A Study Of Hawthorne by George Parsons Lathrop

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A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE

BY

GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.

[Illustration]

CONTENTS.

I. POINT OF VIEW

II. SALEM

III. BOYHOOD.--COLLEGE DAYS.--FANSHAWE

IV. TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES

V. AT BOSTON AND BROOK FARM

VI. THE OLD MANSE

VII. THE SCARLET LETTER.

VIII. LENOX AND CONCORD: PRODUCTIVE PERIOD

IX. ENGLAND AND ITALY

X. THE LAST ROMANCE

XI. PERSONALITY

XII. POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE

XIII. THE Loss AND THE GAIN

APPENDIX I.

APPENDIX II.

APPENDIX III.

INDEX

A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE.

I.

POINT OF VIEW.

This book was not designed as a biography, but is rather a portrait.
And, to speak more carefully still, it is not so much this, as my
conception of what a portrait of Hawthorne should be. For I cannot write
with the authority of one who had known him and had been formally
intrusted with the task of describing his life. On the other hand, I do
not enter upon this attempt as a mere literary performance, but have
been assisted in it by an inward impulse, a consciousness of sympathy
with the subject, which I may perhaps consider a sort of inspiration. My
guide has been intuition, confirmed and seldom confuted by research.
Perhaps it is even a favoring fact that I should never have seen Mr.
Hawthorne; a personality so elusive as his may possibly yield its traits
more readily to one who can never obtrude actual intercourse between
himself and the mind he is meditating upon. An honest report upon
personal contact always has a value denied to the reviews of after-
comers, yet the best criticism and biography is not always that of
contemporaries.

Our first studies will have a biographical scope, because a certain
grouping of facts is essential, to give point to the view which I am
endeavoring to present; and as Hawthorne's early life has hitherto been
but little explored, much of the material used in the earlier chapters
is now for the first time made public. The latter portion of the career
may be treated more sketchily, being already better known; though
passages will be found throughout the essay which have been developed
with some fulness, in order to maintain a correct atmosphere,
compensating any errors which mere opinions might lead to. Special
emphasis, then, must not be held to show neglect of points which my
space and scope prevent my commenting on. But the first outline
requiring our attention involves a distant retrospect.

The history of Hawthorne's genius is in some sense a summary of all New
England history.

From amid a simple, practical, energetic community, remarkable for its
activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to
dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly
enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light
and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods,
in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old
colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans.
Thrusting itself up into view through the drift of a later day, it must
not be confounded with other growths nourished only by that more recent
deposit; though the surface-drift had of course its own weighty
influence in the nourishment of it. The artistic results of a period of
action must sometimes be looked for at a point of time long subsequent,
and this was especially sure to be so in the first phases of New England
civilization. The settlers in this region, in addition to the burdens
and obstacles proper to pioneers, had to deal with the cares of forming
a model state and of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path
in which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an
ample enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were
enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and
exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm
Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's Saint's
Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would suffice to appease
whatever yearnings the immense experiment of their lives failed to
satisfy. Gradually, of course, the native press and new-comers from
England multiplied books in a community which held letters in unusual
reverence. But the continuous work of subduing a new country, the
dependence upon the mother-land for general literature, and finally the
excitements of the Revolutionary period, deferred the opportunity for
any aesthetic expression of the forces that had been at work here ever
since Winthrop stepped from the Arbella on to the shore of the New
World, with noble manliness and sturdy statesmanship enough in him to
uphold the whole future of a great people. When Hawthorne came,
therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding
centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we
owe the high qualities of New England,--a nature which is often so
easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,--this side,
long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found
expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various
elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius
revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had
piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence
imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all this part of
Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses
through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has
been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through
Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration
of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he
himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the
interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's
breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person
and his own blood the same elements, the same capabilities still
existed, however modified or differently ordered. The records of
Massachusetts Bay are full of suggestive incongruities between the
ideal, single-souled life which its founders hoped to lead, and the
jealousies, the opposing opinions, or the intervolved passions of
individuals and of parties, which sometimes unwittingly cloaked
themselves in religious tenets. Placing himself in the position of these
beings, then, and conscious of all the strong and various potencies of
emotion which his own nature, inherited from them, held in curb, it was
natural that Hawthorne should give weight to this contrast between the
intense, prisoned life of shut sensibilities and the formal outward
appearance to which it was moulded. This, indeed, is the source of
motive in much of his writing; notably so in "The Scarlet Letter." It is
thus that his figures get their tremendous and often terrible relief.
They are seen as close as we see our faces in a glass, and brought so
intimately into our consciousness that the throbbing of their passions
sounds like the mysterious, internal beating of our own hearts in our
own ears. And even when he is not dealing directly with themes or
situations closely related to that life, there may be felt in his style,
I think,--particularly in that of the "Twice-Told Tales,"--a union of
vigorous freedom, and graceful, shy restraint, a mingling of guardedness
which verges on severity with a quick and delicately thrilled
sensibility for all that is rich and beautiful and generous, which is
his by right of inheritance from the race of Non-conformist colonizers.
How subtile and various this sympathy is, between himself and the past
of his people, we shall see more clearly as we go on.

Salem was, in fact, Hawthorne's native soil, in all senses; as
intimately and perfectly so as Florence was the only soil in which Dante
and Michael Angelo could have had their growth. It is endlessly
suggestive, this way that historic cities have of expressing themselves
for all time in the persons of one or two men. Silently and with
mysterious precision, the genius comes to birth and ripens--sometimes
despite all sorts of discouragement--into a full bloom which we afterward
see could not have reached its maturity at any other time, and would
surely have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared
in any other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato;
Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris
secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled
expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the
eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the
capital of the Anglo-Saxon race today. In like manner the sober little
New England town which has played a so much more obscure, though in its
way hardly less significant part, sits quietly enshrined and preserved
in Hawthorne's singularly imperishable prose.

Of course, Salem is not to be compared with Florence otherwise than
remotely or partially. Florence was naturally the City of Flowers, in a
figurative sense as well as in the common meaning. Its splendid,
various, and full-pulsed life found spontaneous issue in magnificent
works of art, in architecture, painting, poetry, and sculpture,--things
in which New England was quite sterile. Salem evolved the artistic
spirit indirectly, and embodied itself in Hawthorne by the force of
contrast: the weariness of unadorned life which must have oppressed many
a silent soul before him at last gathered force for a revolt in his
person, and the very dearth which had previously reigned was made to
contribute to the beauty of his achievement. The unique and delicate
perfume of surprise with which his genius issued from its crevice still
haunts his romances. A quality of homeliness dwells in their very
strangeness and rarity which endears them to us unspeakably, and
captivates the foreign sense as well; so that one of Hawthorne's chief
and most enduring charms is in a measure due to that very barrenness of
his native earth which would at first seem to offer only denial to his
development. It is in this direction that we catch sight of the analogy
between his intellectual unfolding and that of the great Florentines. It
consists in his drawing up into himself the nourishment furnished by the
ground upon which he was born, and making the more and the less
productive elements reach a climax of characteristic beauty. One marked
difference, however, is that there was no abundant and inspiriting
municipal life of his own time which could enter into his genius: it was
the consciousness of the past of the place that affected him. He himself
has expressed as much: "This old town of Salem--my native place, though
I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and 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.... And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within
me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be
content to call affection.... But the sentiment has likewise its moral
quality. 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 kind of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the
present phase of the town."

It is by briefly reviewing that past, then trying to reproduce in
imagination the immediate atmosphere of Hawthorne's youth, and comparing
the two, that we shall best arrive at the completion of our proposed
portrait. We have first to study the dim perspective and the suggestive
coloring of that historic background from which the author emerges, and
then to define clearly his own individual traits as they appear in his
published works and Note-Books.

The eagerness which admirers of such a genius show, to learn all
permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the
vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that
it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose
winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and
touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two objections
may be urged against giving such details here: one is, that Hawthorne
especially disapproved the writing of a Life of himself; the other, that
the history of Salem and the works of Hawthorne are easily accessible to
any one, without intervention.

Of the first it may frankly be said, indeed, that Hawthorne alone could
have adequately portrayed his life for us; though in the same breath it
should be added that the idea of his undertaking to do it is almost
preposterous. To such a spirit as his, the plan would have had an
exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of
imposition. The mass of trivial details essential to the accurate and
consecutive account of an entire life could never have gained his
serious attention: his modesty would have made as little of them as of
boyish slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to
observers, but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer.
There is something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the
spectacle presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of
his childhood with senile vanity and persistence, and fashioning with
avaricious care the silver shrine and crystal case in which--like a very
different sort of Saint Charles Borromeo--he hopes to have the reverent
ages view him, is one which increases my sense of his defective though
splendid personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling,
that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with
him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In
the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good.
His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of
biography is in these somewhat abated, so that they have been of
incalculable use in assisting the popular eye to see him as he really
was. Other material for illustration of his daily life is somewhat
meagre; and yet, on one account, this is perhaps a cause for rejoicing.
There is a halo about every man of large poetic genius which it is
difficult for the world to wholly miss seeing, while he is alive.
Afterward, when the biographer comes, we find the actual dimensions, the
physical outline, more insisted upon. That is the biographer's business;
and it is not altogether his fault, though partly so, that the public
regard is thus turned away from the peculiar but impalpable sign that
floats above the poet's actual stature. But, under this subtile
influence, forgetting that old, luminous hallucination (if it be one),
we suddenly feel the want of it, are dissatisfied; and, not perceiving
that the cause lies largely with us, we fall to detracting from the
subject. Thus it is fortunate that we have no regular biography of
Shakespere authoritative enough to fade our own private conceptions of
him; and it is not an unmixed ill that some degree of similar mystery
should soften and give tone to the life of Hawthorne. Not that Hawthorne
could ever be seriously disadvantaged by a complete record; for behind
the greatness of the writer, in this case, there stands a person eminent
for strength and loveliness as few men are eminent in their private
lives. But it is with dead authors somewhat as it proved with those
Etruscan warriors, who, seen through an eyehole lying in perfect state
within their tombs, crumbled to a powder when the sepulchres were
opened. The contact of life and death is too unsympathetic. Whatever
stuff the writer be made of, it seems inevitable that he should suffer
injury from exposure to the busy and prying light of subsequent life,
after his so deep repose in death.

"Would you have me a damned author?" exclaims Oberon, in "The Devil in
Manuscript," [Footnote: See the Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.]
"to undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint praise
bestowed against the giver's conscience!... An outlaw from the
protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot might
spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death!" This, to
be sure, is a heated statement, in the mouth of a young author who is
about to cast his unpublished works into the fire; but the dread
expressed here is by no means unfounded. Even the publication of
Hawthorne's Note-Books has put it in the power of various writers of the
day to assume an omniscience not altogether just, and far from
acceptable. Why, then, should further risk of this be incurred, by
issuing the present work?

It is precisely to put a limit to misconstructions, as well as to
meet--however imperfectly--the desire of genuine appreciators, that it
has been written. If this study for a portrait fulfils its aim, it will
at least furnish an outline, fix a definite shape, within which whatever
is observed by others may find its place with a truer effect and more
fitting relation. The mistakes that have been made, indeed, are in no
wise alarming ones; and it would be difficult to find any author who has
been more carefully considered, on the whole, or with such generally
fair conclusions, as Hawthorne. Still, if one sees even minor
distortions current, it can do no harm to correct them. Besides, there
has as yet been no thorough attempt at a consistent synthetic
portraiture; and the differences of different critics' estimates need
some common ground to meet and be harmonized upon. If this can be
supplied, there will be less waste of time in future studies of the same
subject.

It will be seen, therefore, that my book makes no pretension to the
character of a Life. The wish of Hawthorne on this point would alone be
enough, to prevent that. If such a work is to be undertaken, it should
be by another hand, in which the right to set aside this wish is much
more certainly vested than in mine. But I have thought that an earnest
sympathy with the subject might sanction the present essay. Sympathy,
after all, is the talisman which may preserve even the formal biographer
from giving that injury to his theme just spoken of. And if the insight
which guides me has any worth, it will present whatever material has
already been made public with a selection and shaping which all
researchers might not have time to bestow.

Still, I am quite alive to the difficulties of my task; and I am
conscious that the work may to some appear supererogatory. Stricture and
praise are, it will perhaps be said, equally impertinent to a fame so
well established. Neither have I any rash hope of adding a single ray to
the light of Hawthorne's high standing. But I do not fear the charge of
presumption. Time, if not the present reader, will supply the right
perspective and proportion.

On the ground of critical duty there is surely defence enough for such
an attempt as the one now offered; the relative rank of Hawthorne, and
other distinctions touching him, seem to call for a fuller discussion
than has been given them. I hope to prove, however, that my aim is in no
wise a partisan one. Criticism is appreciative estimation. It is
inevitable that the judgments of competent and cultivated persons should
flatly contradict each other, as well as those of incompetent persons;
and this whether they are coeval or of different dates. At the last, it
is in many respects matter of simple individual impression; and there
will always be persons of high intelligence whom it will be impossible
to make coincide with us entirely, touching even a single author. So
that the best we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of
our diverse admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way,
everything good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become
catholic.

Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it? But
there are two ways in which he may express himself,--through speech and
through silence,--both of them sacred alike. Which of these we will use
on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too surely fraught
with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of arbitrary
prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that I
have adopted only another kind of silence.

[Illustration]

II.

SALEM.

Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand
Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once
transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different
kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers,
that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a
man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he
died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years
before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of
the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects;
almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations,
opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action,
these changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold
between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable
space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne
then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of
Parnell which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: "A
poet while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much
attention.... When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to
investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning
are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian
splendor." The bustle of American life certainly does away with "the
dews of morning" very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to
reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the
century. But there are resources for doing so. To begin with, we shall
view Salem as it is. Vigorous and thriving still, the place has
fortunately not drifted so far from its moorings of seventy years since
as to take us out of our bearings, in considering its present aspect.
Pace its quiet, thoroughfares awhile, and you will find them leading
softly and easily into the past.

You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place
wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem
impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the
streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due
understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote
themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic
events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this
stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must
approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They
will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort.
Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink,
as it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex
Street, or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come
upon shy, ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses
stand out here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold
the whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with
carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some
simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand
on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that
hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint
gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron
gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always
with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps
rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth
caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right
magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient pumps
like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear and sparkling
little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into so many and
such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now disappeared, having
been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of all, by
ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over the past
and the present of the place. Looking down from here you behold the
ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by
soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge
gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or
a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising
slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach
a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at
intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears a probable
aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would have chosen for
the standpoint of his "Sights from a Steeple"; and the two kinds of
spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the Puritan aspiration
that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond the gray and
sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective seems to rise
above it and to dominate the place with its dim, half-threatening blue;
as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great measure, bringing
first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many successive
generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary privateering
or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too, Hawthorne's name
again is connected, as we shall presently notice. Then, quitting the
brimming blue, our eyes return over the "flat, unvaried surface covered
chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to
architectural beauty," with its "irregularity which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame"; and retracing the line upon
which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in "Main
Street," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] we
fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name. At its
foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are
exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once
overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the
land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest
period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete
as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs
from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow
upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world
full of witches. But here on the hill there is no special suggestion of
the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging
Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the witches and
their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering with their own
barren little dwellings the three sides of the height facing the town.
Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line. One small area at
the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of
some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this
space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory
sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to
commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here
endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful
vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from
this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that
hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting
place for execution, indeed! It looms up visible for many miles of lower
country around; and as you stand upon the top, earth seems to fall away
with such a fatal ease around it!

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