XIV

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

In our study of the New England Renaissance we have glanced at Emerson, whom we may call its prophet; at Whittier, who so admirably phrased its aspirations for reform; at Longfellow, its academic poet; at Lowell, its humanist; and at Holmes, its rationalist. The period produced but one other literary figure of equal eminence with these, - Nathaniel Hawthorne, above and beyond the others an artist.

His origin was different from that of his contemporaries whom we have lately considered. Emerson and Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes were all born into the social class which at their time was dominant in New England; and Whittier sprang from sturdy country yeomen. Hawthorne came from a family eminent in early colonial days, but long lapsed into that sort of obscurity which modern cant would call social degeneracy. His father, a ship captain of the period when New England commerce was most vigorous, died in Guiana when Hawthorne was only four years old; and the boy, who had been born at Salem in 1804, grew up there in his mother's care, singularly solitary. His youthful experience was confined to Salem, then a more important town than now, but already showing symptoms of decline. He made at least one prolonged visit in search of health to the woods of Maine. To this day wild and then wilder still, these forests early made familiar to him the atmosphere of our ancestral wilderness. In 1821 he went to Bowdoin College. There he was a classmate of Longfellow, and of Franklin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States. His friendship with

the latter was close and lifelong. In 1825, they took their degrees at Bowdoin.

For the ensuing fourteen years Hawthorne lived with his mother at Salem, so quietly that his existence was hardly known to the townsfolk of that gossipy little Yankee seaport. He spent much time indoors, constantly writing but neither successful nor generally recognised as an author. He took long solitary walks, and his personal appearance is said to have been romantic and picturesque. In 1839 he was appointed a clerk in the Boston Custom House; in 1841 the spoils system turned him out of office, and for a few months he was at Brook Farm. The next year he married, and from then until 1846 he lived at Concord, writing and by this time pleasantly recognised as a writer of short stories. From 1846 to 1849 he was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem. During

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the ensuing four years, when he resided at various places in Massachusetts, he produced his three most characteristic long books, the "Scarlet Letter," the "House of the Seven Gables," and the "Blithedale Romance," as well as his two volumes of mythological stories for children, the "Wonderbook" and "Tanglewood Tales." In 1853, his friend, President Pierce, made him Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad until 1860, passing some time during his later stay there in Italy. From this experience resulted the "Marble Faun.” In 1860, he came home and returned to Concord, where he lived thenceforth. He died in the White Mountains, on the 18th of May, 1864.

Chronologically, then, Hawthorne's position in New England literature seems earlier than that of his contemporaries at whom we have glanced. He was only a year younger than Emerson, he was three years older than Longfellow and Whittier, five years older than Holmes, and fifteen years older than Lowell. He died thirty-six years ago; and Emerson and Longfellow survived until 1882, Lowell till 1891, Whittier till 1892, and Holmes till 1895. Though Hawthorne, how

ever, was the first to die of this little company, he had been a fellow-writer with them during the thirty years when the full literary career of all had declared itself. In the time which followed Hawthorne's death, the survivors wrote and published copiously; but none produced anything which much altered the reputation he had achieved while Hawthorne was still alive. So far as character goes, in short, the literature of✓ renascent New England was virtually complete in 1864.

Under such circumstances chronology becomes accidental. The order in which to consider contemporaries is a question simply of their relative character. We had good reason, then, for reserving Hawthorne till the last; for above all the rest, as we have already remarked, he was an artist. This term is so

general that we may well linger on it for a moment. A little story of the Yankee country may help define our meaning. Not long ago a sportsman, who had started out in a dory along with a native fisherman, found himself becalmed at night off the New Hampshire coast. Observing that the fisherman, who had sat quiet for a little while, was staring at the North Star, he asked what he was thinking about. "I was thinkin'," drawled out the Yankee, "how fur off you'd hev to be to get that south of you." Whereupon he shook himself and fell to his oars. That momentary experience, you see, had awakened in a Yankee countryman something like imaginative emotion. He spoke it out, and then forgot it; but just for a moment he had felt the impulse of artistic spirit, and had found relief in an expression imaginative enough to be memorable. Some such experience as this everybody knows sometimes, many people often; and occasionally there are born into the world natures so sensitive to impressions that they find almost every day overcharged with emotions from which they can find relief only in attempts at expression. Generally such expression is of only momentary value. and again, however, some human being proves endowed not only with sensitiveness to impulse but with mastery of expression

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as well. Such a man, whatever his art, is an artist; and such was Hawthorne.

It chances that fate has posthumously treated him with exceptional irony. The general solitude of his life was partly due to a fastidious reticence which made him shrink from personal revelation. This trait was not inherited by his children; so since his death we have had more publications from his note-books, and more records of his private life than is the case with anybody else in American literary history. Among these posthumous records none are more characteristic or valuable than the first which appeared. The "Passages from American Note Books," published in 1868, extend over many years, mostly before Hawthorne's sojourn abroad. For our purposes they are perhaps the most significant of all his work. They show him in various parts of the New England country, freshly impressed almost every day with some aspect of life which aroused in him concrete reaction. He actually published tales enough to establish more than one literary reputation. These note-books show how few fragments of his wealthy imaginative impulse he ever coined into finished literary form. They reveal, too, another characteristic fact. Though Hawthorne wrote hardly any formal verse, though his natural impulse to expression rarely if ever took metrical form, ✓ he was a genuine poet. His only vehicle of expression was language, and to him language meant not only words but rhythm too. Even in these memoranda, then, which he never expected to stray beyond his note-books, you feel the constant touch of one whose meaning is so subtle that its most careless expression must fall into delicately careful phrasing.

Such a temperament would inevitably have declared itself anywhere. Some critics, then, have lamented the accident which confined Hawthorne's experience for almost fifty years to isolated, æsthetically starved New England. In this opinion there is considerable justice. The extreme localism of Hawthorne's life, until his maturity was passing into age, may

very likely have made world literature poorer. The "Marble Faun" is our only indication of what he might have done if his sensitive youth had been exposed to the unfathomably human influence of Europe. Yet, whatever our loss, we can hardly regret an accident so fortunate to the literature of New England.

This Hawthorne, whose artistic temperament would have been remarkable anywhere, chanced to be born in an old Yankee seaport, just at its zenith. It was soon to be stricken by the Embargo, and swiftly to be surpassed by a more prosperous neighbour. When he knew it best, it was like some iridescent old sea-shell, whose denizens are dead and gone, but whose hollows still faintly vibrate with the voices of the illimitable waters. From this passing, ancestral Salem he visited those woods of Maine which were still so primeval as to recall the shadowy forests whose mystery confronted the immigrant Puritans. Then he lived for a while in Boston, just when Transcendentalism was most in the air; and he had a glimpse of Brook Farm; and he passed more than one year in the Old Manse at Concord; and finally he strayed among the hills of Berkshire. Until he finally set sail for England, however, he had never known any earthly region which had not traditionally been dominated by the spirit of the Puritans; nor any which in his own time was not alive, so far as life was in it, with the spirit of the New England Renaissance.

In considering this period, we have hitherto dwelt only on its most obvious aspect. Like any revelation of new life, it seemed to open the prospect of an illimitably excellent future. Amid such buoyant hopes people think little of the past, tending indeed to regard it like some night of darkness to which at last the dawn has brought an end. They forget the infinite. mysteries of the night, its terrors and its dreamy beauties, and the courage of those who throughout its tremulous course have watched and prayed. So when the dawn comes they