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Hawthorne
at Brook Farm
By Henry James
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Hawthorne By Henry James --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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I The Early Years IT WILL be necessary, for several reasons, to give
this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography.
The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious,
and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure
the purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil
and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it
was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the
dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can
have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books
illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an unagitated
fortune. Hawthorne's career had few vicissitudes or variations; it was
passed for the most part in a small and homogeneous society, in a provincial,
rural community; it had few perceptible points of contact with what
is called the world, with public events, with the manners of his time,
even with the life of his neighbours. Its literary incidents are not
numerous. He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of
four novels and the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales,
a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children.
And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth giving.
Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance
of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature.
The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate,
in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the
American genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but
Hawthorne was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the
writer to whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish
to make a claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from
present appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If
there is something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows
an added relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and
from the general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him,
there is also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation.
He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing
from the lonely honour of a representative attitude--perceiving a painful
incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large
conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle
and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the other is
so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author
of The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from an Old Manse, that we render
him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of a great
civilization. But our author must accept the awkward as well as the
graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable
moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil
is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,
that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.
American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce
flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself
with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful
talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually
recognizes, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted
to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance. His very simplicity has been
in his favour; it has helped him to appear complete and homogeneous.
To talk of his being national would be to force the note and make a
mistake of proportion; but he is, in spite of the absence of the realistic
quality, intensely and vividly local. Out of the soil of New England
he sprang--in a crevice of that immitigable granite he sprouted and
bloomed. Half of the interest that he possesses for an American reader
with any turn for analysis must reside in his latent New England savour;
and I think it no more than just to say that whatever entertainment
he may yield to those who know him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable
condition of properly appreciating him to have received a personal impression
of the manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great
region of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis. The
cold, bright air of New England seems to blow through his pages, and
these, in the opinion of many people, are the medium in which it is
most agreeable to make the acquaintance of that tonic atmosphere. As
to whether it is worth while to seek to know something of New England
in order to extract a more intimate quality from The House of Seven
Gables and The Blithedale Romance, I need not pronounce; but it is certain
that a considerable observation of the society to which these productions
were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for enjoying them.
I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism
which is now so much in fashion, an absence in regard to which there
will of course be more to say; and yet I think I am not fanciful in
saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the society in which he
flourished almost as pertinently (proportions observed) as Balzac and
some of his descendants--M M. Flaubert and Zola--testify to the manners
and morals of the French people. He was not a man with a literary theory;
he was guiltless of a system, and I am not sure that he had ever heard
of Realism, this remarkable compound having (although it was invented
some time earlier) come into general use only since his death. He had
certainly not proposed to himself to give an account of the social idiosyncrasies
of his fellow-citizens, for his touch on such points is always light
and vague, he has none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy
style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy. Nevertheless
he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New England life that
has found its way into literature. His value in this respect is not
diminished by the fact that he has not attempted to portray the usual
Yankee of comedy, and that he has been almost culpably indifferent to
his opportunities for commemorating the variations of colloquial English
that may be observed in the New World. His characters do not express
themselves in the dialect of the Bigelow Papers--their language indeed
is apt to be too elegant, too delicate. They are not portraits of actual
types, and in their phraseology there is nothing imitative. But none
the less, Hawthorne's work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it
is redolent of the social system in which he had his being. This could
hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself was so deeply rooted
in the soil. Hawthorne sprang from the primitive New England stock;
he had a very definite and conspicuous pedigree. He was born at Salem,
Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804, and his birthday was the great
American festival, the anniversary of the Declaration of national Independence.[
footnote] Hawthorne was in his disposition an unqualified and unflinching
American; he found occasion to give us the measure of the fact during
the seven years that he spent in Europe toward the close of his life,
and this was no more than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed
the honour of coming into the world on the day on which of all the days
in the year the great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of self-consciousness.
Moreover, a person who has been ushered into life by the ringing of
bells and the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight
out of it again bv the uproar of his awakening) receives by this very
fact an injunction to do something great, something that will justify
such striking natal accompaniments. Hawthorne was by race of the clearest
Puritan strain. His earliest American ancestor (who wrote the name "Hathorne"--the
shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who inserted the w,)
was the younger son of a Wiltshire family, whose residence, according
to a note of our author's in 1837, was "Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne,
in the note in question, mentions the gentleman who was at that time
the head of the family; but it does not appear that he at any period
renewed acquaintance with his English kinsfolk. Major William Hathorne
came out to Massachusetts in the early years of the Puritan settlement;
in 1635 or 1636, according to the note to which I have just alluded;
in 1630 according to information presumably more accurate. He was one
of the band of companions of the virtuous and exemplary John Winthrop,
the almost lifelong royal Govemor of the young colony, and the brightest
and most amiable figure in the early Puritan annals. How amiable William
Hathorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently of the stuff
of which the citizens of the Commonwealth were best advised to be made.
He was a sturdy fighting man, doing solid execution upon both the inward
and outward enemies of the State. The latter were the savages, the former
the Quakers; the energy expended by the early Puritans in resistance
to the tomahawk not weakening their disposition to deal with spiritual
dangers. They employed the same--or almost the same--weapons in both
directions; the flintlock and the halberd against the Indians, and the
cat-o'-nine-tails against the heretics. One of the longest, though by
no means one of the most successful, of Hawthorne's shorter tales (The
Gentle Boy) deals with this pitiful persecution of the least aggressive
of all schismatic bodies. William Hathorne, who had been made a magistrate
of the town of Salem, where a grant of land had been offered him as
an inducement to residence, figures in New England history as having
given orders that "Anne Coleman and four of her friends" should be whipped
through Salem, Boston, and Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is
the woman alluded to in that fine passage in the Introduction to The
Scarlet Letter, in which Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder
of the American branch of his race:-- "The figure of that first ancestor,
invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present
to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts
me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely
claim in reference to the present, phase of the town. I seem to have
a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so early, with
his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a stately
port, and made so large a figure as a man of war and peace--a stronger
claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly
known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church;
he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise
a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him
in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards
a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be feared, than
anv of his better deeds, though these were many." William Hathorne died
in 1681; but those hard qualities that his descendant speaks of were
reproduced in his son John, who bore the title of Colonel, and who was
connected, too intimately for his honour, with that deplorable episode
of New England history, the persecution of the so-called Witches of
Salem. John Hathorne is introduced into the little drama entitled The
Salem Farms in Longfellow's New England Tragedies. I know not whether
he had the compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks
of him, in the continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their
blood mav be said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain, indeed,"
Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones in the Charter
Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have not crumbled
utterly to dust." Readers of The House of the Seven Gables will remember
that the story concerns itself with a family which is supposed to be
overshadowed by a curse launched against one of its earlier members
bv a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the world, whom this ill-advised
ancestor had been the means of bringing to justice for the crime of
witchcraft. Hawthorne apparently found the idea of the history of the
Pyncheons in his own family annals. His witch-judging ancestor was reported
to have incurred a malediction from one of his victims, in consequence
of which the prosperity of the race faded utterly away. "I know not,"
the passage I have already quoted goes on, "whether these ancestors
of mine bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for
their cruelties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences
of them in another state of being. At all events, I the present writer,
hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse
incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous
condition of the race for some time back would argue to exist--may be
now and henceforth removed." The two first American Hathornes had been
people of importance and responsibility; but with the third generation
the family lapsed into an obscurity from which it emerged in the very
person of the writer who begs so gracefully for a turn in its affairs.
It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the Introduction to The Scarlet
Letter, that from the original point of view such lustre as he might
have contrived to confer upon the name would have appeared more than
questionable. "Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would
have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that after
so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the family tree, with so much
venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an
idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise
as laudable; no success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope,
had ever been brightened by success, would they deem otherwise than
worthless, if not positively disgraceful. 'What is he?' murmurs one
grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. 'A writer of story-books!
What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being
serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why,
the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!' Such are the
compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself across the
gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits
of their nature have intertwined thcmselves with mine." In this last
observation we may imagine that there was not a little truth. Poet and
novelist as Hawthorne was, sceptic and dreamer and little of a man of
action, late-coming fruit of a tree which might seem to have lost the
power to bloom, he was morally, in an appreciative degree, a chip of
the old block. His forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for conscience'
sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted the
imagination of their so-called degenerate successor. The Puritan strain
in his blood ran clear--there are passages in his Diaries, kept during
his residence in Europe, which might almost have been written by the
grimmest of the old Salem worthies. To him as to them, the consciousness
of sin was the most importunate fact of life, and if they had undertaken
to write little tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant
adjective, could hardly have been more frequent in their pages than
in those of their fanciful descendant. Hawthorne had moreover in his
composition, contemplator and dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity
and rigidity, a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might
have kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms with him than
he admits to be possible. However little they might have appreciated
the artist, they would have approved of the man. The play of Hawthorne's
intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and
rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper was not degenerate.
The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he speaks of in regard
to the fortunes of his family is an allusion to the fact that several
generations followed each other on the soil in which they had been planted,
that during the eighteenth century a succession of Hathornes trod the
simple streets of Salem without ever conferring any especial lustre
upon the town or receiving, presumably, any great delight from it. A
hundred years of Salem would perhaps be rather a deadweight for any
family to carry, and we venture to imagine that the Hathornes were dull
and depressed. Thev did what they could, however, to improve their situation;
they trod the Salem streets as little as possible. Thev went to sea,
and made long voyages; seamanship became the regular profession of the
family. Hawthorne has said it in charming language. "From father to
son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the
homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before
the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered
against his sire and grandsire. The boy also, in due time, passed from
the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned
from his world-wanderings to grow old and die and mingle his dust with
the natal earth." Our author's grandfather, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned
by Mr. Lathrop, his biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer
during the war of Independence. His father, from whom he was named,
was also a shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise
of his profession. He was carried off by a fever, at Surinam, in 1808.
He left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's
mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock almost
as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by our
author's biographer as a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an authority
whom he quotes, as being "a minute observer of religious festivals,"
of "feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the poor lady
in her Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number to celebrate;
but of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed the usual, and
of Sabbaths even more than the usual, proportion. In quiet provincial
Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part of his boyhood, as
well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop has much to say about
the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and about the mystic influences
it would project upon such a mind and character as Hawthorne's. These
things are always relative, and in appreciating them everything depends
upon the point of view. Mr. Lathrop writes for American readers, who
in such a matter as this are very easy to please. Americans have as
a general thing a hungry passion for the picturesque, and they are so
fond of local colour that they contrive to perceive it in localities
in which the amateurs of other countries would detect only the most
neutral tints. History, as yet, has left in the United States but so
thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum
of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity
of seeming rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young;
the light of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet
but few of the secrets of the world and none of the weariness of shining;
the vegetation has the appearance of not having reached its majority.
A large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things, and in the vividness
of the present, the past, which died so young and had time to produce
so little, attracts but scanty attention. I doubt whether English observers
would discover any very striking trace of it in the ancient town of
Salem. Still, with all respect to a York and a Shrewsbury, to a Toledo
and a Verona, Salem has a physiognomy which the past plays a more important
part than the present. It is of course a very recent past; but one must
remember that the dead of yesterday are not more alive than those of
a century ago. I know not of what picturesqueness Hawthorne was conscious
in his respectable birthplace; I suspect his perception of it was less
keen than his biographer assumes it to have been; but he must have felt
at least that of whatever complexity of earlier life there had been
in the country, the elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a recognisable
memento. He has made considerable mention of the place, here and there,
in his tales; but he has nowhere dilated upon it very lovingly, and
it is noteworthy that in The House of the Seven Gables, the only one
of his novels of which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed
himself of the opportunity to give a description of it. He had of course
a filial fondness for it--a deep-seated sense of connection with it;
but he must have spent some very dreary years there, and the two feelings,
the mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in the Introduction
to The Scarlet Letter. "The old town of Salem," he writes,--"my native
place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and in
maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the
force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence
here. Indeed, so far as the physical aspect is concerned, with its flat,
unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of
which pretend to architectural beauty; its irregularity, which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows
Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other--such
being the features of my native town it would be quite as reasonable
to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged chequer-board." But
he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense of
intensely belonging to it--that the spell of the continuity of his life
with that of his predecessors has never been broken. "It is no matter
that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site and sentiment,
the chill east wind, and the chilliest of social atmospheres;--all these
and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the
purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfullly as if the natal
spot were an earthly paradise." There is a very American quality in
this perpetual consciousness of a spell on Hawthorne's part; it is only
in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the
common substance of life, that the fact of one's ancestors having lived
for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element
of one's morality. It is only an imaginative American that would feel
urged to keep reverting to this circumstance, to keep analysing and
cunningly considering it. The Salem of to-day has, as New England towns
go, a physiognomy of its own, and in spite of Hawthorne's analogy of
the disarranged draught-board, it is a decidedly agreeable one. The
spreading elms in its streets, the proportion of large, square, honourable-looking
houses, suggesting an easy, copious material life, the little gardens,
the grassy waysides, the open windows, the air of space and salubrity
and decency, and above all the intimation of larger antecedents--these
things compose a picture which has little of the element that painters
call depth of tone, but which is not without something that they would
admit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most honourable of
the smaller American towns must seem in a manner primitive and rustic;
the shabby, straggling, village-quality appears marked in them, and
their social tone is not unnaturally inferred to bear the village stamp.
Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to describe
them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages. But even
a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing
squires, where the "county" has no social existence, where the villagers
are conscious of no superincumbent strata of gentility, piled upwards
into vague regions of privilege--even a village is not an institution
to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well
of itself and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but
it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy
group of old coast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New
England, and of which the list is completed by the names of Portsmouth,
Plymouth, New Bedford, Newburyport, Newport--superannuated centres of
the traffic with foreign lands, which have seen their trade carried
away from them by the greater cities. As Hawthorne says, their ventures
have gone "to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood
of commerce at New York or Boston." Salem, at the beginning of the present
century, played a great part in the Eastern trade; it was the residence
of enterprising shipowners who despatched their vessels to Indian and
Chinese seas. It was a place of large fortunes, many of which have remained,
though the activity that produced them has passed away. These successful
traders constituted what Hawthorne calls "the aristocratic class." He
alludes in one of his slighter sketches (The Sister Years) to the sway
of this class and the "moral influence of wealth" having been more marked
in Salem than in any other New England town. The sway, we may believe,
was on the whole gently exercised, and the moral influence of wealth
was not exerted in the cause of immorality. Hawthorne was probably but
imperfectly conscious of an advantage which familiarity had made stale--the
fact that he lived in the most democratic and most virtuous of modern
communities. Of the virtue it is but civil to suppose that his own family
had a liberal share; but not much of the wealth, apparently, came into
their way. Hawthorne was not born to a patrimony and his income, later
in life, never exceeded very modest proportions. Of his childish years
there appears to be nothing very definite to relate, though his biographer
devotes a good many graceful pages to them. There is a considerable
sameness in the behaviour of small boys, and it is probable that if
we were acquainted with the details of our author's infantine career
we should find it to be made up of the same pleasures and pains as that
of many ingenuous lads for whom fame has had nothing in keeping. The
absence of precocious symptoms of genius is on the whole more striking
in the lives of men who have distinguished themselves than their juvenile
promise; though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has made out, as he
was almost in duty bound to do, a very good case in favour of Hawthorne's
having been an interesting child. He was not at any time what would
be called a sociable man, and there is therefore nothing unexpected
in the fact that he was fond of long walks in which he was not known
to have had a companion. "Juvenile literature" was but scantily known
at that time, and the enormous and extraordinary contribution made by
the United States to this department of human happiness was locked in
the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne therefore, like many of his
contemporaries, was constrained to amuse himself, for want of anything
better, with the Pilgrim's Progress and the Faery Queen. A boy may have
worse company than Bunyan and Spenser, and it is very probable that
in his childish rambles our author may have had associates of whom there
could be no record. When he was nine years old he met with an accident
at school which threatened for a while to have serious results. He was
struck on the foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept
at home for a long time, and had not completely recovered before his
twelfth year. His school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school
of New England--the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive
system of instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms
one of the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was
fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house
of an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond,
near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine. The immense State of Maine,
in the year 1818, must have had an even more magnificently natural character
than it possesses at the present day, and the uncle's dwelling, in consequence
of being in a little smarter style than the primitive structures that
surrounded it, was known by the villagers as Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop
pronounces this region to be of a "weird and woodsy" character; and
Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a friend as the place where
"I first got my cursed habits of solitude." The outlook, indeed, for
an embryonic novelist would not seem to have been cheerful; the social
dreariness of a small New England community lost amid the forests of
Maine, at the beginning of the present century, must have been consummate.
But for a boy with a relish for solitude there were many natural resources,
and we can understand that Hawthorne should in after years have spoken
very tenderly of this episode. "I lived in Maine like a bird of the
air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the long summer days
he roamed, gun in hand, through the great woods and during the moonlight
nights of winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, "he
would skate until midnight, all alone, upon Sebago Lake, with the deep
shadows of the icy hills on either hand." In 1819 he was sent back to
Salem to school, and in the following year he wrote to his mother, who
had remained at Raymond (the boy had found a home at Salem with another
uncle), "I have left school and have begun to fit for college under
Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in danger of having one learned
man in your family.... I get my lessons at home and recite them to him
(Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the morning..... Shall you want me
to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A Minister I will not be." He adds,
at the close of this epistle--"O how I wish I was again with you, with
nothing to do but to go a-gunning! But the happiest days of my life
are gone." In 1821, in his seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College,
at Brunswick, Maine. This institution was in the year 1821--a quarter
of a century after its foundation--a highly honourable, but not a very
elaborately organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning.
I say it was not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions
depend upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple
New England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of
Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have
seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple, frugal
"country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp; exerting within
its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the forests and the
lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the amenities and humanities
and other collegiate graces, and offering a very sufficient education
to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen, politicians, and editors,
of the very active and knowledge-loving community that supported it.
It did more than this--it numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates,
and on the roll-call of its sons it has several distinguished names.
Among Hawthorne's fellow-students was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who
divides with our author the honour of being the most distinguished of
American men of letters. I know not whether Mr. Longfellow was especially
intimate with Hawthorne at this period (they were very good friends
later in life), but with two of his companions he formed a friendship
which lasted always. One of these was Franklin Pierce, who was destined
to fill what Hawthorne calls "the most august position in the world."
Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852. The other
was Horatio Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the Navy,
and to whom the charming prefatory letter of the collection of tales
published under the name of The Snow Image, is addressed. "If anybody
is responsible at this day for my being an author it is yourself. I
know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads together at
a country college--gathering blueberries in study-hours under those
tall Academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along
the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and grey squirrels
in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trout
in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward
through the forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it again--two
idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing
a hundred things the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been worse
for us--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he
was to be a writer of fiction." That is a very pretty picture, but it
is a picture of happy urchins at school, rather than of undergraduates
"panting," as Macaulay says, "for one and twenty." Poor Hawthorne was
indeed thousands of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge; that touch
about the blueberries and the logs on the Androscoggin tells the whole
story, and strikes the note, as it were, of his circumstances. But if
the pleasures at Bowdoin were not expensive, so neither were the penalties.
The amount of Hawthorne's collegiate bill for one term was less than
4l., and of this sum more than 9s. was made up of fines. The fines,
however, were not heavy. Mr. Lathrop prints a letter addressed by the
President to "Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hathorne," requesting her co-operation
with the officers of this college, "in the attempt to induce your sone
faithfully to observe teh laws of this institution." He has just been
fined fifty cents for playing cards for money during the preceding term.
"Perhaps he might not have gamed," the Professor adds, " were it not
for the influence of a student whom we have dismissed from college."
The biographer quotes a letter from Hawthorne to one of his sisters,
in which the writer says, in allusion to this remark, that it is a great
mistake to think that he has been led away by the wiched ones. "I was
fully as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed
me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to
commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced
by another into anything wrong." There is something in these few words
that accords with the impression that the observant reader of Hawthorne
gathers of the personal character that underlay his duskily-sportive
imagination--an impression of simple manliness and transparent honesty.
He appears to have been a fair scholar, but not a brilliant one; and
it is very probable that as the standard of scholarship at Bowdoin was
not high, he graduated none the less comfortably on this account. Mr.
Lathrop is able to testify to the fact, by no means a surprising one,
that he wrote verses at college, though the few stanzas that the biographer
quotes are not such as to make us especially regret that his rhyming
mood was a transient one. "The ocean hath its silent caves, Deep, quiet
and alone. Though there be fury on the waves, Beneath them there is
none." That quatrain may suffice to decorate our page. And in connection
with his college days I may mention his first novel, a short romance
entitled Fanshawe, which was published in Boston in 1828, three years
after he graduated. It was probably also written atter that event, but
the scene of the tale is laid at Bowdoin (which figures under an altered
name), and Hawthorne's attitude with regard to the book, even shortly
after it was published--was such as to assign it to this boyish period.
It was issued anonymously, but he so repented of his venture that he
annihilated the edition, of which, according to Mr. Lathrop, "not half
a dozen copies are now known to be extant." I have seen none of these
rare volumes, and I know nothing of Fanshawe but what the writer just
quoted relates. It is the story of a young lady who goes in rather an
odd fashion to reside at "Harley College" (equivalent of Bowdoin), under
the care and guardianship of Dr. Melmoth, the President of the institution,
a venerable, amiable, unworldly, and henpecked, scholar. Here she becomes
very naturally an object of interest to two of the students; in regard
to whom I cannot do better than quote Mr. Lathrop. One of these young
men "is Edward Wolcott, a wealthy, handsome, generous, healthy young
fellow from one of the seaport towns; and the other Fanshawe, the hero,
who is a poor but ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline
through overmuch devotion to books and meditation. Fanshawe, though
the deeper nature of the two, and intensely moved by his new passion,
perceiving that a union between himself and Ellen could not be a happy
one, resigns the hope of it from the beginning. But circumstances bring
him into intimate relation with her. The real action of the book, after
the preliminaries, takes up only some three days, and turns upon the
attempt of a man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his protection,
then marry her, and secure the fortune to which she is heiress. This
scheme is partly frustrated by circumstances, and Butler's purpose towards
Ellen thus becomes a much more sinister one. From this she is rescued
by Fanshawe, and knowing that he loves her, but is concealing his passion,
she gives him the opportunity and the right to claim her hand. For a
moment the rush of desire and hope is so great that he hesitates; then
he refuses to take advantage of her generosity, and parts with her for
a last time. Ellen becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had won her heart
from the first; and Fanshawe, sinking into rapid consumption, dies before
his class graduates." The story must have had a good deal of innocent
lightness; and it is a proof of how little the world of observation
lay open to Hawthorne, at this time, that he should have had no other
choice than to make his little drama go forward between the rather naked
walls of Bowdoin, where the presence of his heroine was an essential
incongruity. He was twenty-four years old, but the "world," in its social
sense, had not disclosed itself to him. He had, however, already, at
moments, a very pretty writer's touch, as witness this passage, quoted
by Mr. Lathrop, and which is worth transcribing. The heroine has gone
off with the nefarious Butler, and the good Dr. Melmoth starts in pursuit
of her, attended by young Wolcott. " 'Alas, youth, these are strange
times,' observed the President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate
set forth, like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray
damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species
of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there be no such encounter
in store for us; for I utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons.'
"'I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' replied Edward,
whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous comparison.
"'Aye, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the divine. 'But
wherewith shall I defend myself ? my hand being empty except of this
golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton.' "'One of these, if you
will accept it,' answered Edward, exhibiting a brace of pistols, 'will
serve to begin the conflict before you join the battle hand to hand.'
"'Nay. I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly instrument,
since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the bullet,' said
Dr. Melmoth. 'But were it not better, since we are so well provided
with artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to
some stone wall or other place of strength?' "'If I may presume to advise,'
said the squire, 'you, as being most valiant and experienced, should
ride forward, lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while
I annoy the enemy from afar.' "'Like Teucer, behind the shield of Ajax,'
interrupted Dr. Melmoth, 'or David with his stone and sling. No, no,
young man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, important
not only to the present age, but to posterity, for whose sake I must
take heed to my safety. But, lo! who rides yonder?'" On leaving college
Hawthorne had gone back to live at Salem. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[footnote to page 4:] It is proper that before I go further I should
acknowledge my large obligations to the oniy biography of our author,
of any considerabie length, that has been written--the little volume
entitled A Studio of Hawthorne, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the son-in-law
of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this ingenious and sympathetic
sketch, in which the author has taken great pains to collect the more
interesthig facts of Hawthorne's life, I am greatiy indebted. Mr. Lathrop's
work is not pitched in the key which many another writer would have
chosen, and his tone is not to my sense the truly critical one; but
without the help afforded by his elaborate essay the present little
volume could not have been prepared. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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