long-continued thinking is sure to take effect at last, either in words or in action, and Hawthorne’s mind had to disburden itself in some manner. So, after the failure of “Fanshawe,” he returned to his original plan of writing short stories, and this time with success. In January, 1830, the well-known tale of “The Gentle Boy” was accepted by S. G. Goodrich, the editor of a Boston publication called the Token, who was himself better known in those days under the nom de plume of “Peter Parley.” “The Wives of the Dead,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” and “Major Molineaux” soon followed. In 1833 he published the “Seven Vagabonds,” and some others. The New York Knickerbocker published the “Fountain of Youth” and “Edward Fayne’s Rosebud.” After 1833 the Token and the New England Magazine {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 175.} stood ready to accept all the short pieces that Hawthorne could give them, but they did not encourage him to write serial stories. However, it was not the custom then for writers to sign their names to magazine articles, so that Hawthorne gained nothing in reputation by this. Some of his earliest pieces were printed over the signature of “Oberon.”
An autumn expedition to the White Mountains, Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario, and Niagara Falls, in 1832, raised Hawthorne’s spirits and stimulated his ambition. He wrote to his mother from Burlington, Vermont, September 16:
“I have arrived in safety, having passed through the White Hills, stopping at Ethan Crawford’s house, and climbing Mt. Washington. I have not decided as to my future course. I have no intention of going into Canada. I have heard that cholera is prevalent in Boston.”
It was something to have stood on the highest summit east of the Rocky Mountains, and to have seen all New England lying at his feet. A hard wind in the Crawford Notch, which he describes in his story of “The Ambitious Guest,” must have been in his own experience, and as he passed the monument of the ill-fated Willey family he may have thought that he too might become celebrated after his death, even as they were from their poetic catastrophe. This expedition provided him with the materials for a number of small plots.
The ice was now broken; but a new class of difficulties arose before him. American literature was then in the bud and promised a beautiful blossoming, but the public was not prepared for it. Monthly magazines had a precarious existence, and their uncertainty of remuneration reacted on the contributors. Hawthorne was poorly paid, often obliged to wait a long time for his pay, and occasionally lost it altogether. For his story of “The Gentle Boy,” one of the gems of literature, which ought to be read aloud every year in the public schools, he received the paltry sum of thirty-five dollars. Evidently he could not earn even a modest maintenance on such terms, and his letters to Bridge became more despondent than ever.
Goodrich, who was a writer of the Andrews Norton class, soon perceived that Hawthorne could make better sentences than his own, and engaged him to write historical abstracts for his pitiful Peter Parley books, paying him a hundred dollars for the whole work, and securing for himself all the credit that appertained to it. Everybody knew who Peter Parley was, but it has only recently been discovered that much of the literature which passed under his name was the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The editor of a New York magazine to which Hawthorne contributed a number of sketches repeatedly deferred the payment for them, and finally confessed his inability to make it,—which he probably knew or intended beforehand. Then, with true metropolitan assurance, he begged of Hawthorne the use of certain unpublished manuscripts, which he still had in his possession. Hawthorne with unlimited contempt told the fellow that he might keep them, and then wrote to Bridge:
“Thus has this man, who would be considered a Mæcenas, taken from a penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can supply.” {Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 68, 69.}
Whether this New York periodical was the Knickerbocker or some other, we are not informed; neither do we know what Bridge replied to Hawthorne, who had closed his letter with a malediction, on the aforesaid editor, but elsewhere in his memoirs he remarks:
“Hawthorne received but small compensation for any of this literary work, for he lacked the knowledge of business and the self-assertion necessary to obtain even the moderate remuneration vouchsafed to writers fifty years ago.” {Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 77.}
If Horatio Bridge had been an author himself, he would not have written this statement concerning his friend. Magazine editors are like men in other professions: some of them are honorable and others are less so; but an author who offers a manuscript to the editor of a magazine is wholly at his mercy, so far as that small piece of property is concerned. The author cannot make a bargain with the editor as he can with the publisher of his book, and is obliged to accept whatever the latter chooses to give him. Instances have been known where an editor has destroyed a valuable manuscript, without compensation or explanation of any kind. Hawthorne was doing the best that a human being could under the conditions that were given him. Above all things, he was true to himself; no man could be more so.
Yet Bridge wrote to him on Christmas Day, 1836:
“The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would long ago have given you what you must now wait a long time for. It may be for the best, but I doubt it.”
Nothing is more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker, was unreasonable. In the phraseology of Sir William Hamilton, the two vocations are “non-compossible.” Bridge himself was undertaking a grandly unpractical project about this time: nothing less than an attempt to dam the Androscoggin, a river liable to devastating floods; and in this enterprise he was obliged to trust to a class of men who were much more uncertain in their ways and methods than those with whom Hawthorne dealt. Horatio Bridge had not studied civil engineering, and the result was that before two years had elapsed the floods on the Androscoggin swept the dam away, and his fortune with it.
In the same letter we also notice this paragraph concerning another Bowdoin friend:
“And so Frank Pierce is elected Senator. There is an instance of what a man can do by trying. With no very remarkable talents, he at the age of thirty-four fills one of the highest stations in the nation. He is a good fellow, and I rejoice at his success.” {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 148.}
Pierce certainly possessed the cap of Fortunatus, and it seems as if there must have been some magic faculty in the man, which enabled him to win high positions so easily; and he continued to do this, although he had not distinguished himself particularly as a member of Congress, and he appeared to still less advantage among the great party leaders in the United States Senate. He illustrated the faculty for “getting elected.”
In October, 1836, the time arrived for settling the matrimonial wager between Hawthorne and Jonathan Cilley, which they had made at college twelve years before. Bridge accordingly examined the documents which they had deposited with him, and notified Cilley that he was under obligation to provide Hawthorne with an octavo of Madeira.
Cilley’s letter to Hawthorne on this occasion does not impress one favorably. {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 144.} It is familiar and jocose, without being either witty or friendly, and he gives no intimation in it of an intention to fulfil his promise. Hawthorne appears to have sent the letter to Bridge, who replied:
“I doubt whether you ever get your wine from Cilley. His inquiring of you whether he had really lost the bet is suspicious; and he has written me in a manner inconsistent with an intention of paying promptly; and if a bet grows old it grows cold. He wished me to propose to you to have it paid at Brunswick next Commencement, and to have as many of our classmates as could be mustered to drink it. It may be Cilley’s idea to pay over the balance after taking a strong pull at it; if so, it is well enough. But still it should be tendered within the month.”
In short, Cilley behaved in this matter much in the style of a tricky Van Buren politician, making a great bluster of words, and privately intending to do nothing. He was running for Congress at the time on the Van Buren ticket, and it is quite likely that the expenses of the campaign had exhausted his funds. That he should never have paid the bet was less to Hawthorne’s disadvantage than his own.
It was now that Horatio Bridge proved himself a true friend, and equally a man. In the spring of 1836 Goodrich had obtained for Hawthorne the editorship of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, with a salary of five hundred dollars; {Footnote: Conway, 45.}but he soon discovered that he had embarked on a ship with a rotten hulk. He started off heroically, writing the whole of the first number with the help of his sister Elizabeth; but by midsummer the concern was bankrupt, and he retired to his lonely cell, more gloomy and despondent than before. There are few sadder spectacles then that of a man seeking work without being able to obtain it; and this applies to the man of genius as well as to the day laborer.
Horatio Bridge now realized that the time had come for him to interfere. He recognized that Hawthorne was gradually lapsing into a hypochondria that might terminate fatally; that he was Goethe’s oak planted in a flowerpot, and that unless the flower-pot could be broken, the oak would die. He also saw that Hawthorne would never receive the public recognition that was due to his ability, so long as he published magazine articles under an assumed name. He accordingly wrote to Goodrich—fortunately before his mill-dam gave way—suggesting the publication of a volume of Hawthorne’s stories, and offered to guarantee the publisher against loss. This proposition was readily accepted, but Bridge might have made a much better bargain. What it amounted to was, the half-profit system without the half-profit. The necessary papers were exchanged and Hawthorne gladly acceded to Goodrich’s terms. Bridge, however, had cautioned Goodrich not to inform Hawthorne of his share in the enterprise, and the consequence of this was that he shortly received a letter from Hawthorne, informing him of the good news—which he knew already—and praising Goodrich, to whom he proposed to dedicate his new volume. Bridge’s generosity had come back to him, dried and salted,—as it has to many another.
What could Bridge do, in the premises? Goodrich had written to Hawthorne that the publisher, Mr. Howes, was confident of making a favorable arrangement with a man of capital who would edit the book; but Bridge did not know this, and he suspected Goodrich of sailing into Hawthorne’s favor under a false flag. He therefore wrote to Hawthorne, November 17, 1836:
“I fear you will hurt yourself by puffing Goodrich undeservedly,—for there is no doubt in my mind of his selfishness in regard to your work and yourself. I am perfectly aware that he has taken a good deal of interest in you, but when did he ever do anything for you without a quid pro quo? The magazine was given to you for $100 less than it should have been. The Token was saved by your writing. Unless you are already committed, do not mar the prospects of your first book by hoisting Goodrich into favor.”
This prevented the dedication, for which Hawthorne was afterward thankful enough. The book, which was the first volume of “Twice Told Tales” came from the press the following spring, and proved an immediate success, although not a highly lucrative one for its author. With the help of Longfellow’s cordial review of it in the North American it established Hawthorne’s reputation on a firm and irrefragable basis. All honor to Horatio.
As if Hawthorne had not seen a sufficiently long “winter of discontent” already, his friends now proposed to obtain the position of secretary and chronicler for him on Commodore Jones’s exploring expedition to the South Pole! Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no doubt that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for Hawthorne, but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a Congressional appropriation. The following year, 1838, the project was again brought forward by the administration, and Congress being in a more amiable frame of mind granted the requisite funds; but Hawthorne had now contracted new ties in his native city, bound, as it were, by an inseparable cord stronger than a Manila hawser, and Doctor Nathaniel Peabody’s hospitable parlors were more attractive to him than anything the Antarctic regions could offer.
We have now entered upon the period where Hawthorne’s own diary commences, the autobiography of a pure-minded, closely observing man; an invaluable record, which began apparently in 1835, and was continued nearly until the close of his life; now published in a succession of American, English and Italian note-books. In it we find records of what he saw and thought; descriptive passages, afterward made serviceable in his works of fiction, and perhaps written with that object in view; fanciful notions, jotted down on the impulse of the moment; records of his social life; but little critical writing or personal confessions,—although the latter may have been reserved; from publication by his different editors. It is known that much of his diary has not yet been given to the public, and perhaps never will be.
In July, 1837, Hawthorne went to Augusta, to spend a month with his friend Horatio Bridge; went fishing with him, for what they called white perch, probably the saibling; {Footnote: The American saibling, or golden trout, is only indigenous to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, and to a small lake near Augusta.} and was greatly entertained with the peculiarities of an idiomatic Frenchman, an itinerant teacher of that language, whom Bridge, in the kindness of his heart, had taken into his own house. The last of July, Cilley also made his appearance, but did not bring the Madeira with him, and Hawthorne has left this rather critical portrait of him in his diary:
“Friday, July 28th.—Saw my classmate and formerly intimate friend, ——, for the first time since we graduated. He has met with good success in life, in spite of circumstances, having struggled upward against bitter opposition, by the force of his abilities, to be a member of Congress, after having been for some time the leader of his party in the State Legislature. We met like old friends, and conversed almost as freely as we used to do in college days, twelve years ago and more. He is a singular person, shrewd, crafty, insinuating, with wonderful tact, seizing on each man by his manageable point, and using him for his own purpose, often without the man’s suspecting that he is made a tool of; and yet, artificial as his character would seem to be, his conversation, at least to myself, was full of natural feeling, the expression of which can hardly be mistaken, and his revelations with regard to himself had really a great deal of frankness. A man of the most open nature might well have been more reserved to a friend, after twelve years separation, than —— was to me. Nevertheless, he is really a crafty man, concealing, like a murder-secret, anything that it is not good for him to have known. He by no means feigns the good feeling that he professes, nor is there anything affected in the frankness of his conversation; and it is this that makes him so fascinating. There is such a quantity of truth and kindliness and warm affections, that a man’s heart opens to him, in spite of himself. He deceives by truth. And not only is he crafty, but, when occasion demands, bold and fierce like a tiger, determined, and even straightforward and undisguised in his measures,—a daring fellow as well as a sly one.”
This can be no other than Jonathan Cilley; like many of his class, a man of great good humor but not over-scrupulous, so far as the means he might make use of were concerned. He did not, however, prove to be as skilful a diplomat as Hawthorne seems to have supposed him. The duel between Cilley and Graves, of Kentucky, has been so variously misrepresented that the present occasion would seem a fitting opportunity to tell the plain truth concerning it.
President Jackson was an honest man, in the customary sense of the term, and he would have scorned to take a dollar that was not his own; but he suffered greatly from parasites, who pilfered the nation’s money,—the natural consequence of the spoils-of-office system. The exposure of these peculations gave the Whigs a decided advantage, and Cilley, who had quickly proved his ability in debate, attempted to set a back-fire by accusing Watson Webb, the editor of the Courier and Enquirer, of having been bribed to change the politics of his paper. The true facts of the case were, that the paper had been purchased by the Whigs, and Webb, of course, had a right to change his politics if he chose to; and the net result of Cilley’s attack was a challenge to mortal combat, carried by Representative Graves, of Kentucky. Cilley, although a man of courage, declined this, on the ground that members of Congress ought not to be called to account outside of the Capitol, for words spoken in debate. “Then,” said Graves, “you will at least admit that my friend is a gentleman.”
This was a fair offer toward conciliation, and if Cilley had been peaceably inclined he would certainly have accepted it; but he obstinately refused to acknowledge that General Webb was a gentleman, and in consequence of this he received a second challenge the next day from Graves, brought by Henry A. Wise, afterward Governor of Virginia. Cilley still objected to fighting, but members of his party urged him into it: the duel took place, and Cilley was killed.
It may be said in favor of the “code of honor” that it discourages blackguardism and instructs a man to keep a civil tongue; but it is not always possible to prevent outbursts of temper, especially in hot climates, and a man’s wife and children should also be considered. Andrew Jackson said at the close of his life, that there was nothing he regretted so much as having killed a human being in a duel. Man rises by humility, and angels fall from pride.
Hawthorne wrote a kindly and regretful notice of the death of his old acquaintance, which was published in the Democratic Review, and which closed with this significant passage:
“Alas, that over the grave of a dear friend, my sorrow for the bereavement must be mingled with another grief—that he threw away such a life in so miserable a cause! Why, as he was true to the Northern character in all things else, did he swerve from his Northern principles in this final scene?” {Footnote: Conway, 63.}
It will be well to bear this in mind in connection with a somewhat similar incident, which we have now to consider.
An anecdote has been repeated in all the books about Hawthorne published since 1880, which would do him little credit if it could be proved,—a story that he challenged one of his friends to a duel, at the instigation of a vulgar and unprincipled young woman. Horatio Bridge says in reference to it:
“This characteristic was notably displayed several years later, when a lady incited him to quarrel with one of his best friends on account of a groundless pique of hers. He went to Washington for the purpose of challenging the gentleman, and it was only after ample explanation had been made, showing that his friend had behaved with entire honor, that Pierce and Cilley, who were his advisers, could persuade him to be satisfied without a fight.” {Footnote: Bridge, 5.}
How the good Horatio could have fallen into this pit is unimaginable, for a double contradiction is contained in his statement. “Some time after this,” that is after leaving college, would give the impression that the affair took place about 1830, whereas Pierce and Cilley were not in Washington together till five or six years later—probably seven years later. Moreover, Hawthorne states in a letter to Pierce’s friend O’Sullivan, on April 1, 1853, that he had never been in Washington up to that time. The Manning family and Mrs. Hawthorne’s relatives never heard of the story previous to its publication.
The internal evidence is equally strong against it. What New England girl would behave in the manner that Hawthorne’s son represents this one to have done? What young gentleman would have listened to such a communication as he supposes, and especially the reserved and modest Hawthorne? One can even imagine the aspect of horror on his face at such an unlady-like proceeding. The story would be an ignominious one for Hawthorne, if it were credible, but there is no occasion for our believing it until some tangible evidence is adduced in its support. There was no element of Quixotism in his composition, and it is quite as impossible to locate the identity of the person whom Hawthorne is supposed to have challenged.
CHAPTER V. — EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839
It was fortunate for Hawthorne that there was at this time a periodical in the United States, the North American Review, which was generally looked upon as an authority in literature, and which in most instances deserved the confidence that was placed in it, for its reviews were written by men of distinguished ability. It was the North American Review which made the reputation of L. Maria Child, and which enrolled Hawthorne in the order of geniuses.
There is not much literary criticism in Longfellow’s review, and he does not “rise to the level of the accomplished essayist” of our own time, {Footnote: Who writes so correctly and says so little to the purpose.} but he goes to the main point with the single-mindness of the true poet. “A new star,” he says, “has appeared in the skies”—a veritable prediction. “Others will gaze at it with telescopes, and decide whether it is in the constellation of Orion or the Great Bear. It is enough for us to gaze at it, to admire it, and welcome it.”
“Although Hawthorne writes in prose, he belongs among the poets. To every subject he touches he gives a poetic personality which emanates from the man himself. His sympathies extend to all things living, and even to the inanimates. Another characteristic is the exceeding beauty of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed he uses words as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful bound, his spirit crosses and re-crosses the bright and rushing stream of thought.”
Again he says:
“A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page; with now a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a strange and painful expression, as, in the German romance, the bronze knocker of the Archivarius Lindhorst makes up faces at the Student Anselmus.”
Here we have a portrait of Hawthorne, by one who knew him, in a few simple words; and behind a calm thoughtful face there is that mysterious unknown quantity which puzzles Longfellow here, and always perplexed Hawthorne’s friends. It may have been the nucleus or tap-root of his genius.
Longfellow seems to have felt it as a dividing line between them. He probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject. Hawthorne’s superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted essentially in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked upon human nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in it where none existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great moral movement which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as all reformers do, to the opposite extreme,—to that scepticism of evil which, as George Brandes says, is greatly to the advantage of hypocrites and sharpers. This was justifiable in Doctor Channing, but among his followers it has often degenerated into an inverted or homoeopathic kind of Puritanism,—a habit of excusing the faults of others, or of themselves, on the score of good intentions—a habit of self-justification, and even to the perverse belief that, as everything is for the best, whatever we do in this world must be for good. To this class of sentimentalists the most serious evil is truth-seeing and truth-speaking. It is an excellent plan to look upon the bright side of things, but one should not do this to the extent of blinding oneself to facts. Doctor Johnson once said to Boswell, “Beware, my friend, of mixing up virtue and vice;” but there is something worse than that, and it is, to stigmatize a writer as a pessimist or a hypochondriac for refusing to take rainbow-colored views. This, however, would never apply to Longfellow.
Hawthorne, with his eye ever on the mark, pursued a middle course. He separated himself from the Puritans without joining their opponents, and thus attained the most independent stand-point of any American writer of his time; and if this alienated him from the various humanitarian movements that were going forward, it was nevertheless a decided advantage for the work he was intended to do. In this respect he resembled Scott, Thackeray and George Eliot.
What we call evil or sin is merely the negative of civilization,—a tendency to return to the original savage condition. In the light of history, there is always progress or improvement, but in individual cases there is often the reverse, and so far as the individual is concerned evil is no imaginary metaphor, but as real and absolute as what we call good. The Bulgarian massacres of 1877 were a historical necessity, and we console ourselves in thinking of them by the fact that they may have assisted the Bulgarians in obtaining their independence; but this was no consolation to the twenty or thirty thousand human beings who were ground to powder there. To them there was no comfort, no hope,—only the terrible reality. Neither can we cast the responsibility of such events on the mysterious ways of Providence. The ways of Providence are not so mysterious to those who have eyes to read with. Take for instance one of the most notable cases of depravity, that of Nero. If we consider the conditions under which he was born and brought up, the necessity of that form of government to hold a vast empire together, and the course of history for a hundred years previous, it is not difficult to trace the genesis of Nero’s crimes to the greed of the Roman people (especially of its merchants) for conquest and plunder; and Nero was the price which they were finally called on to pay for this. Marcus Aurelius, a noble nature reared under favorable conditions for its development, became the Washington of his time.
It is the same in private life. In many families there are evil tendencies, which if they are permitted to increase will take permanent hold, like a bad demon, of some weak individual, and make of him a terror and a torment to his relatives—fortunate if he is not in a position of authority. He may serve as a warning to the general public, but in the domestic circle he is an unmitigated evil,—he or she, though it is not so likely to be a woman. When a crime is committed within the precincts of good society, we are greatly shocked; but we do not often notice the debasement of character which leads down to it, and still more rarely notice the instances in which fear or some other motive arrests demoralization before the final step, and leaves the delinquent as it were in a condition of moral suspense.
It was in such tragic situations that Hawthorne found the material which was best suited to the bent of his genius.
In the two volumes, however, of “Twice Told Tales,”—the second published two years later,—the tragical element only appears as an undercurrent of pathos in such stories as “The Gentle Boy,” “Wakefield,” “The Maypole of Merry-mount,” and “The Haunted Mind,” but reaches a climax in “The Ambitious Guest” and “Lady Eleanor’s Mantle.” There are others, like “Lights from a Steeple,” and “Little Annie’s Ramble,” that are of a more cheerful cast, but are also much less serious in their composition. “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Great Carbuncle,” and “The Ambitious Guest,” are Dantean allegories. We notice that each volume begins with a highly patriotic tale, the “Gray Champion,” and “Howe’s Masquerade,” but the patriotism is genuine and almost fervid.
When I first looked upon the house in which Hawthorne lived at Sebago, I was immediately reminded of these earlier studies in human nature, which are of so simple and quiet a diction, so wholly devoid of rhetoric, that Elizabeth Peabody thought they must be the work of his sister, and others supposed them to have been written by a Quaker. They resemble Dürer’s wood-cuts,—gentle and tender in line, but unswerving in their fidelity. We sometimes wish that they were not so quiet and evenly composed, and then repent of our wish that anything so perfect should be different from what it is. His “Twice Told Tales” are a picture-gallery that may be owned in any house-hold. They stand alone in English, and there is not their like in any other language.
Yet Hawthorne is not a word-painter like Browning and Carlyle, but obtains his pictorial effect by simple accuracy of description, a more difficult process than the other, but also more satisfactory. His eyes penetrate the masks and wrappings which cover human nature, as the Röntgen rays penetrate the human body. He sees a man’s heart through the flesh and bones, and knows what is concealed in it. He ascends a church-steeple, and looking down from the belfry the whole life of the town is spread out before him. Men and women come and go—Hawthorne knows the errands they are on. He sees a militia company parading below, and they remind him from that elevation of the toy soldiers in a shop-window,—which they turned out to be, pretty much, at Bull Run. A fashionable young man comes along the street escorting two young ladies, and suddenly at a crossing encounters their father, who takes them away from him; but one of them gives him a sweet parting look, which amply compensates him in its presage of future opportunities. How plainly that consolatory look appears between our eyes and the printed page! Then Hawthorne describes the grand march of a thunder-storm,—as in Rembrandt’s “Three Trees,”—with its rolling masses of dark vapor, preceded by a skirmish-line of white feathery clouds. The militia company is defeated at the first onset of this, its meteoric enemy, and driven under cover. The artillery of the skies booms and flashes about Hawthorne himself, until finally: “A little speck of azure has widened in the western heavens; the sunbeams find a passage and go rejoicing through the tempest, and on yonder darkest cloud, born like hallowed hopes of the glory of another world and the trouble and tears of this, brightens forth the rainbow.” All this may have happened just as it is set down.
“Lady Eleanor’s Mantle” exemplifies the old proverb, “Pride goeth before destruction,” in almost too severe a manner, but the tale is said to have a legendary foundation; and “The Minister’s Black Veil” is an equally awful symbolism for that barrier between man and man, which we construct through suspicion and our lack of frankness in our dealings with one another. We all hide ourselves behind veils, and, as Emerson says, “Man crouches and blushes, absconds and conceals.”
“The Ambitious Guest” allegorizes a vain imagination, and is the most important of these three. A young man suffers from a craving for distinction, which he believes will only come to him after this life is ended. He is walking through the White Mountains, and stops overnight at the house of the ill-fated Willey family. He talks freely on the subject of his vain expectations, when Destiny, in the shape of an avalanche, suddenly overtakes him, and buries him so deeply that neither his body nor his name has ever been recovered. Hawthorne might have drawn another allegory from the same source, for if the Willey family had trusted to Providence, and remained in their house, instead of rushing out into the dark, they would not have lost their lives.
In the Democratic Review for 1834, Hawthorne published the account of a visit to Niagara Falls, one of the fruits of his expedition thither in September, 1832, by way of the White Mountains and Burlington, the journey from Salem to Niagara in those days being fully equal to going from New York to the cataracts of the Nile in our own time. “The Ambitious Guest” was published in the same volume with it, and “The Ontario Steamboat” first appeared in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, in 1836. Hawthorne may have made other expeditions to the White Mountains, but we do not hear of them.
In addition to the three studies already mentioned, Hawthorne drew from this source the two finest of his allegories, “The Great Carbuncle” and “The Great Stone Face.”
“The Great Carbuncle” is not only one of the most beautiful of Hawthorne’s tales, but the most far-reaching in its significance. The idea of it must have originated in the Alpine glow, an effect of the rising or setting sun on the icy peaks of a mountain, which looks at a distance like a burning coal; an appearance only visible in the White Mountains during the winter, and there is no reason why Hawthorne should not have seen it at that season from Lake Sebago. At a distance of twenty miles or more it blazes wonderfully, but on a nearer approach it entirely disappears. Hawthorne could not have found a more fascinating subject, and he imagines it for us as a great carbuncle located in the upper recesses of the mountains.
A number of explorers for this wonderful gem meet together at the foot of the mountain beyond the confines of civilization, and build a hut in which to pass the night. They are recognizable, from Hawthorne’s description, as the man of one idea, who has spent his whole life seeking the gem; a scientific experimenter who wishes to grind it up for the benefit of his crucible; a cynical sceptic who has come to disprove the existence of the great gem; a greedy speculator who seeks the carbuncle as he would prospect for a silver-mine; an English lord who wishes to add it to his hereditary possessions; and finally a young married couple who want to obtain it for an ornament to their new cottage. The interest of the reader immediately centres on these last two, and we care much more concerning their fortunes and adventures than we do about the carbuncle.
The conversation that evening between these ill-assorted companions is in Hawthorne’s most subtle vein of irony, and would have delighted old Socrates himself. Meanwhile the young bride weaves a screen of twigs and leaves, to protect herself and her husband from the gaze of the curious.
The following morning they all set out by different paths in search of the carbuncle; but our thoughts accompany the steps of the young bride, as she makes one toilsome ascent after another until she feels ready to sink to the ground with fatigue and discouragement. They have already decided to return, when the rosy light of the carbuncle bursts upon them from beneath the lifting clouds; but they now feel instinctively that it is too great a prize for their possession. The man of one idea also sees it, and his life goes out in the exultation over his final success. The skeptic appears, but cannot discover it, although his face is illumined by its light, until he takes off his large spectacles; whereupon, he instantly becomes blind. The English nobleman and the American speculator fail to discover it; the former returns to his ancestral halls, as wise as he was before; and the latter is captured by a party of Indians and obliged to pay a heavy ransom to regain freedom. The scientific pedant finds a rare specimen of primeval granite, which serves his purpose quite as well as the carbuncle; and the two young doves return to their cot, having learned the lesson of contentment.
How fortunate was Hawthorne at the age of thirty thus to anatomize the chief illusions of life, which so many others follow until old age!