The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne Part 4

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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.body. 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 inst.i.tution. 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 s.e.x 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s in spite of his reserved manners, but he held no cla.s.s offices that we hear of, except a place on a committee of the Athenaean Society with Franklin Pierce. Cla.s.s days and cla.s.s suppers, so prolific of small honors, were not introduced at Bowdoin until some years later. He graduated eighteenth in a cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s would have ent.i.tled 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 cla.s.smates, 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 ma.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tles afford no indication of their character. He carried them to a publisher, who received him politely and promised to examine them, but one month pa.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 quant.i.ty, 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 n.o.ble renunciation of the woman who is devoted to him, purely from a sense of grat.i.tude, 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.sociates, 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 pa.s.sed in the street. Beautiful visions came to him, instead of sermonizing ladies, patronizing money-changers, aggressive upstarts, grimacing wiseacres, and that large cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 mult.i.tude.... 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 a.s.sisted 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-pa.s.sengers, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance, he begged of Hawthorne the use of certain unpublished ma.n.u.scripts, which he still had in his possession. Hawthorne with unlimited contempt told the fellow that he might keep them, and then wrote to Bridge: