History of American Literature Part 21

The sterling honesty and directness of Th.o.r.eau's character are reflected in his style. He says, "The one great rule of composition--and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this--is to _speak the truth_."

This was his aim in presenting the results of the experience of his soul, as well as of his senses. If he exaggerated the importance of a certain way of regarding things, he did so only because he thought the exaggeration was necessary to secure attention for that particular truth, which would even then not be apprehended at its full value. His style has a peculiar flavor, difficult to describe. Lowell's characterization of Th.o.r.eau's style has hardly been surpa.s.sed. "His range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. There are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil."

Th.o.r.eau's style shows remarkable power of description. No American has surpa.s.sed him in unique description of the most varied incidents in the procession of all the seasons. We shall find frequent ill.u.s.trations of this power scattered through his _Journal_:--

"_June_ 1, 1857. I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me.... He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his gla.s.sichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling string ... the meadow is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms, in the orchard."

Even more characteristic is an entry in his _Journal_ for June 11, 1840, where he tries to fathom the consciousness of the solitary bittern:--

"With its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet? It has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing in such hours and in such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it."

In this entry, which was probably never revised for publication, we note three of his characteristics: his images "fresh from the soil," adding vigor to his style; his mystic and poetic communion with nature; and the peculiar transcendental desire to pa.s.s beyond human experience and to supplement it with new revelations of the gospel of nature.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1804-1864

[Ill.u.s.tration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]

ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.--William Hathorne, the ancestor of America's greatest prose writer, sailed at the age of twenty-three from England on the ship _Arbella_ with John Winthrop (p. 30), and finally settled at Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts. He brought with him a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, a very unusual book for the library of a New England Puritan.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAWTHORNES BIRTHPLACE, SALEM, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS]

John Hathorne, a son of the first settler, was a judge of the poor creatures who were put to death as witches at Salem in 1692. The great romance writer says that this ancestor "made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. ...I, the present writer, as their representative, 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 many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed." Tradition says that the husband of one of the tortured victims appealed to G.o.d to avenge her sufferings and murder. Probably the ancestral curse hanging over _The House of the Seven Gables_ would not have been so vividly conceived, if such a curse had not been traditional in the Hawthorne family.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England ancestor, and the first of his family to add a "w" to his name, was born in Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port in 1808. Hawthorne's mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for a while on the sh.o.r.e of Sebago Lake, Maine. "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I got my cursed habits of solitude." Shyness and aversion to meeting people became marked characteristics.

His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ and Shakespeare's plays were special favorites.

Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ was the first book that he bought with his own money. Bunyan and Spenser probably fostered his love of the allegorical method of presenting truth, a method that is in evidence in the bulk of Hawthorne's work. He even called his daughter Una, after one of Spenser's allegorical heroines, and, following the suggestion in the _Faerie Queene_, gave the name of "Lion" to the large cat that came to her as a playmate.

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he met such students as Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, and Horatio Bridge, in after years a naval officer, who published in 1893 a delightful volume called _Personal Reminiscences of Nathaniel Hawthorne_. These friends changed the course of Hawthorne's life. In his dedication of _The Snow Image_ to Bridge in 1850, Hawthorne says, "If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself."

LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP.--After leaving college, Milton spent nearly six years in studious retirement; but Hawthorne after graduating at Bowdoin, in 1825, pa.s.sed in seclusion at Salem a period twice as long. Here he lived the life of a recluse, frequently postponing his walks until after dark. He was busy serving his apprenticeship as an author. In 1828 he paid one hundred dollars for the publication of _Fanshawe_, an unsuccessful short romance. In mortification he burned the unsold copies, and his rejected short stories often shared the same fate. He was so depressed that in 1836 his friend Bridge went quietly to a publisher and by guaranteeing him against loss induced him to bring out Hawthorne's volume ent.i.tled _Twice--Told Tales_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MISS PEABODYS DRAWING FOR "THE GENTLE BOY"]

The Peabodys of Salem then invited the author to their home, where he met the artistic Miss Sophia Peabody, who made an ill.u.s.tration for his fine historical story, _The Gentle Boy_. Of her he wrote, "She is a flower to be worn in no man's bosom, but was lent from Heaven to show the possibilities of the human soul." We find that not long after he wrote in his _American Note-Books_:--

"All that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."

He was thinking of Sophia Peabody's creative touch, for he had become engaged to her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 'THE OLD MANSE,' HAWTHORNE'S FIRST CONCORD HOME]

Fired with the ambition of making enough money to enable him to marry, he secured a subordinate position in the Boston customhouse, from which the spoils system was soon responsible for his discharge. He then invested in Brook Farm a thousand dollars which he had saved, thinking that this would prove a home to which he could bring his future wife and combine work and writing in an ideal way. A year's trial of this life convinced him of his mistake. He was then thirty eight, and much poorer for his last experiment; but he withdrew and in a few months married Miss Peabody and took her to live in the famous Old Manse at Concord. The first entry in his _American Note-Books_ after this transforming event is:--

"And what is there to write about? Happiness has no succession of events, because it is a part of eternity, and we have been living in eternity ever since we came to this old manse. Like Enoch we seem to have been translated to the other state of being, without having pa.s.sed through death."

The history of American literature can record no happier marriage and no more idyllic life than this couple lived for nearly four years in the Old Manse. While residing here, Hawthorne wrote another volume, known as _Mosses from an Old Manse_ (1846). The only serpent to enter that Eden was poverty. Hawthorne's pen could not support his family. He found himself in debt before he had finished his fourth year in Concord. Moncure D. Conway, writing Hawthorne's _Life_ in 1890, the year before American authors were protected by international copyright, says, "In no case has literature, pure and simple, ever supported an American author, unless, possibly, if he were a bachelor." Hawthorne's college friends, Bridge and Pierce, came to his a.s.sistance, and used their influence with President Polk to secure for Hawthorne the position of surveyor of customs at Salem, with a yearly salary of twelve hundred dollars.

HIS PRIME AND LATER YEARS.--He kept his position as head customs officer at Salem for three years. Soon after President Taylor was inaugurated in 1849, the spoils system again secured Hawthorne's removal. When he came home dejected with this news, his wife smiled and said, "Oh, then you can write your book!" _The Scarlet Letter_, published in 1850, was the result. The publisher printed five thousand copies, all that he had ever expected to sell, and then ordered the type to be distributed at once. Finding in ten days, however, that every copy had been sold, he gave the order to have the type reset and permanent plates made. Hawthorne had at last, at the age of forty-six, become one of the greatest writers of English prose romance.

From this time he wrote but few short tales.

He left Salem in the year of the publication of _The Scarlet Letter_, never again to return to it as a place of residence, although his pen continued to help immortalize his birthplace.

In 1852 he bought of Bronson Alcott in Concord a house since known as the "Wayside." This was to be Hawthorne's American home during his remaining years. Here he had a tower room so constructed as to be well-nigh inaccessible to visitors, and he also had a romantic study bower built in the pine trees on a hill back of his house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAWTHORNE'S PINE STUDY, CONCORD]

His college friend, Pierce, was inaugurated President of the United States in 1853, and he appointed Hawthorne consul at Liverpool. This consulship then netted the holder between $5000 and $7000 a year. After nearly four years' service in this position, he resigned and traveled in Europe with his family. They lived in Rome sufficiently long for him to absorb the local color for his romance of _The Marble Faun_. He remained abroad for seven years. The record of his travels and impressions may be found in his _English Note-Books_ and in his _French and Italian Note-Books_. _Our Old Home_, a volume based on his _English Note-Books_, is a more finished account of his thoughts and experiences in England.

In 1860 he returned quietly to his Concord home. His health was failing, but he promised to write for the _Atlantic Monthly_ another romance, called _The Dolliver Romance_. This, however, was never finished, and _The Marble Faun_ remains the last of his great romances. His health continued to fail, and in May, 1864, Pierce, thinking that a trip might prove beneficial, started with him on a journey to the White Mountains. Hawthorne retired for the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning Pierce found that Hawthorne's wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been gratified. He had pa.s.sed away before the completion of his fifty-ninth year. He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord. His cla.s.smate, Longfellow, wrote:--

"There in seclusion and remote from men, The wizard hand lies cold."

"TWICE TOLD TALES" AND "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE."--Many do not realize that these two volumes contain eighty-two tales or sketches and that they represent the most of Hawthorne's surviving literary work for the first forty-five years of his life. The t.i.tle for _Twice-Told Tales_ (1837) was probably suggested by the line from Shakespeare's _King John:_ "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale." The second volume, _Mosses from an Old Manse_ (1846), took its name from Hawthorne's first Concord home. His last collection is called _The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales_ (1851).

Each one of these volumes contains some of his short-story masterpieces, although, taken as a whole, the collection in _Mosses from an Old Manse_ shows the greatest power and artistic finish.

The so-called tales in these volumes are of several different types. (1) There is the story which presents chiefly allegorical or symbolic truth, such as _Rappacini's Daughter, The Great Stone Face, The Birthmark, The Artist of the Beautiful, and The Snow Image._ The last story, one of the greatest of this cla.s.s, relates how two children make a companion out of a snow image, how Jack Frost and the pure west wind endow this image with life and give them a little "snow sister." She grows more vigorous with every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children.

Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring something of Eden back to our everyday lives. This story, like so many of the others, was written with a moral purpose. There are to-day people who measure their acquaintances by their estimates of this allegorical story.

(2) Another type of Hawthorne's stories ill.u.s.trates the history of New England. Such are _The Gentle Boy_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_, _Endicotts Red Cross_, and _Lady Eleanore's Mantle_. We may even include in this list _Young Goodman Brown_, in one sense an unreal and fantastic tale, but in another, historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of witches in a forest. If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker persecution of New England, let us open _The Twice-Told Tales_ and read the story of _The Gentle Boy_, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and invokes woe upon the Puritans.

(3) We shall occasionally find in these volumes what eighteenth-century readers of the _Spectator_ would have called a "paper," that is, a delightful bit of mixed description and narration, "a narrative essay" or "a sketch," as some prefer to call it. In this cla.s.s we may include _The Old Manse_, _The Old Apple-Dealer_, _Sights from a Steeple_, _A Rill from the Town Pump_, and the masterly _Introduction to The Scarlet Letter_.

_The Old Manse_, the first paper in _Mosses from an Old Manse_, is excellent. Hawthorne succeeds in taking his readers with him up the a.s.sabeth River, in a boat made by Th.o.r.eau. We agree with Hawthorne that a lovelier river "never flowed on earth,--nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination." When we return with him at the end of that day's excursion, we are almost tempted to say that we can never again be enslaved as before. We feel that we can say with him:--

"We were so free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again tomorrow. When we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the a.s.sabeth were whispering to us, 'Be free! Be free.'"

These volumes ent.i.tle Hawthorne to be ranked among the greatest of short-story writers. Like Irving, Hawthorne did not take the air line directness of narration demanded by the modern short story; but the moral truth and beauty of his tales will long prove their elixir of life, after the pa.s.sing of many a modern short story which has divested itself of everything except the mere interest in narration.

CHILDREN'S STORIES.--Hawthorne's _Grandfather's Chair_ (1841) is a series of simple stories of New England history, from the coming of the Mayflower to the death of Samuel Adams in 1803. Hawthorne's greatest success in writing for children is to be found in his _A Wonder Book_ (1851) and _Tanglewood Tales_ (1853). In these volumes he has adapted the old cla.s.sical myths to the tastes of American children. His unusual version of these myths meets two supreme tests. Children like it, and are benefited by it. Many would rejoice to be young enough again to hear for the first time the story of _The Golden Touch_,--how Midas prized gold above all things, how he secured the golden touch, and how the flies that alighted on his nose fell off little nuggets of gold. What a fine thing we thought the golden touch until he touched his beautiful little daughter, Marygold! No sermon could better have taught us that gold is not the thing above all to be desired.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES]

Hawthorne stands in the front rank of a very small number whose writings continue to appeal to the children of succeeding generations. He loved and understood children and shared their experiences. He was one of those whose sixteenth amendment to the Const.i.tution reads, "The rights and caprices of children in the United States shall not be denied or abridged on account of age, s.e.x, or formal condition of tutelage."

GREAT ROMANCES.--Hawthorne wrote four long romances: _The Scarlet Letter_ (1850), the scene of which is laid in Boston in Governor Winthrop's time, _The House of the Seven Gables_ (1851), with the scene laid in Salem, _The Marble Faun_ (1860), in Rome, and _The Blithedale Romance_ (1852), in an ideal community similar to Brook Farm. The first three of these works have a great moral truth to present. Accordingly, the details of scene, plot, description, and conversation are handled so as to emphasize this central truth.

_The Scarlet Letter_ was written to show that the consequences of a sin cannot be escaped and that many different lives are influenced by one wrong deed. The lives of Hester Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth are wrecked by the crime in _The Scarlet Letter_. Roger Chillingworth is transformed into a demon of revenge. So malevolent does he become that Hester wonders "whether the tender gra.s.s of early spring would not be blighted beneath him." She would not be surprised to see him "spread bat's wings and flee away." The penalty paid by Arthur Dimmesdale is to appear to be what he is not, and this is a terrible punishment to his sensitive nature. The slow steps by which his soul is tortured and darkened are followed with wonderful clearness, and the agony of his soul alone with G.o.d is presented with an almost Shakespearean pen. The third sufferer is the beautiful Hester Prynne. Her fate is the most terrible because she not only writhes under a severe punishment inflicted by the authorities, but also suffers from daily, even hourly, remorse. To help a.s.suage her grief, and to purify her soul, Hester becomes the self-effacing good Samaritan of the village. Her uncomplaining courage, n.o.ble beauty, and self-sacrifice make her the center of this tragic story.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CUSTOMERS OF ONE CENT SHOP, "HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES"]

Shakespeare proposed no harder problem than the one in _The Scarlet Letter_,--the problem of the expiation of sin. The completeness with which everything is subordinated to the moral question involved, and the intensity with which this question is treated, show the Puritanic temperament and the imaginative genius of the author. Hawthorne is Puritan in the earnestness of his purpose, but he is wholly the artist in carrying out his design. Such a combination of Puritan and artist has given to American literature in _The Scarlet Letter_ a masterpiece, somber yet beautiful, ethical yet poetic, incorporating both the spirit of a past time and the lessons of an eternal present. This incomparable romance is unified in conception, symmetrical in form, and n.o.bly simple in expression.

Far less somber than _The Scarlet Letter_ is _The House of the Seven Gables_. This has been called a romance of heredity, because the story shows the fulfillment of a curse upon the distant descendants of the wrongdoer, old Judge Pyncheon. The present inhabitants of the Pyncheon mansion, who are among the worst sufferers, are Hepzibah Pyncheon and her brother Clifford. Hawthorne's pages contain nothing more pathetic than the picture of helplessness presented by these two innocent souls, bearing a burden of crime not their own. The brightness of the story comes through the simple, joyous, home-making nature of Phoebe Pyncheon. She it is who can bring a smile to Clifford's face and can attract custom to Hepzibah's cent shop. Hawthorne never loses sight of his purpose. The curse finds its last victim, and the whole story is a slow preparation for this event. The scenes, however, in which Phoebe, that "fair maker of sunshine," reigns as queen, are so peaceful and attractive, the cent shop, which Hepzibah is forced to open for support, offers so many opportunities for comic as well as pathetic incidents, and the outcome of the story is so satisfactory that it is the brightest of all Hawthorne's long romances.

In _The Marble Faun_, Hawthorne's last complete romance, the Puritan problem of sin is transplanted to Italian soil. The scene is laid in Rome, where the art of Michael Angelo and Raphael, the secret orders of the Church, the tragic history of the eternal city, with its catacombs and ruins, furnish a rich and varied background for the story. So faithfully indeed are the galleries, churches, and historic corners of Rome described, that _The Marble Faun_ has served as a guide for the cultured visitor. This expression of opinion by the late A. P. Stanley (1815-1881), a well-known author and dean of Westminster Abbey, is worth remembering: "I have read it seven times. I read it when it appeared, as I read everything from that English master. I read it again when I expected to visit Rome, then when on the way to Rome, again while in Rome, afterwards to revive my impressions of Rome. Recently I read it again because I wanted to." In this historic setting, Hawthorne places four characters: Donatello, the faun, Miriam, the beautiful and talented young artist, Kenyon, the American sculptor, and Hilda, the Puritan maid who tends the lamp of the Virgin in her tower among the doves and makes true copies of the old masters. From the beginning of the story some mysterious evil power is felt, and this power gains fuller and fuller ascendency over the characters. What that is the author does not say. It seems the very spirit of evil itself that twines its shadow about human beings and crushes them if they are not strong enough to resist.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HILDA'S TOWER, VIA PORTOGHESE, ROME]