HAWTHORNE

BY

Henry James, Junr.

London

MACMILLAN AND CO

1879

CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS 1
CHAPTER II.
EARLY MANHOOD 25
CHAPTER III.
EARLY WRITINGS 52
CHAPTER IV.
BROOK FARM AND CONCORD 76
CHAPTER V.
THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS 105
CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND AND ITALY 147

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CHAPTER VII.
LAST YEARS 171

HAWTHORNE.
[1]

CHAPTER I.

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[2]
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[3] 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
recognises, 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

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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[4] 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—MM. 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[5] 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 Biglow 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.[1] 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 [6]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 by 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 ancestors (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 life-long royal Governor 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

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sturdy fighting man, doing solid execution upon both the inward and outward enemies of the State. The latter
were the savages, the former[7] 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 make 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[8] 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 any of his better deeds, though these were many."

FOOTNOTE

[1] It is proper that before I go further I should acknowledge my large obligations to the only biography of our
author, of any considerable length, that has been written—the little volume entitled A Study 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 interesting facts of
Hawthorne's life, I am greatly 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.

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 may 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 by 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[9] 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

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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[10] 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 themselves 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[11] 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 dead-weight for any family to carry, and we venture to imagine that
the Hathornes were dull and depressed. They did what they could, however, to improve their situation; they
trod the Salem streets as little as possible. They 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,[12] came of

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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[13] 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 in 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[14] 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 powerfully 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

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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[15] 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[16] 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. [17]

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

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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[18] 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[19] 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[20]
(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 river-ward 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

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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[21] 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 son
faithfully to observe the 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 wicked 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[22] 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 after 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
sea-port towns; and the other Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor but ambitious recluse, already passing into a
decline[23] 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

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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[24] 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.

[25]

CHAPTER II.

EARLY MANHOOD.
The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or most brilliant phase of Hawthorne's life; they strike
me indeed as having had an altogether peculiar dreariness. They had their uses; they were the period of
incubation of the admirable compositions which eventually brought him reputation and prosperity. But of
their actual aridity the young man must have had a painful consciousness; he never lost the impression of it.
Mr. Lathrop quotes a phrase to this effect from one of his letters, late in life. "I am disposed to thank God for
the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone."

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And the same writer alludes to a touching passage in the English Note-Books, which I shall quote
entire:—

"I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than ever before—by my own fireside, and with my
wife and children about me—more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious for anything beyond it, in
this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a
blank that any thereafter would compare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally[26]
been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in
England. It is, that I am still at college, or, sometimes, even, at school—and there is a sense that I have
been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have
done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think
of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the
effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when
everybody moved onward and left me behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call myself
famous and prosperous!—when I am happy too."

The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man's positive choice at the time—or
into which he drifted at least under the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive, he
was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he was not, personally, in a word, what is
called sociable. The general impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his character is
doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at
fault. He was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait and meditate, than to produce
himself, and fonder, on almost any occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality betrays itself
in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold and light and thin, something belonging to the
imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact,
with society. If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side[27] of
his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that there was nothing unamiable or
invidious in his shyness, and above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities to which
the Note-Books most testify are, on the whole, his serenity and amenity of mind. They reveal these
characteristics indeed in an almost phenomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in certain portions
almost child-like; of brilliant gaiety, of high spirits, there is little; but the placidity and evenness of temper, the
cheerful and contented view of the things he notes, never belie themselves. I know not what else he may have
written in this copious record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed; but as
his Diaries stand, they offer in a remarkable degree the reflection of a mind whose development was not in the
direction of sadness. A very clever French critic, whose fancy is often more lively than his observation is
deep, M. Emile Montégut, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in the year 1860, invents for our author the
appellation of "Un Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title is a happy one; but only
superficially. Pessimism consists in having morbid and bitter views and theories about human nature; not in
indulging in shadowy fancies and conceits. There is nothing whatever to show that Hawthorne had any such
doctrines or convictions; certainly, the note of depression, of despair, of the disposition to undervalue the
human race, is never sounded in his Diaries. These volumes contain the record of very few convictions or
theories of any kind; they move with curious evenness, with a charming, graceful flow, on a level which lies
above that of a man's[28] philosophy. They adhere with such persistence to this upper level that they prompt
the reader to believe that Hawthorne had no appreciable philosophy at all—no general views that were,
in the least uncomfortable. They are the exhibition of an unperplexed intellect. I said just now that the
development of Hawthorne's mind was not towards sadness; and I should be inclined to go still further, and
say that his mind proper—his mind in so far as it was a repository of opinions and articles of
faith—had no development that it is of especial importance to look into. What had a development was
his imagination—that delicate and penetrating imagination which was always at play, always
entertaining itself, always engaged in a game of hide and seek in the region in which it seemed to him, that the
game could best be played—among the shadows and substructions, the dark-based pillars and supports,

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of our moral nature. Beneath this movement and ripple of his imagination—as free and spontaneous as
that of the sea surface—lay directly his personal affections. These were solid and strong, but, according
to my impression, they had the place very much to themselves.

His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by no means cynical, relish for solitude, imposed
themselves upon him, in a great measure, with a persistency which helped to make the time a tolerably arid
one—so arid a one indeed that we have seen that in the light of later happiness he pronounced it a
blank. But in truth, if these were dull years, it was not all Hawthorne's fault. His situation was intrinsically
poor—poor with a poverty that one almost hesitates to look into. When we think of what the conditions
of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a small New England town[29] fifty years ago; and when we
think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style
and form and colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them, compassion for the young man
becomes our dominant sentiment, and we see the large dry village picture in perhaps almost too hard a light. It
seems to me then that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that he was not expansive and inquisitive, that
he lived much to himself and asked but little of his milieu. If he had been exacting and ambitious, if his
appetite had been large and his knowledge various, he would probably have found the bounds of Salem
intolerably narrow. But his culture had been of a simple sort—there was little of any other sort to be
obtained in America in those days, and though he was doubtless haunted by visions of more suggestive
opportunities, we may safely assume that he was not to his own perception the object of compassion that he
appears to a critic who judges him after half a century's civilization has filtered into the twilight of that earlier
time. If New England was socially a very small place in those days, Salem was a still smaller one; and if the
American tone at large was intensely provincial, that of New England was not greatly helped by having the
best of it. The state of things was extremely natural, and there could be now no greater mistake than to speak
of it with a redundancy of irony. American life had begun to constitute itself from the foundations; it had
begun to be, simply; it was at an immeasurable distance from having begun to enjoy. I imagine there was no
appreciable group of people in New England at that time proposing to itself to enjoy life; this was not an
undertaking for[30] which any provision had been made, or to which any encouragement was offered.
Hawthorne must have vaguely entertained some such design upon destiny; but he must have felt that his
success would have to depend wholly upon his own ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to
enjoy, simply because he proposed to be an artist, and because this enters inevitably into the artist's scheme.
There are a thousand ways of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most innocent. But for all that, it
connects itself with the idea of pleasure. He proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must first get it.
Where he gets it will depend upon circumstances, and circumstances were not encouraging to Hawthorne.

He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to literature in a community in which the
interest in literature was as yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a
considerable discomfort in the United States not to be "in business." The young man who attempts to launch
himself in a career that does not belong to the so-called practical order; the young man who has not, in a word,
an office in the business-quarter of the town, with his name painted on the door, has but a limited place in the
social system, finds no particular bough to perch upon. He is not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an
idler; literature and the arts have always been held in extreme honour in the American world, and those who
practise them are received on easier terms than in other countries. If the tone of the American world is in some
respects provincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the exaggerated homage rendered to authorship.
The gentleman or the[31] lady who has written a book is in many circles the object of an admiration too
indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing. There is no reason to suppose that this was
less the case fifty years ago; but fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the literary man must have lacked the
comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that
are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and
yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by solitary
workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been
produced in more genial circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and discussion; he is

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apt to make awkward experiments; he is in the nature of the case more or less of an empiric. The empiric may,
as I say, be treated by the world as an expert; but the drawbacks and discomforts of empiricism remain to him,
and are in fact increased by the suspicion that is mingled with his gratitude, of a want in the public taste of a
sense of the proportions of things. Poor Hawthorne, beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was
empirical enough; he was one of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up literature as a profession.
The profession in the United States is still very young, and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its head
could hardly have been seen above ground. It strikes the observer of to-day that Hawthorne showed great
courage in entering a field in which the honours and emoluments were so scanty as the profits of authorship
must have been at that time. I have said that in[32] the United States at present authorship is a pedestal, and
literature is the fashion; but Hawthorne's history is a proof that it was possible, fifty years ago, to write a great
many little masterpieces without becoming known. He begins the preface to the Twice-Told Tales by
remarking that he was "for many years the obscurest man of letters in America." When once this work
obtained recognition, the recognition left little to be desired. Hawthorne never, I believe, made large sums of
money by his writings, and the early profits of these charming sketches could not have been considerable; for
many of them, indeed, as they appeared in journals and magazines, he had never been paid at all; but the
honour, when once it dawned—and it dawned tolerably early in the author's career—was never
thereafter wanting. Hawthorne's countrymen are solidly proud of him, and the tone of Mr. Lathrop's Study is
in itself sufficient evidence of the manner in which an American story-teller may in some cases look to have
his eulogy pronounced.

Hawthorne's early attempt to support himself by his pen appears to have been deliberate; we hear nothing of
those experiments in counting-houses or lawyers' offices, of which a permanent invocation to the Muse is
often the inconsequent sequel. He began to write, and to try and dispose of his writings; and he remained at
Salem apparently only because his family, his mother and his two sisters, lived there. His mother had a house,
of which during the twelve years that elapsed until 1838, he appears to have been an inmate. Mr. Lathrop
learned from his surviving sister that after publishing Fanshawe he produced a group of short stories entitled
Seven Tales of my Native Land, and that[33] this lady retained a very favourable recollection of the work,
which her brother had given her to read. But it never saw the light; his attempts to get it published were
unsuccessful, and at last, in a fit of irritation and despair, the young author burned the manuscript.

There is probably something autobiographic in the striking little tale of The Devil in Manuscript. "They have
been offered to seventeen publishers," says the hero of that sketch in regard to a pile of his own lucubrations.

"It would make you stare to read their answers.... One man publishes nothing but school-books; another has
five novels already under examination;... another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I verily
believe, to avoid publishing my book. In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even
to read my tales; and he—a literary dabbler himself, I should judge—has the impertinence to
criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of
condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not be concerned on any terms.... But there does seem
to be one righteous man among these seventeen unrighteous ones, and he tells me, fairly, that no American
publisher will meddle with an American work—seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new
one—unless at the writer's risk."

But though the Seven Tales were not printed, Hawthorne, proceeded to write others that were; the two
collections of the Twice-Told Tales, and the Snow Image, are gathered from a series of contributions to the
local journals and the annuals of that day. To make these three volumes, he picked out the things he thought
the best. "Some very small part," he says of what remains, "might yet be rummaged out (but it would not[34]
be worth the trouble), among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty-years-old periodicals, or within the shabby
morocco covers of faded Souvenirs." These three volumes represent no large amount of literary labour for so
long a period, and the author admits that there is little to show "for the thought and industry of that portion of
his life." He attributes the paucity of his productions to a "total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind

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would naturally have been most effervescent." "He had no incitement to literary effort in a reasonable
prospect of reputation or profit; nothing but the pleasure itself of composition, an enjoyment not at all amiss in
its way, and perhaps essential to the merit of the work in hand, but which in the long run will hardly keep the
chill out of a writer's heart, or the numbness out of his fingers." These words occur in the preface attached in
1851 to the second edition of the Twice-Told Tales; à propos of which I may say that there is always a charm
in Hawthorne's prefaces which makes one grateful for a pretext to quote from them. At this time The Scarlet
Letter had just made his fame, and the short tales were certain of a large welcome; but the account he gives of
the failure of the earlier edition to produce a sensation (it had been published in two volumes, at four years
apart), may appear to contradict my assertion that, though he was not recognised immediately, he was
recognised betimes. In 1850, when The Scarlet Letter appeared, Hawthorne was forty-six years old, and this
may certainly seem a long-delayed popularity. On the other hand, it must be remembered that he had not
appealed to the world with any great energy. The Twice-Told Tales, charming as they are, do not constitute a
very massive literary pedestal. As[35] soon as the author, resorting to severer measures, put forth The Scarlet
Letter, the public ear was touched and charmed, and after that it was held to the end. "Well it might have
been!" the reader will exclaim. "But what a grievous pity that the dulness of this same organ should have
operated so long as a deterrent, and by making Hawthorne wait till he was nearly fifty to publish his first
novel, have abbreviated by so much his productive career!" The truth is, he cannot have been in any very high
degree ambitious; he was not an abundant producer, and there was manifestly a strain of generous indolence
in his composition. There was a loveable want of eagerness about him. Let the encouragement offered have
been what it might, he had waited till he was lapsing from middle-life to strike his first noticeable blow; and
during the last ten years of his career he put forth but two complete works, and the fragment of a third.

It is very true, however, that during this early period he seems to have been very glad to do whatever came to
his hand. Certain of his tales found their way into one of the annuals of the time, a publication endowed with
the brilliant title of The Boston Token and Atlantic Souvenir. The editor of this graceful repository was S. G.
Goodrich, a gentleman who, I suppose, may be called one of the pioneers of American periodical literature.
He is better known to the world as Mr. Peter Parley, a name under which he produced a multitude of popular
school-books, story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize human knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind.
This enterprising purveyor of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, to have been Hawthorne's earliest
protector, if protection is[36] the proper word for the treatment that the young author received from him. Mr.
Goodrich induced him in 1836 to go to Boston to edit a periodical in which he was interested, The American
Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. I have never seen the work in question, but Hawthorne's
biographer gives a sorry account of it. It was managed by the so-called Bewick Company, which "took its
name from Thomas Bewick, the English restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to do his
memory honour by his admirable illustrations. But in fact it never did any one honour, nor brought any one
profit. It was a penny popular affair, containing condensed information about innumerable subjects, no fiction,
and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the hands of
several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a salary of five hundred dollars a year; but it
appears that he got next to nothing, and did not stay in the position long." Hawthorne wrote from Boston in
the winter of 1836: "I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as soon
as I arrived; and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I
have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going near him.... I don't feel at all obliged to
him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company ... and I defy them to get
another to do for a thousand dollars, what I do for five hundred."—"I make nothing," he says in another
letter, "of writing a history or biography before dinner." Goodrich proposed to him to write a Universal
History for the use of schools,[37] offering him a hundred dollars for his share in the work. Hawthorne
accepted the offer and took a hand—I know not how large a one—in the job. His biographer has
been able to identify a single phrase as our author's. He is speaking of George IV: "Even when he was quite a
young man this King cared as much about dress as any young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such
matters, and it is a pity that he was a King, for he might otherwise have made an excellent tailor." The
Universal History had a great vogue and passed through hundreds of editions; but it does not appear that

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Hawthorne ever received more than his hundred dollars. The writer of these pages vividly remembers making
its acquaintance at an early stage of his education—a very fat, stumpy-looking book, bound in boards
covered with green paper, and having in the text very small woodcuts, of the most primitive sort. He
associates it to this day with the names of Sesostris and Semiramis whenever he encounters them, there having
been, he supposes, some account of the conquests of these potentates that would impress itself upon the
imagination of a child. At the end of four months, Hawthorne had received but twenty dollars—four
pounds—for his editorship of the American Magazine.

There is something pitiful in this episode, and something really touching in the sight of a delicate and superior
genius obliged to concern himself with such paltry undertakings. The simple fact was that for a man
attempting at that time in America to live by his pen, there were no larger openings; and to live at all
Hawthorne had, as the phrase is, to make himself small. This cost him less, moreover, than it would have cost
a more copious and strenuous genius, for his modesty[38] was evidently extreme, and I doubt whether he had
any very ardent consciousness of rare talent. He went back to Salem, and from this tranquil standpoint, in the
spring of 1837, he watched the first volume of his Twice-Told Tales come into the world. He had by this time
been living some ten years of his manhood in Salem, and an American commentator may be excused for
feeling the desire to construct, from the very scanty material that offers itself, a slight picture of his life there.
I have quoted his own allusions to its dulness and blankness, but I confess that these observations serve rather
to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer has of necessity a relish for detail; his business is to
multiply points of characterisation. Mr. Lathrop tells us that our author "had little communication with even
the members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at his locked door, and it was not often
that the four inmates of the old Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read his stories aloud to
his mother and sisters.... It was the custom in this household for the several members to remain very much by
themselves; the three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself, and, speaking of the isolation
which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said, 'We do not even live at our house!'" It is added that he was
not in the habit of going to church. This is not a lively picture, nor is that other sketch of his daily habits much
more exhilarating, in which Mr. Lathrop affirms that though the statement that for several years "he never saw
the sun" is entirely an error, yet it is true that he stirred little abroad all day and "seldom chose to walk in the
town except at night." In the dusky hours he took walks of many miles along the[39] coast, or else wandered
about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, and these were apparently his most intimate
occasions of contact with life. Life, on such occasions, was not very exuberant, as any one will reflect who
has been acquainted with the physiognomy of a small New England town after nine o'clock in the evening.
Hawthorne, however, was an inveterate observer of small things, and he found a field for fancy among the
most trivial accidents. There could be no better example of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled
"Night Sketches," included among the Twice-Told Tales. This small dissertation is about nothing at all, and to
call attention to it is almost to overrate its importance. This fact is equally true, indeed, of a great many of its
companions, which give even the most appreciative critic a singular feeling of his own
indiscretion—almost of his own cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply to
mention them is to put them in a false position. The author's claim for them is barely audible, even to the most
acute listener. They are things to take or to leave—to enjoy, but not to talk about. Not to read them
would be to do them an injustice (to read them is essentially to relish them), but to bring the machinery of
criticism to bear upon them would be to do them a still greater wrong. I must remember, however, that to
carry this principle too far would be to endanger the general validity of the present little work—a
consummation which it can only be my desire to avert. Therefore it is that I think it permissible to remark that
in Hawthorne, the whole class of little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to which these
just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a greater[40] charm than there is any warrant for in their
substance. The charm is made up of the spontaneity, the personal quality, of the fancy that plays through
them, its mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity and its bonhomie. The Night Sketches are simply the light,
familiar record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, dull, rainy day, through the sloppy, ill-paved
streets of a country town, where the rare gas-lamps twinkle in the large puddles, and the blue jars in the
druggist's window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say that the inspiration of such a theme could

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have had no great force, and such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem puddles, nevertheless, springs,
flower-like, a charming and natural piece of prose.

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing
too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual
things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way—this
seems as good a place as any other to say it—are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether
there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the whole body of literature. They were
published—in six volumes, issued at intervals—some years after Hawthorne's death, and no
person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given
to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to
desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books, but I am
obliged to[41] confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they
came to be written—what was Hawthorne's purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and
often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid
light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its
value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense
a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the larger part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and
simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence or commits to its pages any
reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely
objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly
formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post,
should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things
intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they
are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that
they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in
them. Our business for the moment, however, is not with the light that they throw upon his intellect, but with
the information they offer about his habits and his social circumstances.

I know not at what age he began to keep a diary; the first entries in the American volumes are of the[42]
summer of 1835. There is a phrase in the preface to his novel of Transformation, which must have lingered in
the minds of many Americans who have tried to write novels and to lay the scene of them in the western
world. "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where
there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a
commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land." The
perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat
ominous text. It does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say that the effect would be
the same for the usual English reader. An American reads between the lines—he completes the
suggestions—he constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice in saying that the
picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is
not, on the whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blankness—a curious
paleness of colour and paucity of detail. Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for detail,
and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the diet to which his observation was condemned.
For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple society in
which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as
closely as possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are
struck with the large number of elements that were absent from them,[43] and the coldness, the thinness, the
blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that our foremost feeling is that of compassion
for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later
in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer-European spectacle—it takes such
an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion

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for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of
genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a
very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his
fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which
Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be
made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries,
which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no
court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country
gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages
nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public
schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no
political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that[44] might be drawn up
of the absent things in American life—especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of
which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural
remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is
left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his
joke, as one may say. It would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him the consolation of his national
gift, that "American humour" of which of late years we have heard so much.

But in helping us to measure what remains, our author's Diaries, as I have already intimated, would give
comfort rather to persons who might have taken the alarm from the brief sketch I have just attempted of what I
have called the negative side of the American social situation, than to those reminding themselves of its fine
compensations. Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the country, drives in
stage-coaches, people he met in taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he
deems worthy of being commemorated is frequently extreme, and from this fact we get the impression of a
general vacancy in the field of vision. "Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the
windows most cheerfully; as if there were a bright, comfortable light within its darksome stone wall." "I went
yesterday with Monsieur S—— to pick raspberries. He fell through an old log-bridge, thrown
over a hollow; looking back, only his head and shoulders appeared through the rotten logs and among the
bushes.—A shower coming on, the rapid running of a[45] little barefooted boy, coming up unheard,
and dashing swiftly past us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran adown the path and up the
opposite side." In another place he devotes a page to a description of a dog whom he saw running round after
its tail; in still another he remarks, in a paragraph by itself—"The aromatic odor of peat-smoke, in the
sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." The reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty gives a place in
his mind—and his inkstand—to such trifles as these, it is because nothing else of superior
importance demands admission. Everything in the Notes indicates a simple, democratic, thinly-composed
society; there is no evidence of the writer finding himself in any variety or intimacy of relations with any one
or with anything. We find a good deal of warrant for believing that if we add that statement of Mr. Lathrop's
about his meals being left at the door of his room, to rural rambles of which an impression of the temporary
phases of the local apple-crop were the usual, and an encounter with an organ-grinder, or an eccentric dog, the
rarer, outcome, we construct a rough image of our author's daily life during the several years that preceded his
marriage. He appears to have read a good deal, and that he must have been familiar with the sources of good
English we see from his charming, expressive, slightly self-conscious, cultivated, but not too cultivated, style.
Yet neither in these early volumes of his Note-Books, nor in the later, is there any mention of his reading.
There are no literary judgments or impressions—there is almost no allusion to works or to authors. The
allusions to individuals of any kind are indeed much less numerous than one might have expected; there is
little psychology,[46] little description of manners. We are told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem
during the early part of Hawthorne's life "a strong circle of wealthy families," which "maintained rigorously
the distinctions of class," and whose "entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent." This is a
rather pictorial way of saying that there were a number of people in the place—the commercial and

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professional aristocracy, as it were—who lived in high comfort and respectability, and who, in their
small provincial way, doubtless had pretensions to be exclusive. Into this delectable company Mr. Lathrop
intimates that his hero was free to penetrate. It is easy to believe it, and it would be difficult to perceive why
the privilege should have been denied to a young man of genius and culture, who was very good-looking
(Hawthorne must have been in these days, judging by his appearance later in life, a strikingly handsome
fellow), and whose American pedigree was virtually as long as the longest they could show. But in fact
Hawthorne appears to have ignored the good society of his native place almost completely; no echo of its
conversation is to be found in his tales or his journals. Such an echo would possibly not have been especially
melodious, and if we regret the shyness and stiffness, the reserve, the timidity, the suspicion, or whatever it
was, that kept him from knowing what there was to be known, it is not because we have any very definite
assurance that his gains would have been great. Still, since a beautiful writer was growing up in Salem, it is a
pity that he should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the types that flourished in the
richest soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong degree the story[47]telling faculty,
Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature.
Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social
distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He
liked to fraternise with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself if possible into their
shoes. His Note-Books, and even his tales, are full of evidence of this easy and natural feeling about all his
unconventional fellow-mortals—this imaginative interest and contemplative curiosity—and it
sometimes takes the most charming and graceful forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and
delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the points in his character which his reader
comes most to appreciate—that reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a dusky and
malarious genius.

But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few, he must in the nature of things have
been more or less of a consenting democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social
structure in which he played his part. The air of his journals and his tales alike are full of the genuine
democratic feeling. This feeling has by no means passed out of New England life; it still flourishes in
perfection in the great stock of the people, especially in rural communities; but it is probable that at the
present hour a writer of Hawthorne's general fastidiousness would not express it quite so artlessly. "A shrewd
gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the town," he says, in Chippings with a Chisel, "was anxious to obtain two
or three gravestones for the deceased members of her[48] family, and to pay for these solemn commodities by
taking the sculptor to board." This image of a gentlewoman keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders,
seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all incongruous. It will be observed that the lady in
question was shrewd; it was probable that she was substantially educated, and of reputable life, and it is
certain that she was energetic. These qualities would make it natural to Hawthorne to speak of her as a
gentlewoman; the natural tendency in societies where the sense of equality prevails, being to take for granted
the high level rather than the low. Perhaps the most striking example of the democratic sentiment in all our
author's tales, however, is the figure of Uncle Venner, in The House of the Seven Gables. Uncle Venner is a
poor old man in a brimless hat and patched trousers, who picks up a precarious subsistence by rendering, for a
compensation, in the houses and gardens of the good people of Salem, those services that are know in New
England as "chores." He carries parcels, splits firewood, digs potatoes, collects refuse for the maintenance of
his pigs, and looks forward with philosophic equanimity to the time when he shall end his days in the
almshouse. But in spite of the very modest place that he occupies in the social scale, he is received on a
footing of familiarity in the household of the far-descended Miss Pyncheon; and when this ancient lady and
her companions take the air in the garden of a summer evening, he steps into the estimable circle and mingles
the smoke of his pipe with their refined conversation. This obviously is rather imaginative—Uncle
Venner is a creation with a purpose. He is an original, a natural moralist, a philosopher; and Hawthorne, who
knew perfectly what he[49] was about in introducing him—Hawthorne always knew perfectly what he
was about—wished to give in his person an example of humorous resignation and of a life reduced to
the simplest and homeliest elements, as opposed to the fantastic pretensions of the antiquated heroine of the

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story. He wished to strike a certain exclusively human and personal note. He knew that for this purpose he
was taking a licence; but the point is that he felt he was not indulging in any extravagant violation of reality.
Giving in a letter, about 1830, an account of a little journey he was making in Connecticut, he says, of the end
of a seventeen miles' stage, that "in the evening, however, I went to a Bible-class with a very polite and
agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling tailor of very questionable habits."

Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absented himself from Salem, and to have wandered
somewhat through the New England States. But the only one of these episodes of which there is a
considerable account in the Note-Books is a visit that he paid in the summer of 1837 to his old college-mate,
Horatio Bridge, who was living upon his father's property in Maine, in company with an eccentric young
Frenchman, a teacher of his native tongue, who was looking for pupils among the northern forests. I have said
that there was less psychology in Hawthorne's Journals than might have been looked for; but there is
nevertheless a certain amount of it, and nowhere more than in a number of pages relating to this remarkable
"Monsieur S." (Hawthorne, intimate as he apparently became with him, always calls him "Monsieur," just as
throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks[50] of all his friends, even the most familiar, as "Mr." He
confers the prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow-woodsman at Concord, and upon the
emancipated brethren at Brook Farm.) These pages are completely occupied with Monsieur S., who was
evidently a man of character, with the full complement of his national vivacity. There is an elaborate effort to
analyse the poor young Frenchman's disposition, something conscientious and painstaking, respectful,
explicit, almost solemn. These passages are very curious as a reminder of the absence of the off-hand element
in the manner in which many Americans, and many New Englanders especially, make up their minds about
people whom they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder of something that may be called the importance of the
individual in the American world; which is a result of the newness and youthfulness of society and of the
absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it were, and, thanks to the absence of a
variety of social types and of settled heads under which he may be easily and conveniently pigeon-holed, he is
to a certain extent a wonder and a mystery. An Englishman, a Frenchman—a Frenchman above
all—judges quickly, easily, from his own social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has not that
rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility which is apt to visit a New Englander in such
processes; and he has the advantage that his standards are fixed by the general consent of the society in which
he lives. A Frenchman, in this respect, is particularly happy and comfortable, happy and comfortable to a
degree which I think is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the most definite in the world, the
most easily and[51] promptly appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the
French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he is better off than his poor interrogative
and tentative cousin beyond the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair-splitting is the
occupation he most despises. There is always a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have
had woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne was almost as much
a quality of race as of genius; albeit that Hawthorne has paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on "Lichfield
and Uttoxeter," in his volume on England), a tribute of the finest appreciation. American intellectual standards
are vague, and Hawthorne's countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a
somewhat agitated conscience.

[52]

CHAPTER III.

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EARLY WRITINGS.
The second volume of the Twice-Told Tales was published in 1845, in Boston; and at this time a good many
of the stories which were afterwards collected into the Mosses from an Old Manse had already appeared,
chiefly in The Democratic Review, a sufficiently flourishing periodical of that period. In mentioning these
things I anticipate; but I touch upon the year 1845 in order to speak of the two collections of Twice-Told Tales
at once. During the same year Hawthorne edited an interesting volume, the Journals of an African Cruiser, by
his friend Bridge, who had gone into the Navy and seen something of distant waters. His biographer mentions
that even then Hawthorne's name was thought to bespeak attention for a book, and he insists on this fact in
contradiction to the idea that his productions had hitherto been as little noticed as his own declaration that he
remained "for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in America," might lead one, and has led many
people, to suppose. "In this dismal chamber Fame was won," he writes in Salem in 1836.[53] And we find in
the Note-Books (1840), this singularly beautiful and touching passage:—

"Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by.... Here I have written many
tales—many that have been burned to ashes, many that have doubtless deserved the same fate. 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 seems to me 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 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 multitude.... 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.... I
used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did
I know!... Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that[54] 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."

There is something exquisite in the soft philosophy of this little retrospect, and it helps us to appreciate it to
know that the writer had at this time just become engaged to be married to a charming and accomplished
person, with whom his union, which took place two years later, was complete and full of happiness. But I
quote it more particularly for the evidence it affords that, already in 1840, Hawthorne could speak of the
world finding him out and calling him forth, as of an event tolerably well in the past. He had sent the first of
the Twice-Told series to his old college friend, Longfellow, who had already laid, solidly, the foundation of
his great poetic reputation, and at the time of his sending it had written him a letter from which it will be to
our purpose to quote a few lines:—

"You tell me you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been; but I can assure
you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have
no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may
be true that there may have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in
the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up

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no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in thinking that future years
may be more varied, and therefore more tolerable, than the past. You give me more credit than I deserve in
supposing that I have led a studious life. I have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so desultory
a[55] way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me the fruits of study.... I have another great difficulty
in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my
stories of, and it is not easy to give a life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes, through a
peephole, I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed
these glimpses please me better than the others."

It is more particularly for the sake of the concluding lines that I have quoted this passage; for evidently no
portrait of Hawthorne at this period is at all exact which, fails to insist upon the constant struggle which must
have gone on between his shyness and his desire to know something of life; between what may be called his
evasive and his inquisitive tendencies. I suppose it is no injustice to Hawthorne to say that on the whole his
shyness always prevailed; and yet, obviously, the struggle was constantly there. He says of his Twice-Told
Tales, in the preface, "They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so
they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but his attempts, and very
imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world." We are speaking here of small things, it
must be remembered—of little attempts, little sketches, a little world. But everything is relative, and
this smallness of scale must not render less apparent the interesting character of Hawthorne's efforts. As for
the Twice-Told Tales themselves, they are an old story now; every one knows them a little, and those who
admire them particularly have read them a great many times. The writer of this sketch belongs to the latter
class, and he has been trying to forget his familiarity[56] with them, and ask himself what impression they
would have made upon him at the time they appeared, in the first bloom of their freshness, and before the
particular Hawthorne-quality, as it may be called, had become an established, a recognised and valued, fact.
Certainly, I am inclined to think, if one had encountered these delicate, dusky flowers in the blossomless
garden of American journalism, one would have plucked them with a very tender hand; one would have felt
that here was something essentially fresh and new; here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a
degree distinctly appreciable, was an original element in literature. When I think of it, I almost envy
Hawthorne's earliest readers; the sensation of opening upon The Great Carbuncle, The Seven Vagabonds, or
The Threefold Destiny in an American annual of forty years ago, must have been highly agreeable.

Among these shorter things (it is better to speak of the whole collection, including the Snow Image, and the
Mosses from an Old Manse at once) there are three sorts of tales, each one of which has an original stamp.
There are, to begin with, the stories of fantasy and allegory—those among which the three I have just
mentioned would be numbered, and which on the whole, are the most original. This is the group to which
such little masterpieces as Malvin's Burial, Rappacini's Daughter, and Young Goodman Brown also
belong—these two last perhaps representing the highest point that Hawthorne reached in this direction.
Then there are the little tales of New England history, which are scarcely less admirable, and of which The
Grey Champion, The Maypole of Merry Mount, and the four beautiful Legends of the Province House, as[57]
they are called, are the most successful specimens. Lastly come the slender sketches of actual scenes and of
the objects and manners about him, by means of which, more particularly, he endeavoured "to open an
intercourse with the world," and which, in spite of their slenderness, have an infinite grace and charm. Among
these things A Rill from the Town Pump, The Village Uncle, The Toll-Gatherer's Day, the Chippings with a
Chisel, may most naturally be mentioned. As we turn over these volumes we feel that the pieces that spring
most directly from his fancy, constitute, as I have said (putting his four novels aside), his most substantial
claim to our attention. It would be a mistake to insist too much upon them; Hawthorne was himself the first to
recognise that. "These fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the Mosses from an Old Manse, "with so little
of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose—so reserved even while they
sometimes seem so frank—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing
satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image—such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis
for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly uttered; but it may be said, partly in answer to it, and partly

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in confirmation, that the valuable element in these things was not what Hawthorne put into them consciously,
but what passed into them without his being able to measure it—the element of simple genius, the
quality of imagination. This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing—this purity and spontaneity and
naturalness of fancy. For the rest, it is interesting to see how it borrowed a particular colour from the other
faculties that lay near it—how the imagination, in this capital son of the old[58] Puritans, reflected the
hue of the more purely moral part, of the dusky, overshadowed conscience. The conscience, by no fault of its
own, in every genuine offshoot of that sombre lineage, lay under the shadow of the sense of sin. This
darkening cloud was no essential part of the nature of the individual; it stood fixed in the general moral
heaven, under which he grew up and looked at life. It projected from above, from outside, a black patch over
his spirit, and it was for him to do what he could with the black patch. There were all sorts of possible ways of
dealing with it; they depended upon the personal temperament. Some natures would let it lie as it fell, and
contrive to be tolerably comfortable beneath it. Others would groan and sweat and suffer; but the dusky blight
would remain, and their lives would be lives of misery. Here and there an individual, irritated beyond
endurance, would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what would be deemed deeper abysses of
depravity. Hawthorne's way was the best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to himself, to
transmute this heavy moral burden into the very substance of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light
and charming fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was exceptionally fortunate; he had his
genius to help him. Nothing is more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively imported character of
the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had
ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into
his soul, he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral
and[59] theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say,
objectively. He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regular victims,
who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his
imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature; the light element that had been mingled with his own
composition always clung to this rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers about
the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne's stock that if his imagination should take
licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan morality for its play-ground.
He speaks of the dark disapproval with which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would see
him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more darkly would they have frowned could they have
understood that he had converted the very principle of their own being into one of his toys!

It will be seen that I am far from being struck with the justice of that view of the author of the Twice-Told
Tales, which is so happily expressed by the French critic to whom I alluded at an earlier stage of this essay.
To speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montégut does, as a romancier pessimiste, seems to me very much
beside the mark. He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much of either. He
does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of human nature; indeed, I should even say that at
bottom he does not take human nature as hard as he may seem to do. "His bitterness," says M. Montégut,
"is[60] without abatement, and his bad opinion of man is without compensation.... His little tales have the air
of confessions which the soul makes to itself; they are so many little slaps which the author applies to our
face." This, it seems to me, is to exaggerate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish of gloomy
subjects. What pleased him in such subjects was their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their
chiaroscuro; but they were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a predominantly melancholy, feeling
about the human soul. Such at least is my own impression. He is to a considerable degree ironical—this
is part of his charm—part even, one may say, of his brightness; but he is neither bitter nor
cynical—he is rarely even what I should call tragical. There have certainly been story-tellers of a gayer
and lighter spirit; there have been observers more humorous, more hilarious—though on the whole
Hawthorne's observation has a smile in it oftener than may at first appear; but there has rarely been an
observer more serene, less agitated by what he sees and less disposed to call things deeply into question. As I
have already intimated, his Note-Books are full of this simple and almost child-like serenity. That dusky
pre-occupation with the misery of human life and the wickedness of the human heart which such a critic as M.

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Emile Montégut talks about, is totally absent from them; and if we may suppose a person to have read these
Diaries before looking into the tales, we may be sure that such a reader would be greatly surprised to hear the
author described as a disappointed, disdainful genius. "This marked love of cases of conscience," says M.
Montégut, "this taciturn, scornful cast of mind, this habit of seeing sin everywhere and hell[61] always gaping
open, this dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world and a nature draped in mourning, these lonely
conversations of the imagination with the conscience, this pitiless analysis resulting from a perpetual
examination of one's self, and from the tortures of a heart closed before men and open to God—all
these elements of the Puritan character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or to speak more justly, have filtered
into him, through a long succession of generations." This is a very pretty and very vivid account of
Hawthorne, superficially considered; and it is just such a view of the case as would commend itself most
easily and most naturally to a hasty critic. It is all true indeed, with a difference; Hawthorne was all that M.
Montégut says, minus the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the
fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster—these things had been
lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks
with them—to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and æsthetic point of view, the point
of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction makes the difference; but the difference is
great.

Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that in speaking of him it is inevitable that we should feel
ourselves confronted with the familiar problem of the difference between the fancy and the imagination. Of
the larger and more potent faculty he certainly possessed a liberal share; no one can read The House of the
Seven Gables without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. But I am often struck, especially in the
shorter tales, of which I am now chiefly speaking, with[62] a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for conceits and
analogies, which bears more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are
redolent of a rich imagination.

"Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so,
if you will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly
meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the
Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin
rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with
power and fervid eloquence, and with his hand on the open Bible of the sacred truth of our religion, and of
saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown
grow pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often,
awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the
family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned
away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged
woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbours not a few, they carved no
hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."

There is imagination in that, and in many another passage that I might quote; but as a general thing I should
characterise the more metaphysical of our author's short stories as graceful and felicitous conceits. They seem
to me to be qualified in this manner by the very fact that they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne,
in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the[63]
lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight
in symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very different story. I
frankly confess that I have as a general thing but little enjoyment of it and that it has never seemed to me to
be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. It has produced assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his
younger years had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great masters of allegory. But
it is apt to spoil two good things—a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is
responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only

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cases in which it is endurable is when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with eager
promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course
absent and the failure complete. Then the machinery alone is visible, and the end to which it operates becomes
a matter of indifference. There was but little literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's
earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps held the scales the highest. He at
any rate rattled them loudest, and pretended, more than any one else, to conduct the weighing-process on
scientific principles. Very remarkable was this process of Edgar Poe's, and very extraordinary were his
principles; but he had the advantage of being a man of genius, and his intelligence was frequently great. His
collection of critical sketches of the American writers flourishing in what M. Taine would call his milieu and
moment, is very curious and[64] interesting reading, and it has one quality which ought to keep it from ever
being completely forgotten. It is probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism ever
prepared for the edification of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great
deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase
of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and
spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he
should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his tales—in defence of which,
he says, "however, or for whatever object employed, there is scarcely one respectable word to be said.... The
deepest emotion," he goes on, "aroused within us by the happiest allegory as allegory, is a very, very
imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his
not having attempted to overcome.... One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of
overturning a fiction;" and Poe has furthermore the courage to remark that the Pilgrim's Progress is a
"ludicrously overrated book." Certainly, as a general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity and felicity of
Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; the idea appears to have made itself at home in them easily.
Nothing could be better in this respect than The Snow-Image (a little masterpiece), or The Great Carbuncle, or
Doctor Heidegger's Experiment, or Rappacini's Daughter. But in such things as The Birth-Mark and The
Bosom-Serpent, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical, slightly[65] incongruous, as if the kernel
had not assimilated its envelope. But these are matters of light impression, and there would be a want of tact
in pretending to discriminate too closely among things which all, in one way or another, have a charm. The
charm—the great charm—is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of
man's soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the
mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he
cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it. This natural, yet
fanciful familiarity with it, this air, on the author's part, of being a confirmed habitué of a region of mysteries
and subtleties, constitutes the originality of his tales. And then they have the further merit of seeming, for
what they are, to spring up so freely and lightly. The author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular dweller in the
moral, psychological realm; he goes to and fro in it, as a man who knows his way. His tread is a light and
modest one, but he keeps the key in his pocket.

His little historical stories all seem to me admirable; they are so good that you may re-read them many times.
They are not numerous, and they are very short; but they are full of a vivid and delightful sense of the New
England past; they have, moreover, the distinction, little tales of a dozen and fifteen pages as they are, of
being the only successful attempts at historical fiction that have been made in the United States. Hawthorne
was at home in the early New England history; he had thumbed its records and he had breathed its air, in
whatever odd receptacles this somewhat pungent compound[66] still lurked. He was fond of it, and he was
proud of it, as any New Englander must be, measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics who
formed his earliest precursors, in laying the foundations of a mighty empire. Hungry for the picturesque as he
always was, and not finding any very copious provision of it around him, he turned back into the two
preceding centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive annals of Massachusetts should at least
appear picturesque. His fancy, which was always alive, played a little with the somewhat meagre and angular
facts of the colonial period and forthwith converted a great many of them into impressive legends and
pictures. There is a little infusion of colour, a little vagueness about certain details, but it is very gracefully

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and discreetly done, and realities are kept in view sufficiently to make us feel that if we are reading romance,
it is romance that rather supplements than contradicts history. The early annals of New England were not
fertile in legend, but Hawthorne laid his hands upon everything that would serve his purpose, and in two or
three cases his version of the story has a great deal of beauty. The Grey Champion is a sketch of less than
eight pages, but the little figures stand up in the tale as stoutly, at the least, as if they were propped up on
half-a-dozen chapters by a dryer annalist, and the whole thing has the merit of those cabinet pictures in which
the artist has been able to make his persons look the size of life. Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the
least a realist—he was not to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine lover of the good city of
Boston but will feel grateful to him for his courage in attempting to recount the "traditions" of Washington
Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital.[67] The four Legends of the Province House are certain
shadowy stories which he professes to have gathered in an ancient tavern lurking behind the modern
shop-fronts of this part of the city. The Province House disappeared some years ago, but while it stood it was
pointed to as the residence of the Royal Governors of Massachusetts before the Revolution. I have no
recollection of it, but it cannot have been, even from Hawthorne's account of it, which is as pictorial as he
ventures to make it, a very imposing piece of antiquity. The writer's charming touch, however, throws a rich
brown tone over its rather shallow venerableness; and we are beguiled into believing, for instance, at the close
of Howe's Masquerade (a story of a strange occurrence at an entertainment given by Sir William Howe, the
last of the Royal Governors, during the siege of Boston by Washington), that "superstition, among other
legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture the
ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide through the Province House. And last of all comes
a figure shrouded in a military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping his iron-shod boots
upon the freestone steps, with a semblance of feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp."
Hawthorne had, as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that faculty which is called
now-a-days the historic consciousness. He never sought to exhibit it on a large scale; he exhibited it indeed on
a scale so minute that we must not linger too much upon it. His vision of the past was filled with definite
images—images none the less definite that they were concerned with events as shadowy as this
dramatic passing away of the last of[68] King George's representatives in his long loyal but finally alienated
colony.

I have said that Hawthorne had become engaged in about his thirty-fifth-year; but he was not married until
1842. Before this event took place he passed through two episodes which (putting his falling in love aside)
were much the most important things that had yet happened to him. They interrupted the painful monotony of
his life, and brought the affairs of men within his personal experience. One of these was moreover in itself a
curious and interesting chapter of observation, and it fructified, in Hawthorne's memory, in one of his best
productions. How urgently he needed at this time to be drawn within the circle of social accidents, a little
anecdote related by Mr. Lathrop in connection with his first acquaintance with the young lady he was to
marry, may serve as an example. This young lady became known to him through her sister, who had first
approached him as an admirer of the Twice-Told Tales (as to the authorship of which she had been so much in
the dark as to have attributed it first, conjecturally, to one of the two Miss Hathornes); and the two Miss
Peabodys, desiring to see more of the charming writer, caused him to be invited to a species of conversazione
at the house of one of their friends, at which they themselves took care to be punctual. Several other ladies,
however, were as punctual as they, and Hawthorne presently arriving, and seeing a bevy of admirers where he
had expected but three or four, fell into a state of agitation, which is vividly described by his biographer. He
"stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing away.... He was
stricken with dismay; his face lost colour and took[69] on a warm paleness ... his agitation was-very great; he
stood by a table and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, he found his hand trembling so that he was
obliged to lay it down." It was desirable, certainly, that something should occur to break the spell of a
diffidence that might justly be called morbid. There is another little sentence dropped by Mr. Lathrop in
relation to this period of Hawthorne's life, which appears to me worth quoting, though I am by no means sure
that it will seem so to the reader. It has a very simple and innocent air, but to a person not without an
impression of the early days of "culture" in New England, it will be pregnant with historic meaning. The elder

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Miss Peabody, who afterwards was Hawthorne's sister-in-law and who acquired later in life a very honourable
American fame as a woman of benevolence, of learning, and of literary accomplishment, had invited the Miss
Hathornes to come to her house for the evening, and to bring with them their brother, whom she wished to
thank for his beautiful tales. "Entirely to her surprise," says Mr. Lathrop, completing thereby his picture of the
attitude of this remarkable family toward society—"entirely to her surprise they came. She herself
opened the door, and there, before her, between his sisters, stood a splendidly handsome youth, tall and
strong, with no appearance whatever of timidity, but instead, an almost fierce determination making his face
stern. This was his resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess
brought out Flaxman's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton, of Harvard, and the party made
an evening's entertainment out of them." This last sentence is the one I allude to; and were it not for[70] fear
of appearing too fanciful I should say that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an unconscious
expression of the lonely frigidity which characterised most attempts at social recreation in the New England
world some forty years ago. There was at that time a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in
art, in æsthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small things were made
to do large service; and there is something even touching in the solemnity of consideration that was bestowed
by the emancipated New England conscience upon little wandering books and prints, little echoes and
rumours of observation and experience. There flourished at that time in Boston a very remarkable and
interesting woman, of whom we shall have more to say, Miss Margaret Fuller by name. This lady was the
apostle of culture, of intellectual curiosity, and in the peculiarly interesting account of her life, published in
1852 by Emerson and two other of her friends, there are pages of her letters and diaries which narrate her
visits to the Boston Athenæum and the emotions aroused in her mind by turning over portfolios of engravings.
These emotions were ardent and passionate—could hardly have been more so had she been prostrate
with contemplation in the Sistine Chapel or in one of the chambers of the Pitti Palace. The only analogy I can
recall to this earnestness of interest in great works of art at a distance from them, is furnished by the great
Goethe's elaborate study of plaster-casts and pencil-drawings at Weimar. I mention Margaret Fuller here
because a glimpse of her state of mind—her vivacity of desire and poverty of knowledge—helps
to define the situation. The situation lives for a moment[71] in those few words of Mr. Lathrop's. The initiated
mind, as I have ventured to call it, has a vision of a little unadorned parlour, with the snow-drifts of a
Massachusetts winter piled up about its windows, and a group of sensitive and serious people, modest votaries
of opportunity, fixing their eyes upon a bookful of Flaxman's attenuated outlines.

At the beginning of the year 1839 he received, through political interest, an appointment as weigher and
gauger in the Boston Custom-house. Mr. Van Buren then occupied the Presidency, and it appears that the
Democratic party, whose successful candidate he had been, rather took credit for the patronage it had
bestowed upon literary men. Hawthorne was a Democrat, and apparently a zealous one; even in later years,
after the Whigs had vivified their principles by the adoption of the Republican platform, and by taking up an
honest attitude on the question of slavery, his political faith never wavered. His Democratic sympathies were
eminently natural, and there would have been an incongruity in his belonging to the other party. He was not
only by conviction, but personally and by association, a Democrat. When in later years he found himself in
contact with European civilisation, he appears to have become conscious of a good deal of latent radicalism in
his disposition; he was oppressed with the burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for
lightness and freshness and facility of change. But these things are relative to the point of view, and in his own
country Hawthorne cast his lot with the party of conservatism, the party opposed to change and freshness. The
people who found something musty and mouldy in his literary productions would have regarded[72] this quite
as a matter of course; but we are not obliged to use invidious epithets in describing his political preferences.
The sentiment that attached him to the Democracy was a subtle and honourable one, and the author of an
attempt to sketch a portrait of him, should be the last to complain of this adjustment of his sympathies. It falls
much more smoothly into his reader's conception of him than any other would do; and if he had had the
perversity to be a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would have been considerably taxed in devising a
proper explanation of the circumstance. At any rate, the Democrats gave him a small post in the Boston
Custom-house, to which an annual salary of $1,200 was attached, and Hawthorne appears at first to have

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joyously welcomed the gift. The duties of the office were not very congruous to the genius of a man of fancy;
but it had the advantage that it broke the spell of his cursed solitude, as he called it, drew him away from
Salem, and threw him, comparatively speaking, into the world. The first volume of the American Note-Books
contains some extracts from letters written during his tenure of this modest office, which indicate sufficiently
that his occupations cannot have been intrinsically gratifying.

"I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during the winter of 1840, "on board of a black little British
schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself
warm; for the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the dock as if it had been the pipe of a pair of
bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand
and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water and covered with ice, which the rising
and falling of successive tides had[73] left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the
water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker's Hill Monument, and what interested me
considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the
march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed
myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all
sorts—my olfactories meanwhile being greatly refreshed with the odour of a pipe, which the captain, or
some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon
the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release."

A worse man than Hawthorne would have measured coal quite as well, and of all the dismal tasks to which an
unremunerated imagination has ever had to accommodate itself, I remember none more sordid than the
business depicted in the foregoing lines. "I pray," he writes some weeks later, "that in one year more I may
find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-house; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I do detest all
offices; all, at least, that are held on a political tenure, and I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts
wither away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as
black as that and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my Custom-house
experience—to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy
could have taught me; because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." A few days later he goes on
in the same strain:—

"I do not think it is the doom laid upon me of murdering so many of the brightest hours of the day at the
Custom[74]-house that makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again trying to write worthily ... yet
with a sense as if all the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition, or had decayed out of it
since my nature was given to my own keeping.... Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region. A
salt or even a coal-ship is ten million times preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the fresh breeze
around me, and my thoughts having hardly anything to do with my occupation, are as free as air. Nevertheless
... it is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the iron of my
chain; for after all a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food for it, even in the Custom-house. And with
such materials as these I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not
know unless I had learned them there; so that the present position of my life shall not be quite left out of the
sum of my real existence.... It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know
much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. I have gained
worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And when I quit this earthy career
where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not perceive, I trust, by
my look or the tenor of my thoughts and feelings, that I have been a Custom-house officer."

He says, writing shortly afterwards, that "when I shall be free again, I will enjoy all things with the fresh
simplicity of a child of five years old. I shall grow young again, made all over anew. I will go forth and stand
in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my
heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon."

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This forecast of his destiny was sufficiently exact. A year later, in April 1841, he went to take up his
abode[75] in the socialistic community of Brook Farm. Here he found himself among fields and flowers and
other natural products—as well as among many products that could not very justly be called natural. He
was exposed to summer showers in plenty; and his personal associations were as different as possible from,
those he had encountered in fiscal circles. He made acquaintance with Transcendentalism and the
Transcendentalists.

[76]

CHAPTER IV.

BROOK FARM AND CONCORD.

The history of the little industrial and intellectual association which formed itself at this time in one of the
suburbs of Boston has not, to my knowledge, been written; though it is assuredly a curious and interesting
chapter in the domestic annals of New England. It would of course be easy to overrate the importance of this
ingenious attempt of a few speculative persons to improve the outlook of mankind. The experiment came and
went very rapidly and quietly, leaving very few traces behind it. It became simply a charming personal
reminiscence for the small number of amiable enthusiasts who had had a hand in it. There were degrees of
enthusiasm, and I suppose there were degrees of amiability; but a certain generous brightness of hope and
freshness of conviction pervaded the whole undertaking and rendered it, morally speaking, important to an
extent of which any heed that the world in general ever gave to it is an insufficient measure. Of course it
would be a great mistake to represent the episode of Brook Farm as directly related to the manners and morals
of the New England world in general—and in especial to those of the prosperous, opulent,
comfortable[77] part of it. The thing was the experiment of a coterie—it was unusual, unfashionable,
unsuccessful. It was, as would then have been said, an amusement of the Transcendentalists—a
harmless effusion of Radicalism. The Transcendentalists were not, after all, very numerous; and the Radicals
were by no means of the vivid tinge of those of our own day. I have said that the Brook Farm community left
no traces behind it that the world in general can appreciate; I should rather say that the only trace is a short
novel, of which the principal merits reside in its qualities of difference from the affair itself. The Blithedale
Romance is the main result of Brook Farm; but The Blithedale Romance was very properly never recognised
by the Brook Farmers as an accurate portrait of their little colony.

Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent complaint is that it is monotonous, that it lacks
variety of incident and of type, the episode, our own business with which is simply that it was the cause of
Hawthorne's writing an admirable tale, might be welcomed as a picturesque variation. At the same time, if we
do not exaggerate its proportions, it may seem to contain a fund of illustration as to that phase of human life
with which our author's own history mingled itself. The most graceful account of the origin of Brook Farm is
probably to be found in these words of one of the biographers of Margaret Fuller: "In Boston and its vicinity,
several friends, for whose character Margaret felt the highest-honour, were earnestly considering the
possibility of making such industrial, social, and educational arrangements as would simplify economies,
combine leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust collisions of caste, equalise[78]
refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole." The
reader will perceive that this was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment failed, the greater was the pity.
The writer goes on to say that a gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in literature (he had begun
by being a clergyman), "convinced by his experience in a faithful ministry that the need was urgent for a
thorough application of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was about staking his all of
fortune, reputation, and influence, in an attempt to organize a joint-stock company at Brook Farm." As
Margaret Fuller passes for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance,

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and as she is probably, with one exception, the person connected with the affair who, after Hawthorne, offered
most of what is called a personality to the world, I may venture to quote a few more passages from her
Memoirs—a curious, in some points of view almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I have said,
an extremely interesting book. It was a strange history and a strange destiny, that of this brilliant, restless, and
unhappy woman—this ardent New Englander, this impassioned Yankee, who occupied so large a place
in the thoughts, the lives, the affections, of an intelligent and appreciative society, and yet left behind her
nothing but the memory of a memory. Her function, her reputation, were singular, and not altogether
reassuring: she was a talker, she was the talker, she was the genius of talk. She had a magnificent, though by
no means an unmitigated, egotism; and in some of her utterances it is difficult to say whether pride or
humility prevails—as for instance when she writes that she feels "that there[79] is plenty of room in the
Universe for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking of them when so many things interest me
more." She has left the same sort of reputation as a great actress. Some of her writing has extreme beauty,
almost all of it has a real interest, but her value, her activity, her sway (I am not sure that one can say her
charm), were personal and practical. She went to Europe, expanded to new desires and interests, and, very
poor herself, married an impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, she embarked to
return to her own country, and was lost at sea in a terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death
combined with many of the elements of her life to convert her memory into a sort of legend, so that the people
who had known her well, grew at last to be envied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to have been
intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an entry as this in the American Note-Books in 1841: "I was
invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some
business to do; for which I was very thankful!" It is true that, later, the lady is the subject of one or two
allusions of a gentler cast. One of them indeed is so pretty as to be worth quoting:—

"After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's, I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I
perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been
there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which
I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving
utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a[80] group of
people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old
man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made
some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we
talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows, whose voices
Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the
character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance,
and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy."

It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a high relish for the very positive
personality of this accomplished and argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to
reign, as twilight did in his own. He must have been struck with the glare of her understanding, and, mentally
speaking, have scowled and blinked a good deal in conversation with her. But it is tolerably manifest,
nevertheless, that she was, in his imagination, the starting-point of the figure of Zenobia; and Zenobia is, to
my sense, his only very definite attempt at the representation of a character. The portrait is full of alteration
and embellishment; but it has a greater reality, a greater abundance of detail, than any of his other figures, and
the reality was a memory of the lady whom he had encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the
wood-walks of Concord, with strange books in her hand and eloquent discourse on her lips. The Blithedale
Romance was written just after her unhappy death, when the reverberation of her talk would lose much of its
harshness. In fact, however, very much[81] the same qualities that made Hawthorne a Democrat in
polities—his contemplative turn and absence of a keen perception of abuses, his taste for old ideals, and
loitering paces, and muffled tones—would operate to keep him out of active sympathy with a woman
of the so-called progressive type. We may be sure that in women his taste was conservative.

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It seems odd, as his biographer says, "that the least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a
socialistic community;" but although it is apparent that Hawthorne went to Brook Farm without any great
Transcendental fervour, yet he had various good reasons for casting his lot in this would-be happy family. He
was as yet unable to marry, but he naturally wished to do so as speedily as possible, and there was a prospect
that Brook Farm would prove an economical residence. And then it is only fair to believe that Hawthorne was
interested in the experiment, and that though he was not a Transcendentalist, an Abolitionist, or a Fourierite,
as his companions were in some degree or other likely to be, he was willing, as a generous and unoccupied
young man, to lend a hand in any reasonable scheme for helping people to live together on better terms than
the common. The Brook Farm scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was devised and carried out
by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who were careful to place economy first and idealism
afterwards, and who were not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There were no
formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference whatever with private life or individual habits, and not
the faintest adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as the[82] relations of the sexes.
The relations of the sexes were neither more nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent;
and in such particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and irreproachable. Its main characteristic
was that each individual concerned in it should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the whole machine
going. He could choose his work and he could live as he liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means
demanded, that he would make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party. Allowing,
however, for everything that was a concession to worldly traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there
must have been in the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of spirit, of a certain noble
credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year
1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism
could only have sprouted in the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak—the soil of the old
New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an imported culture. The Transcendentalists read a great
deal of French and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and many other writers;
but the strong and deep New England conscience accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and
there never was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in fewer eccentricities of conduct,
or that borrowed a smaller licence in private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live in
the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage and would not have been, however[83] the
fashion of his time might have turned, a man about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm ploughed the
fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer from another clime and society would have been much
more struck with their spirit of conformity than with their déréglements. Their ardour was a moral ardour, and
the lightest breath of scandal never rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism.

A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming
and free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society
forty years ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be, properly, that the biographer's own personal
reminiscences should stretch back to that period and to the persons who animated it. This would be a
guarantee of fulness of knowledge and, presumably, of kindness of tone. It is difficult to see, indeed, how the
generation of which Hawthorne has given us, in Blithedale, a few portraits, should not at this time of day be
spoken of very tenderly and sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the lightest and
gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect chronicler of these things, a writer just touching them as he
passes, and who has not the advantage of having been a contemporary, there is only one possible tone. The
compiler of these pages, though his recollections date only from a later period, has a memory of a certain
number of persons who had been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with the agitations of that
interesting time. Something of its interest adhered to them still—something of its aroma clung to their
garments; there was something[84] about them which seemed to say that when they were young and
enthusiastic, they had been initiated into moral mysteries, they had played at a wonderful game. Their usual
mark (it is true I can think of exceptions) was that they seemed excellently good. They appeared unstained by
the world, unfamiliar with worldly desires and standards, and with those various forms of human depravity
which flourish in some high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple and democratic ways, destitute of

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pretensions and affectations, of jealousies, of cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation has
three or four drawbacks for the critic—drawbacks, however, that may be overlooked by a person for
whom it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of provincialism; it was a beginning
without a fruition, a dawn without a noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It
produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not a sharer)
only one writer in whom the world at large has interested itself. The situation was summed up and
transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all that it contained, and a good deal more,
doubtless, besides; he was the man of genius of the moment; he was the Transcendentalist par excellence.
Emerson expressed, before all things, as was extremely natural at the hour and in the place, the value and
importance of the individual, the duty of making the most of one's self, of living by one's own personal light
and carrying out one's own disposition. He reflected with beautiful irony upon the exquisite impudence of
those institutions which claim to have appropriated the truth and to dole it out, in propor[85]tionate morsels,
in exchange for a subscription. He talked about the beauty and dignity of life, and about every one who is born
into the world being born to the whole, having an interest and a stake in the whole. He said "all that is clearly
due to-day is not to lie," and a great many other things which it would be still easier to present in a ridiculous
light. He insisted upon sincerity and independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one's nature,
and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being more comfortable. He urged that a man should
await his call, his finding the thing to do which he should really believe in doing, and not be urged by the
world's opinion to do simply the world's work. "If no call should come for years, for centuries, then I know
that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence.... If I cannot work, at least I need not
lie." The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality and, as regards his own
character, unique quality, must have had a great charm for people living in a society in which introspection,
thanks to the want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social resource.

In the United States, in those days, there were no great things to look out at (save forests and rivers); life was
not in the least spectacular; society was not brilliant; the country was given up to a great material prosperity, a
homely bourgeois activity, a diffusion of primary education and the common luxuries. There was therefore,
among the cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a writer who would help one to take a
picturesque view of one's internal possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine[86]
sunrise and moonlight effects. "Meantime, while the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before
every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this,
namely—it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but
provocation that I can receive from another soul." To make one's self so much more interesting would help to
make life interesting, and life was probably, to many of this aspiring congregation, a dream of freedom and
fortitude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy; but the general tone was magnificent; and I
can easily believe that, coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a great many fine
moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly
sentient period, but the convictions and interests—the moral passion. One certainly envies the privilege
of having heard the finest of Emerson's orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most
poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly local and national.
They had a music and a magic, and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the beautiful
modulation of his utterance, one regrets in especial that one might not have been present on a certain occasion
which made a sensation, an era—the delivery of an address to the Divinity School of Harvard
University, on a summer evening in 1838. In the light, fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by
customs and institutions established, these things, as the phrase is, told.

Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at Brook Farm in the midst of one of[87]
those April snow-storms which, during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of the
vernal process. Miles Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance, is evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one
else in particular. He is indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the observer; his chief
identity lies in his success in looking at things objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them.

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This indeed was the part that Hawthorne played socially in the little community at West Roxbury. His
biographer describes him as sitting "silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the house,
where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment of the young people, himself almost always
holding a book before him, but seldom turning the leaves." He put his hand to the plough and supported
himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do, by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum
of voices. Some of his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his
want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for
purely psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched the inmates when they were off
their guard, analysing their characters, and dissecting the amiable ardour, the magnanimous illusions, which
he was too cold-blooded to share. In so far as this account of Hawthorne's attitude was a complaint, it was a
singularly childish one. If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a very fortunate circumstance from
the point of view of posterity, who would have preserved but a slender memory of the affair if our author's
fine novel[88] had not kept the topic open. The complaint is indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us
regret that the author's fellow-communists came off so easily. They certainly would not have done so if the
author of Blithedale had been more of a satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was a very
harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer specimens of the reforming genus with which he must have
been surrounded, one almost wishes that, for our entertainment, he had given his old companions something
to complain of in earnest. There is no satire whatever in the Romance; the quality is almost conspicuous by its
absence. Of portraits there are only two; there is no sketching of odd figures—no reproduction of
strange types of radicalism; the human background is left vague. Hawthorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook
Farm he was, according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his scepticism was exercised much more in
the interest of fancy than in that of reality.

There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and pastoral in the habits of the place during the fine New
England summer; but we have no retrospective envy of the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season
which, as Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves in those regions, "so large a blank—so melancholy a
deathspot—in lives so brief that they ought to be all summer-time." "Of a summer night, when the
moon was full," says Mr. Lathrop, "they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and shadow, while sundry of
the younger men sang old ballads, or joined Tom Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other nights there would
be an original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of Shakspeare, with the parts distributed to
different[89] members; and these amusements failing, some interesting discussion was likely to take their
place. Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm would drive into Boston, in
carriages and waggons, to the opera or the play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the
dishes in the Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped them with their work. The men
wore blouses of a checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the
throat, and rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns and hats." All this sounds delightfully
Arcadian and innocent, and it is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in some of the
features of such a life; in the free, frank, and stainless companionship of young men and maidens, in the
mixture of manual labour and intellectual flights—dish-washing and æsthetics, wood-chopping and
philosophy. Wordsworth's "plain living and high thinking" were made actual. Some passages in Margaret
Fuller's journals throw plenty of light on this. (It must be premised that she was at Brook Farm as an
occasional visitor; not as a labourer in the Hive.)

"All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, upon
Education, in its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual
ground:—The aim is perfection; patience the road. Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an
approximation only.... Mr. R. spoke admirably on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of the
sans-culotte tendency in their manners, throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they
had heard enough. Yet as the majority differ with me, to begin with—that being the reason this subject
was chosen—they[90] showed on the whole more interest and deference than I had expected. As I am
accustomed to deference, however, and need it for the boldness and animation which my part requires, I did

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not speak with as much force as usual.... Sunday.—A glorious day; the woods full of perfume; I was
out all the morning. In the afternoon Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would be too uncertain here,
as I could not work. —— said 'they would all like to work for a person of genius.' ... 'Yes,' I told
her; 'but where would be my repose when they were always to be judging whether I was worth it or not?....
Each day you must prove yourself anew.' ... We talked of the principles of the community. I said I had not a
right to come, because all the confidence I had in it was as an experiment worth trying, and that it was part of
the great wave of inspired thought.... We had valuable discussion on these points. All Monday morning in the
woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I felt the evils of the want of conventional refinement, in
the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I notice; and by
every day's observation of me will see that she ought not to have done it. In the evening a husking in the barn
... a most picturesque scene.... I stayed and helped about half an hour, and then took a long walk beneath the
stars. Wednesday.... In the evening a conversation on Impulse.... I defended nature, as I always
do;—the spirit ascending through, not superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I
advocated the claims of Intellect, because those present were rather disposed to postpone them. On the nature
of Beauty we had good talk. —— seemed in a much more reverent humour than the other night,
and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled.... Saturday,—Well, good-bye, Brook
Farm. I know more about this place than I did when I came; but the only way to be qualified for a judge of
such an experiment would be to become an active, though unimpassioned, associate in trying it.... The girl
who was so rude to me stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-bye." [91]

The young girl in question cannot have been Hawthorne's charming Priscilla; nor yet another young lady, of a
most humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret's biographers her recollections of this remarkable
woman's visits to Brook Farm; concluding with the assurance that "after a while she seemed to lose sight of
my more prominent and disagreeable peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard."

Hawthorne's farewell to the place appears to have been accompanied with some reflections of a cast similar to
those indicated by Miss Fuller; in so far at least as we may attribute to Hawthorne himself some of the
observations that he fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His biographer justly quotes two or three sentences from
The Blithedale Romance, as striking the note of the author's feeling about the place. "No sagacious man," says
Coverdale, "will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people,
without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from
that old standpoint." And he remarks elsewhere that "it struck me as rather odd that one of the first questions
raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of
getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labour. But to tell the truth, I very soon
became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility rather than new
brotherhood." He was doubtless oppressed by the "sultry heat of society," as he calls it in one of the jottings in
the Note-Books. "What would a man do if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and
could never bathe himself in[92] cool solitude?" His biographer relates that one of the other Brook Farmers,
wandering afield one summer's day, discovered Hawthorne stretched at his length upon a grassy hillside, with
his hat pulled over his face, and every appearance, in his attitude, of the desire to escape detection. On his
asking him whether he had any particular reason for this shyness of posture—"Too much of a party up
there!" Hawthorne contented himself with replying, with a nod in the direction of the Hive. He had
nevertheless for a time looked forward to remaining indefinitely in the community; he meant to marry as soon
as possible and bring his wife there to live. Some sixty pages of the second volume of the American
Note-Books are occupied with extracts from his letters to his future wife and from his journal (which appears
however at this time to have been only intermittent), consisting almost exclusively of descriptions of the
simple scenery of the neighbourhood, and of the state of the woods and fields and weather. Hawthorne's
fondness for all the common things of nature was deep and constant, and there is always something charming
in his verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to himself about them. "Oh," he breaks out, of an October
afternoon, "the beauty of grassy slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the intervals
between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and sits down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue

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asters as her parting gifts and memorials!" He was but a single summer at Brook Farm; the rest of his
residence had the winter-quality.

But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the French say, a solitude à deux. He was married
in[93] July 1842, and betook himself immediately to the ancient village of Concord, near Boston, where he
occupied the so-called Manse which has given the title to one of his collections of tales, and upon which this
work, in turn, has conferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets "ancient" and "near" in the foregoing
sentence, according to the American measurement of time and distance. Concord is some twenty miles from
Boston, and even to day, upwards of forty years after the date of Hawthorne's removal thither, it is a very
fresh and well-preserved looking town. It had already a local history when, a hundred years ago, the larger
current of human affairs flowed for a moment around it. Concord has the honour of being the first spot in
which blood was shed in the war of the Revolution; here occurred the first exchange of musket-shots between
the King's troops and the American insurgents. Here, as Emerson says in the little hymn which he contributed
in 1836 to the dedication of a small monument commemorating this circumstance—

"Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world."
The battle was a small one, and the farmers were not destined individually to emerge from obscurity; but the
memory of these things has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered, moreover, so to
speak, by the life-long presence there of one of the most honoured of American men of letters—the
poet from whom I just quoted two lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and is an excellent
specimen of a New England village of the riper sort. At the time of Hawthorne's first going there it must have
been an even better specimen than to-day—more homogeneous,[94] more indigenous, more absolutely
democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration had scarcely begun to break upon the rural
strongholds of the New England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt Hibernian spray. It is
very possible, however, that at this period there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a
village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least honourable
item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous summers
and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous field and forest, would have been part of
the composition. For the rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools and the
self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little
society to manage its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the Mosses, Hawthorne has given an
account of his dwelling, of his simple occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics of the
place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the surface of which—even in the dry New
England air, so unfriendly to mosses and lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a picturesque
complexion—a hundred and fifty years of exposure have imparted a kind of tone, standing just above
the slow-flowing Concord river, and approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It had been the
dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers, ancestors of the celebrated Emerson, who had himself
spent his early manhood and written some of his most beautiful essays there. "He used," as Hawthorne says,
"to watch the[95] Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill."
From its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological association—a
vague reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent
quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the happiest of his life.
The future was indeed not in any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. In the
American Note-Books there is a charming passage (too long to quote) descriptive of the entertainment the
new couple found in renovating and re-furnishing the old parsonage, which, at the time of their going into it,
was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed,
he writes that "the shade of our departed host will never haunt it; for its aspect has been as completely
changed as the scenery of a theatre. Probably the ghost gave one peep into it, uttered a groan, and vanished for
ever." This departed host was a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar, who left behind him a reputation
of learning and sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most distinguished

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woman in the little Concord circle. Doctor Ripley's predecessor had been, I believe, the last of the line of the
Emerson ministers—an old gentleman who, in the earlier years of his pastorate, stood at the window of
his study (the same in which Hawthorne handled a more irresponsible quill) watching, with his hands under
his long coat-tails, the progress of Concord fight. It is not by any means related, however, I should add, that he
waited for the conclusion to make up his mind which was the righteous cause. [96]

Hawthorne had a little society (as much, we may infer, as he desired), and it was excellent in quality. But the
pages in the Note-Books which relate to his life at the Manse, and the introduction to the Mosses, make more
of his relations with vegetable nature, and of his customary contemplation of the incidents of wood-path and
way-side, than of the human elements of the scene; though these also are gracefully touched upon. These
pages treat largely of the pleasures of a kitchen-garden, of the beauty of summer-squashes, and of the
mysteries of apple-raising. With the wholesome aroma of apples (as is indeed almost necessarily the case in
any realistic record of New England rural life) they are especially pervaded; and with many other homely and
domestic emanations; all of which derive a sweetness from the medium of our author's colloquial style.
Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with his pen. The tone of his writing is often that of
charming talk—ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its
vulgarity. In the preface to the tales written at the Manse he talks of many things and just touches upon some
of the members of his circle—especially upon that odd genius, his fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I
said a little way back that the New England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the
world at large from not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. But any reference to it
would be ungenerous which should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of Walden. Whatever
question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one;
but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse[97] than
provincial—he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable. But at his best he has an extreme
natural charm, and he must always be mentioned after those Americans—Emerson, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, Lowell, Motley—who have written originally. He was Emerson's independent moral man
made flesh—living for the ages, and not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for
Concord. In fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the
observation of the phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for
flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward
consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he
and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and there are some charming touches
in the preface to the Mosses in regard to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord
river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed himself, and which he eventually
made over to Hawthorne, and as expert in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had once haunted the
same silent stream. The most frequent of Hawthorne's companions on these excursions appears, however, to
have been a local celebrity—as well as Thoreau a high Transcendentalist—Mr. Ellery Channing,
whom I may mention, since he is mentioned very explicitly in the preface to the Mosses, and also because no
account of the little Concord world would be complete which should omit him. He was the son of the
distinguished Unitarian moralist, and, I believe, the intimate friend of Thoreau, whom he resembled in[98]
having produced literary compositions more esteemed by the few than by the many. He and Hawthorne were
both fishermen, and the two used to set themselves afloat in the summer afternoons. "Strange and happy times
were those," exclaims the more distinguished of the two writers, "when we cast aside all irksome forms and
strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any less
conventional race, during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide
meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its junction
with the Concord, has never flowed on earth—nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a
poet's imagination.... It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood which
whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were
hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and the clustering
foliage...." While Hawthorne was looking at these beautiful things, or, for that matter, was writing them, he

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was well out of the way of a certain class of visitants whom he alludes to in one of the closing passages of this
long Introduction. "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer,
strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the
world's destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense character." "These hobgoblins of flesh and blood," he
says in a preceding paragraph, "were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original
thinker who had his[99] earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.... People that had lighted on a
new thought or a thought they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a
lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value." And Hawthorne enumerates some of the categories of pilgrims to
the shrine of the mystic counsellor, who as a general thing was probably far from abounding in their own
sense (when this sense was perverted), but gave them a due measure of plain practical advice. The whole
passage is interesting, and it suggests that little Concord had not been ill-treated by the fates—with "a
great original thinker" at one end of the village, an exquisite teller of tales at the other, and the rows of New
England elms between. It contains moreover an admirable sentence about Hawthorne's pilgrim-haunted
neighbour, with whom, "being happy," as he says, and feeling therefore "as if there were no question to be
put," he was not in metaphysical communion. "It was good nevertheless to meet him in the wood-paths, or
sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a
shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to
receive more than he could impart!" One may without indiscretion risk the surmise that Hawthorne's
perception, of the "shining" element in his distinguished friend was more intense than his friend's appreciation
of whatever luminous property might reside within the somewhat dusky envelope of our hero's identity as a
collector of "mosses." Emerson, as a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have attached but a moderate
value to Hawthorne's cat-like faculty of seeing in the dark.[100]

"As to the daily coarse of our life," the latter writes in the spring of 1843, "I have written with pretty
commendable diligence, averaging from two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I
might have written more if it had seemed worth while, but I was content to earn only so much gold as might
suffice for our immediate wants, having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away
with the necessity of writing for bread. These prospects have not yet had their fulfilment; and we are well
content to wait, for an office would inevitably remove us from our present happy home—at least from
an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine
people do not pay their debts; so that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance, not a
trouble." And he goes on to give some account of his usual habits. (The passage is from his Journal, and the
account is given to himself, as it were, with that odd, unfamiliar explicitness which marks the tone of this
record throughout.) "Every day I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the post-office, and
spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return home, generally without having spoken a word to any
human being.... In the way of exercise I saw and split wood, and physically I was never in a better condition
than now." He adds a mention of an absence he had lately made. "I went alone to Salem, where I resumed all
my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted away
like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had got hold of a reality which never could be taken
from me. It was[101] good thus to get apart from my happiness for the sake of contemplating it."

These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for, appeared in the Democratic Review, a periodical
published at Washington, and having, as our author's biographer says, "considerable pretensions to a national
character." It is to be regretted that the practice of keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the
magazine in question, have been thought compatible with these pretensions. The foregoing lines are a
description of a very monotonous but a very contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the
dissonance of tone of the tales Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances. It is indeed not a little
of an anomaly. The episode of the Manse was one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best of the
Mosses (though not the greater number of them) are singularly dismal compositions. They are redolent of M.
Montégut's pessimism. "The reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, "had been but slightly
insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking

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strength, and the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us." This is very true (allowing for Mr. Lathrop's rather
too emphatic way of putting it); but the anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our writer's
imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy one; the old Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to
be paid, of the darkness and wickedness of life, had, as I have already suggested, passed into it. It had not
passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature corresponding to those occupied by the same horrible vision of
things in his[102] ancestors; but it had still been determined to claim this later comer as its own, and since his
heart and his happiness were to escape, it insisted on setting its mark upon his genius—upon his most
beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was strongest and keenest, when it
was most itself, then the dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a better proof that he
was not the man of a sombre parti-pris whom M. Montégut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers
of his invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This surely indicates that there was but little
direct connection between the products of his fancy and the state of his affections. When he was lightest at
heart, he was most creative, and when he was most creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old secret of
mankind in general and of the Puritans in particular, most appealed to him—the secret that we are
really not by any means so good as a well-regulated society requires us to appear. It is not too much to say,
even, that the very condition of production of some of these unamiable tales would be that they should be
superficial, and, as it were, insincere. The magnificent little romance of Young Goodman Brown, for instance,
evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own state of mind, his conviction of human depravity and his
consequent melancholy; for the simple reason that if it meant anything, it would mean too much. Mr. Lathrop
speaks of it as a "terrible and lurid parable;" but this, it seems to me, is just what it is not. It is not a parable,
but a picture, which is a very different thing. What does M. Montégut make, one would ask, from the
point[103] of view of Hawthorne's pessimism, of the singularly objective and unpreoccupied tone of the
Introduction to the Old Manse, in which the author speaks from himself, and in which the cry of metaphysical
despair is not even faintly sounded?

We have seen that when he went into the village he often came home without having spoken a word to a
human being. There is a touching entry made a little later, bearing upon his mild taciturnity. "A cloudy veil
stretches across the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think
that God sees through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know
everything that is there. Yes, and so may any mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to
come into my depths. But he must find his own way there; I can neither guide nor enlighten him." It must be
acknowledged, however, that if he was not able to open the gate of conversation, it was sometimes because he
was disposed to slide the bolt himself. "I had a purpose," he writes, shortly before the entry last quoted, "if
circumstances would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any
human being." He beguiled these incommunicative periods by studying German, in Tieck and Bürger, without
apparently making much progress; also in reading French, in Voltaire and Rabelais. "Just now," he writes, one
October noon, "I heard a sharp tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume
of Rabelais), behold, the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance." It was a quiet life, of
course, in which these diminutive incidents seemed noteworthy; and what is noteworthy[104] here to the
observer of Hawthorne's contemplative simplicity, is the fact that though he finds a good deal to say about the
little bird (he devotes several lines more to it) he makes no remark upon Rabelais. He had other visitors than
little birds, however, and their demands were also not Rabelaisian. Thoreau comes to see him, and they talk
"upon the spiritual advantages of change of place, and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred
or concatenated subjects." Mr. Alcott was an arch-transcendentalist, living in Concord, and the Dial was a
periodical to which the illuminated spirits of Boston and its neighbourhood used to contribute. Another visitor
comes and talks "of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last
meeting." There is probably a great deal of Concord five-and-thirty years ago in that little sentence!

[105]

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CHAPTER V.

THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS.

The prospect of official station and emolument which Hawthorne mentions in one of those paragraphs from
his Journals which I have just quoted, as having offered itself and then passed away, was at last, in the event,
confirmed by his receiving from the administration of President Polk the gift of a place in the Custom-house
of his native town. The office was a modest one, and "official station" may perhaps appear a magniloquent
formula for the functions sketched in the admirable Introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's duties
were those of Surveyor of the port of Salem, and they had a salary attached, which was the important part; as
his biographer tells us that he had received almost nothing for the contributions to the Democratic Review. He
bade farewell to his ex-parsonage and went back to Salem in 1846, and the immediate effect of his
ameliorated fortune was to make him stop writing. None of his Journals of the period from his going to Salem
to 1850 have been published; from which I infer that he even ceased to journalise. The Scarlet Letter was not
written till 1849. In the delightful prologue to that work, entitled The Custom-house, he[106] embodies some
of the impressions gathered during these years of comparative leisure (I say of leisure because he does not
intimate in this sketch of his occupations that his duties were onerous). He intimates, however, that they were
not interesting, and that it was a very good thing for him, mentally and morally, when his term of service
expired—or rather when he was removed from office by the operation of that wonderful "rotatory"
system which his countrymen had invented for the administration of their affairs. This sketch of the
Custom-house is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the most
gracefully and humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting to examine it in detail, but I prefer to use
my space for making some remarks upon the work which was the ultimate result of this period of Hawthorne's
residence in his native town; and I shall, for convenience' sake, say directly afterwards what I have to say
about the two companions of The Scarlet Letter—The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale
Romance. I quoted some passages from the prologue to the first of these novels in the early pages of this
essay. There is another passage, however, which bears particularly upon this phase of Hawthorne's career, and
which is so happily expressed as to make it a pleasure to transcribe it—the passage in which he says
that "for myself, during the whole of my Custom-house experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of
the fire-light, were just alike in my regard, and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of
a tallow candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them—of no great richness
or value, but the best I had—was gone from me." He goes on to say that he believes that[107] he might
have done something if he could have made up his mind to convert the very substance of the commonplace
that surrounded him into matter of literature.

"I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of
the inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not
stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gift as a story-teller.... Or I might readily have found a
more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to
attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy
matter.... The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance
of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay
hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The
fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had
not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there.... These perceptions came too
late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good
Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a
suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of
phial; so that at every glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum."

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As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect after three years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote
The Scarlet Letter, there is little reason to complain of the injury he suffered in his Surveyorship.

His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled Yesterdays with Authors, has related the circumstances in
which Hawthorne's masterpiece came into the world.[108] "In the winter of 1849, after he had been ejected
from the Custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him and inquire after his health, for we heard he had
been suffering from illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house.... I found him alone in a chamber
over the sitting-room of the dwelling, and as the day was cold he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk
about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood." His visitor
urged him to bethink himself of publishing something, and Hawthorne replied by calling his attention to the
small popularity his published productions had yet acquired, and declaring that he had done nothing and had
no spirit for doing anything. The narrator of the incident urged upon him the necessity of a more hopeful view
of his situation, and proceeded to take leave. He had not reached the street, however, when Hawthorne hurried
to overtake him, and, placing a roll of MS. in his hand, bade him take it to Boston, read it, and pronounce
upon it. "It is either very good or very bad," said the author; "I don't know which." "On my way back to
Boston," says Mr. Fields, "I read the germ of The Scarlet Letter; before I slept that night I wrote him a note all
aglow with admiration of the marvellous story he had put into my hands, and told him that I would come
again to Salem the next day and arrange for its publication. I went on in such an amazing state of excitement,
when we met again in the little house, that he would not believe I was really in earnest. He seemed to think I
was beside myself, and laughed sadly at my enthusiasm." Hawthorne, however, went on with the book and
finished it, but it appeared only a year later. His biographer quotes a[109] passage from a letter which he
wrote in February, 1850, to his friend Horatio Bridge. "I finished my book only yesterday; one end being in
the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem, so that, as you see, my story is at least
fourteen miles long.... My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before April. He speaks of it in
tremendous terms of approbation, so does Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the conclusion last night. It broke
her heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache—which I look upon, as a triumphant success.
Judging from the effect upon her and the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten-strike. But I
don't make any such calculation." And Mr. Lathrop calls attention, in regard to this passage, to an allusion in
the English Note-Books (September 14, 1855). "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness
in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to
my wife, just after writing it—tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I were
tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having
gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many months."

The work has the tone of the circumstances in which it was produced. If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood,
and if his future was painfully vague, The Scarlet Letter contains little enough of gaiety or of hopefulness. It is
densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently
gloomy of English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the author's masterpiece, and I imagine it
will continue to be, for other generations than ours, his[110] most substantial title to fame. The subject had
probably lain a long time in his mind, as his subjects were apt to do; so that he appears completely to possess
it, to know it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels; it achieves more perfectly what
it attempts, and it has about it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the first time
he has touched his highest mark—a sort of straightness and naturalness of execution, an
unconsciousness of his public, and freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he
immediately found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers dimly
the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror
were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes
as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief indeed that the "letter" in
question was one of the documents that come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him
that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance
of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured A. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to

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see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a
representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and a white coif, holding between her
knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the
woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the
picture, were maliciously playing. I was[111] told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I
grew older I might read their interesting history. But the picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I
had been vaguely frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I first read the novel, I
seemed to myself to have read it before, and to be familiar with its two strange heroines, I mention this
incident simply as an indication of the degree to which the success of The Scarlet Letter had made the book
what is called an actuality. Hawthorne himself was very modest about it; he wrote to his publisher, when there
was a question of his undertaking another novel, that what had given the history of Hester Prynne its "vogue"
was simply the introductory chapter. In fact, the publication of The Scarlet Letter was in the United States a
literary event of the first importance. The book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the
country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was given it—a satisfaction in the idea
of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. Something might at
last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the
thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New
England.

It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the
mark of Hawthorne's best things—an indefinable purity and lightness of conception, a quality which in
a work of art affects one in the same way as the absence of grossness does in a human being. His fancy, as I
just now said, had evidently brooded over the subject[112] for a long time; the situation to be represented had
disclosed itself to him in all its phases. When I say in all its phases, the sentence demands modification; for it
is to be remembered that if Hawthorne laid his hand upon the well-worn theme, upon the familiar combination
of the wife, the lover, and the husband, it was after all but to one period of the history of these three persons
that he attached himself. The situation is the situation after the woman's fault has been committed, and the
current of expiation and repentance has set in. In spite of the relation between Hester Prynne and Arthur
Dimmesdale, no story of love was surely ever less of a "love story." To Hawthorne's imagination the fact that
these two persons had loved each other too well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to
him was the idea of their moral situation in the long years that were to follow. The story indeed is in a
secondary degree that of Hester Prynne; she becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure; it is not
upon her the dénoûment depends. It is upon her guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold,
thin rays of his fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a little luminous circle, on the edge of
which hovers the livid and sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. The story goes on for the
most part between the lover and the husband—the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the
secret of his own lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to the
reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and
humbling herself to the misery of atonement—between this more[113] wretched and pitiable culprit, to
whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as a relief, and the older, keener, wiser man, who,
to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally ingenious plan of conjoining
himself with his wronger, living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden
ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and stimulates
them by malignant arts. The attitude of Roger Chillingworth, and the means he takes to compensate
himself—these are the highly original elements in the situation that Hawthorne so ingeniously treats.
None of his works are so impregnated with that after-sense of the old Puritan consciousness of life to which
allusion has so often been made. If, as M. Montégut says, the qualities of his ancestors filtered down through
generations into his composition, The Scarlet Letter was, as it were, the vessel that gathered up the last of the
precious drops. And I say this not because the story happens to be of so-called historical cast, to be told of the
early days of Massachusetts and of people in steeple-crowned hats and sad coloured garments. The historical
colouring is rather weak than otherwise; there is little elaboration of detail, of the modern realism of research;

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and the author has made no great point of causing his figures to speak the English of their period.
Nevertheless, the book is full of the moral presence of the race that invented Hester's penance—diluted
and complicated with other things, but still perfectly recognisable. Puritanism, in a word, is there, not only
objectively, as Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjectively as well. Not, I mean, in his judgment of his
characters,[114] in any harshness of prejudice, or in the obtrusion of a moral lesson; but in the very quality of
his own vision, in the tone of the picture, in a certain coldness and exclusiveness of treatment.

The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element—of a
certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very
picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the
situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said,
of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and
move. I was made to feel this want of reality, this over-ingenuity, of The Scarlet Letter, by chancing not long
since upon a novel which was read fifty years ago much more than to-day, but which is still worth
reading—the story of Adam Blair, by John Gibson Lockhart. This interesting and powerful little tale
has a great deal of analogy with Hawthorne's novel—quite enough, at least, to suggest a comparison
between them; and the comparison is a very interesting one to make, for it speedily leads us to larger
considerations than simple resemblances and divergences of plot.

Adam Blair, like Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Calvinistic minister who becomes the lover of a married woman, is
overwhelmed with remorse at his misdeed, and makes a public confession of it; then expiates it by resigning
his pastoral office and becoming a humble tiller of the soil, as his father had been. The two stories are of about
the same length, and each is the masterpiece[115] (putting aside of course, as far as Lockhart is concerned, the
Life of Scott) of the author. They deal alike with the manners of a rigidly theological society, and even in
certain details they correspond. In each of them, between the guilty pair, there is a charming little girl; though
I hasten to say that Sarah Blair (who is not the daughter of the heroine but the legitimate offspring of the hero,
a widower) is far from being as brilliant and graceful an apparition as the admirable little Pearl of The Scarlet
Letter. The main difference between the two tales is the fact that in the American story the husband plays an
all-important part, and in the Scottish plays almost none at all. Adam Blair is the history of the passion, and
The Scarlet Letter the history of its sequel; but nevertheless, if one has read the two books at a short interval,
it is impossible to avoid confronting them. I confess that a large portion of the interest of Adam Blair, to my
mind, when once I had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of The Scarlet Letter, lay
in noting its difference of tone. It threw into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element of
cold and ingenious fantasy, its elaborate imaginative delicacy. These things do not precisely constitute a
weakness in The Starlet Letter; indeed, in a certain way they constitute a great strength; but the absence of a
certain something warm and straightforward, a trifle more grossly human and vulgarly natural, which one
finds in Adam Blair, will always make Hawthorne's tale less touching to a large number of even very
intelligent readers, than a love-story told with the robust, synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His
novel is not of the first rank (I should call it an excellent[116] second-rate one), but it borrows a charm from
the fact that his vigorous, but not strongly imaginative, mind was impregnated with the reality of his subject.
He did not always succeed in rendering this reality; the expression is sometimes awkward and poor. But the
reader feels that his vision was clear, and his feeling about the matter very strong and rich. Hawthorne's
imagination, on the other hand, plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a dance through the
moonlighted air of his intellect, that the thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing effects
much more exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of having handled a splendid piece of silversmith's work.
Lockhart, by means much more vulgar, produces at moments a greater illusion, and satisfies our inevitable
desire for something, in the people in whom it is sought to interest us, that shall be of the same pitch and the
same continuity with ourselves. Above all, it is interesting to see how the same subject appears to two men of
a thoroughly different cast of mind and of a different race. Lockhart was struck with the warmth of the subject
that offered itself to him, and Hawthorne with its coldness; the one with its glow, its sentimental
interest—the other with its shadow, its moral interest. Lockhart's story is as decent, as severely draped,

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as The Scarlet Letter; but the author has a more vivid sense than appears to have imposed itself upon
Hawthorne, of some of the incidents of the situation he describes; his tempted man and tempting woman are
more actual and personal; his heroine in especial, though not in the least a delicate or a subtle conception, has
a sort of credible, visible, palpable property, a vulgar roundness and relief, which are lacking[117] to the dim
and chastened image of Hester Prynne. But I am going too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, the
usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of mind impelled him, but each expressed something more
than himself. Lockhart was a dense, substantial Briton, with a taste for the concrete, and Hawthorne was a thin
New Englander, with a miasmatic conscience.

In The Scarlet Letter there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and
becomes mechanical; it ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. The idea of the mystic A which the
young minister finds imprinted upon his breast and eating into his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered
badge that Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case in point. This suggestion should, I think,
have been just made and dropped; to insist upon it and return to it, is to exaggerate the weak side of the
subject. Hawthorne returns to it constantly, plays with it, and seems charmed by it; until at last the reader feels
tempted to declare that his enjoyment of it is puerile. In the admirable scene, so superbly conceived and
beautifully executed, in which Mr. Dimmesdale, in the stillness of the night, in the middle of the sleeping
town, feels impelled to go and stand upon the scaffold where his mistress had formerly enacted her dreadful
penance, and then, seeing Hester pass along the street, from watching at a sick-bed, with little Pearl at her
side, calls them both to come and stand there beside him—in this masterly episode the effect is almost
spoiled by the introduction of one of these superficial conceits. What leads up to it is very fine—so fine
that I cannot do better than quote it[118] as a specimen of one of the striking pages of the book.

"But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was
doubtless caused by one of those meteors which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste
in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense
medium of cloud, betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It
showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of midday, but also with the awfulness that is
always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting stories
and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the
garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the marketplace,
margined with green on either side;—all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to
give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood
the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her
bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting-link between these two. They stood in the noon
of that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that
shall unite all that belong to one another."

That is imaginative, impressive, poetic; but when, almost immediately afterwards, the author goes on to say
that "the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter—the
letter A—marked out in lines of dull red light," we feel that he goes too far and is in danger of crossing
the line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbour. We are tempted to say that this is not[119]
moral tragedy, but physical comedy. In the same way, too much is made of the intimation that Hester's badge
had a scorching property, and that if one touched it one would immediately withdraw one's hand. Hawthorne
is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the
spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of poetry. But in
such a process discretion is everything, and when the image becomes importunate it is in danger of seeming to
stand for nothing more serious than itself. When Hester meets the minister by appointment in the forest, and
sits talking with him while little Pearl wanders away and plays by the edge of the brook, the child is
represented as at last making her way over to the other side of the woodland stream, and disporting herself
there in a manner which makes her mother feel herself, "in some indistinct and tantalising manner, estranged

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from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she
and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it." And Hawthorne devotes a chapter
to this idea of the child's having, by putting the brook between Hester and herself, established a kind of
spiritual gulf, on the verge of which her little fantastic person innocently mocks at her mother's sense of
bereavement. This conception belongs, one would say, quite to the lighter order of a story-teller's devices, and
the reader hardly goes with Hawthorne in the large development he gives to it. He hardly goes with him
either, I think, in his extreme predilection for a small number of vague ideas which are represented by such
terms as "sphere" and "sympathies."[120] Hawthorne makes too liberal a use of these two substantives; it is
the solitary defect of his style; and it counts as a defect partly because the words in question are a sort of
specialty with certain writers immeasurably inferior to himself.

I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects, which are of the slenderest and most venial kind. The
Scarlet Letter has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and its weaker spots,
whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere light flaws and inequalities of surface. One can often
return to it; it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art. It is
admirably written. Hawthorne afterwards polished his style to a still higher degree, but in his later
productions—it is almost always the case in a writer's later productions—there is a touch of
mannerism. In The Scarlet Letter there is a high degree of polish, and at the same time a charming freshness;
his phrase is less conscious of itself. His biographer very justly calls attention to the fact that his style was
excellent from the beginning; that he appeared to have passed through no phase of learning how to write, but
was in possession of his means from the first of his handling a pen. His early tales, perhaps, were not of a
character to subject his faculty of expression to a very severe test, but a man who had not Hawthorne's natural
sense of language would certainly have contrived to write them less well. This natural sense of
language—this turn for saying things lightly and yet touchingly, picturesquely yet simply, and for
infusing a gently colloquial tone into matter of the most unfamiliar import, he had evidently cultivated with
great assiduity.[121] I have spoken of the anomalous character of his Note-Books—of his going to such
pains often to make a record of incidents which either were not worth remembering or could be easily
remembered without its aid. But it helps us to understand the Note-Books if we regard them as a literary
exercise. They were compositions, as school boys say, in which the subject was only the pretext, and the main
point was to write a certain amount of excellent English. Hawthorne must at least have written a great many of
these things for practice, and he must often have said to himself that it was better practice to write about
trifles, because it was a greater tax upon one's skill to make them interesting. And his theory was just, for he
has almost always made his trifles interesting. In his novels his art of saying things well is very positively
tested, for here he treats of those matters among which it is very easy for a blundering writer to go
wrong—the subtleties and mysteries of life, the moral and spiritual maze. In such a passage as one I
have marked for quotation from The Scarlet Letter there is the stamp of the genius of style.

"Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or
whence she knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere and utterly beyond her reach.
One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest
with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand in hand,
they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had
they known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past,
enveloped as it were in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so
unattainable in his worldly[122] position, and still more so in that far vista in his unsympathising thoughts,
through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much
of woman there was in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him—least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!—for being able to withdraw
himself so completely from their mutual world, while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands,
and found him not!"

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The House of the Seven Gables was written at Lenox, among the mountains of Massachusetts, a village
nestling, rather loosely, in one of the loveliest corners of New England, to which Hawthorne had betaken
himself after the success of The Scarlet Letter became conspicuous, in the summer of 1850, and where he
occupied for two years an uncomfortable little red house which is now pointed out to the inquiring stranger.
The inquiring stranger is now a frequent figure at Lenox, for the place has suffered the process of lionisation.
It has become a prosperous watering-place, or at least (as there are no waters), as they say in America, a
summer-resort. It is a brilliant and generous landscape, and thirty years ago a man of fancy, desiring to apply
himself, might have found both inspiration and tranquillity there. Hawthorne found so much of both that he
wrote more during his two years of residence at Lenox than at any period of his career. He began with The
House of the Seven Gables, which was finished in the early part of 1851. This is the longest of his three
American novels, it is the most elaborate, and in the judgment of some persons it is the finest. It is a rich,
delightful, imaginative work, larger and more various than its companions,[123] and full of all sorts of deep
intentions, of interwoven threads of suggestion But it is not so rounded and complete as The Scarlet Letter; it
has always seemed to me more like a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself. I think this is partly
owing to the fact that the subject, the donnée, as the French say, of the story, does not quite fill it out, and that
we get at the same time an impression of certain complicated purposes on the author's part, which seem to
reach beyond it. I call it larger and more various than its companions, and it has indeed a greater richness of
tone and density of detail. The colour, so to speak, of The House of the Seven Gables is admirable. But the
story has a sort of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I lately laid it down, after reading it
for the third time, I had a sense of having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet the book has a
great fascination, and of all of those of its author's productions which I have read over while writing this
sketch, it is perhaps the one that has gained most by re-perusal. If it be true of the others that the pure, natural
quality of the imaginative strain is their great merit, this is at least as true of The House of the Seven Gables,
the charm of which is in a peculiar degree of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds—like that of
the sweetness of a piece of music, or the softness of fine September weather. It is vague, indefinable,
ineffable; but it is the sort of thing we must always point to in justification of the high claim that we make for
Hawthorne. In this case of course its vagueness is a drawback, for it is difficult to point to ethereal beauties;
and if the reader whom we have wished to inoculate with our admiration inform us after looking a while that
he[124] perceives nothing in particular, we can only reply that, in effect, the object is a delicate one.

The House of the Seven Gables comes nearer being a picture of contemporary American life than either of its
companions; but on this ground it would be a mistake to make a large claim for it. It cannot be too often
repeated that Hawthorne was not a realist. He had a high sense of reality—his Note-Books
super-abundantly testify to it; and fond as he was of jotting down the items that make it up, he never
attempted to render exactly or closely the actual facts of the society that surrounded him. I have said—I
began by saying—that his pages were full of its spirit, and of a certain reflected light that springs from
it; but I was careful to add that the reader must look for his local and national quality between the lines of his
writing and in the indirect testimony of his tone, his accent, his temper, of his very omissions and
suppressions. The House of the Seven Gables has, however, more literal actuality than the others, and if it
were not too fanciful an account of it, I should say that it renders, to an initiated reader, the impression of a
summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New England town. It leaves upon the mind a vague correspondence
to some such reminiscence, and in stirring up the association it renders it delightful. The comparison is to the
honour of the New England town, which gains in it more than it bestows. The shadows of the elms, in The
House of the Seven Gables, are exceptionally dense and cool; the summer afternoon is peculiarly still and
beautiful; the atmosphere has a delicious warmth, and the long daylight seems to pause and rest. But the mild
provincial quality is there, the mixture of shabbiness and[125] freshness, the paucity of ingredients. The end
of an old race—this is the situation that Hawthorne has depicted, and he has been admirably inspired in
the choice of the figures in whom he seeks to interest us. They are all figures rather than
characters—they are all pictures rather than persons. But if their reality is light and vague, it is
sufficient, and it is in harmony with the low relief and dimness of outline of the objects that surround them.
They are all types, to the author's mind, of something general, of something that is bound up with the history,

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at large, of families and individuals, and each of them is the centre of a cluster of those ingenious and
meditative musings, rather melancholy, as a general thing, than joyous, which melt into the current and texture
of the story and give it a kind of moral richness. A grotesque old spinster, simple, childish, penniless, very
humble at heart, but rigidly conscious of her pedigree; an amiable bachelor, of an epicurean temperament and
an enfeebled intellect, who has passed twenty years of his life in penal confinement for a crime of which he
was unjustly pronounced guilty; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young girl from the country, a poor relation
of these two ancient decrepitudes, with whose moral mustiness her modern freshness and soundness are
contrasted; a young man still more modern, holding the latest opinions, who has sought his fortune up and
down the world, and, though he has not found it, takes a genial and enthusiastic view of the future: these, with
two or three remarkable accessory figures, are the persons concerned in the little drama. The drama is a small
one, but as Hawthorne does not put it before us for its own superficial sake, for the dry facts of the case, but
for something in it which he[126] holds to be symbolic and of large application, something that points a moral
and that it behoves us to remember, the scenes in the rusty wooden house whose gables give its name to the
story, have something of the dignity both of history and of tragedy. Miss Hephzibah Pyncheon, dragging out a
disappointed life in her paternal dwelling, finds herself obliged in her old age to open a little shop for the sale
of penny toys and gingerbread. This is the central incident of the tale, and, as Hawthorne relates it, it is an
incident of the most impressive magnitude and most touching interest. Her dishonoured and vague-minded
brother is released from prison at the same moment, and returns to the ancestral roof to deepen her
perplexities. But, on the other hand, to alleviate them, and to introduce a breath of the air of the outer world
into this long unventilated interior, the little country cousin also arrives, and proves the good angel of the
feebly distracted household. All this episode is exquisite—admirably conceived, and executed with a
kind of humorous tenderness, an equal sense of everything in it that is picturesque, touching, ridiculous,
worthy of the highest praise. Hephzibah Pyncheon, with her near-sighted scowl, her rusty joints, her antique
turban, her map of a great territory to the eastward which ought to have belonged to her family, her vain
terrors and scruples and resentments, the inaptitude and repugnance of an ancient gentlewoman to the vulgar
little commerce which a cruel fate has compelled her to engage in—Hephzibah Pyncheon is a masterly
picture. I repeat that she is a picture, as her companions are pictures; she is a charming piece of descriptive
writing, rather than a dramatic exhibition. But she is described, like her companions too, so subtly[127] and
lovingly that we enter into her virginal old heart and stand with her behind her abominable little counter.
Clifford Pyncheon is a still more remarkable conception, though he is perhaps not so vividly depicted. It was a
figure needing a much more subtle touch, however, and it was of the essence of his character to be vague and
unemphasised. Nothing can be more charming than the manner in which the soft, bright, active presence of
Phœbe Pyncheon is indicated, or than the account of her relations with the poor dimly sentient kinsman
for whom her light-handed sisterly offices, in the evening of a melancholy life, are a revelation of lost
possibilities of happiness. "In her aspect," Hawthorne says of the young girl, "there was a familiar gladness,
and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer offered up
in the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phœbe, moreover, and airy, and sweet in her
apparel; as if nothing that she wore—neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little
kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings—had ever been put on before; or if worn, were all the
fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rose-buds." Of the influence of her maidenly
salubrity upon poor Clifford, Hawthorne gives the prettiest description, and then, breaking off suddenly,
renounces the attempt in language which, while pleading its inadequacy, conveys an exquisite satisfaction to
the reader. I quote the passage for the sake of its extreme felicity, and of the charming image with which it
concludes.

"But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos
with which it impresses us is attainable. This being, made only[128] for happiness, and heretofore so
miserably failing to be happy—his tendencies so hideously thwarted that some unknown time ago, the
delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
imbecile—this poor forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea,
had been flung by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbour. There, as he lay more than

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half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odours will,
had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have
had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight ethereal rapture into his
soul, and expires!"

I have not mentioned the personage in The House of the Seven Gables upon whom Hawthorne evidently
bestowed most pains, and whose portrait is the most elaborate in the book; partly because he is, in spite of the
space he occupies, an accessory figure, and partly because, even more than the others, he is what I have called
a picture rather than a character. Judge Pyncheon is an ironical portrait, very richly and broadly executed, very
sagaciously composed and rendered—the portrait of a superb, full blown hypocrite, a large-based,
full-nurtured Pharisee, bland, urbane, impressive, diffusing about him a "sultry" warmth of benevolence, as
the author calls it again and again, and basking in the noontide of prosperity and the consideration of society;
but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate piece of description, made up of a
hundred admirable touches, in which satire is always winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep sense
of reality. It is difficult to say whether Hawthorne followed a model in describing Judge[129] Pyncheon; but it
is tolerably obvious that the picture is an impression—a copious impression—of an individual. It
has evidently a definite starting-point in fact, and the author is able to draw, freely and confidently, after the
image established in his mind. Holgrave, the modern young man, who has been a Jack-of-all-trades and is at
the period of the story a daguerreotypist, is an attempt to render a kind of national type—that of the
young citizen of the United States whose fortune is simply in his lively intelligence, and who stands naked, as
it were, unbiased and unencumbered alike, in the centre of the far-stretching level of American life. Holgrave
is intended as a contrast; his lack of traditions, his democratic stamp, his condensed experience, are opposed
to the desiccated prejudices and exhausted vitality of the race of which poor feebly-scowling, rusty-jointed
Hephzibah is the most heroic representative. It is perhaps a pity that Hawthorne should not have proposed to
himself to give the old Pyncheon-qualities some embodiment which would help them to balance more fairly
with the elastic properties of the young daguerreotypist—should not have painted a lusty conservative
to match his strenuous radical. As it is, the mustiness and mouldiness of the tenants of the House of the Seven
Gables crumble away rather too easily. Evidently, however, what Hawthorne designed to represent was not
the struggle between an old society and a new, for in this case he would have given the old one a better
chance; but simply, as I have said, the shrinkage and extinction of a family. This appealed to his imagination;
and the idea of long perpetuation and survival always appears to have filled him with a kind of horror and
disapproval. Conservative, in a[130] certain degree, as he was himself, and fond of retrospect and quietude
and the mellowing influences of time, it is singular how often one encounters in his writings some expression
of mistrust of old houses, old institutions, long lines of descent. He was disposed apparently to allow a very
moderate measure in these respects, and he condemns the dwelling of the Pyncheons to disappear from the
face of the earth because it has been standing a couple of hundred years. In this he was an American of
Americans; or rather he was more American than many of his countrymen, who, though they are accustomed
to work for the short run rather than the long, have often a lurking esteem for things that show the marks of
having lasted. I will add that Holgrave is one of the few figures, among those which Hawthorne created, with
regard to which the absence of the realistic mode of treatment is felt as a loss. Holgrave is not sharply enough
characterised; he lacks features; he is not an individual, but a type. But my last word about this admirable
novel must not be a restrictive one. It is a large and generous production, pervaded with that vague hum, that
indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man, which is the real sign of a great work of fiction.

After the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, which brought him great honour, and, I believe, a
tolerable share of a more ponderable substance, he composed a couple of little volumes, for
children—The Wonder-Book, and a small collection of stories entitled Tanglewood Tales. They are not
among his most serious literary titles, but if I may trust my own early impression of them, they are among the
most charming literary services that have been rendered to children[131] in an age (and especially in a
country) in which the exactions of the infant mind have exerted much too palpable an influence upon
literature. Hawthorne's stories are the old Greek myths, made more vivid to the childish imagination by an

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infusion of details which both deepen and explain their marvels. I have been careful not to read them over, for
I should be very sorry to risk disturbing in any degree a recollection of them that has been at rest since the
appreciative period of life to which they are addressed. They seem at that period enchanting, and the ideal of
happiness of many American children is to lie upon the carpet and lose themselves in The Wonder-Book. It is
in its pages that they first make the acquaintance of the heroes and heroines of the antique mythology, and
something of the nursery fairy-tale quality of interest which Hawthorne imparts to them always remains.

I have said that Lenox was a very pretty place, and that he was able to work there Hawthorne proved by
composing The House of the Seven Gables with a good deal of rapidity. But at the close of the year in which
this novel was published he wrote to a friend (Mr. Fields, his publisher,) that "to tell you a secret I am sick to
death of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here.... The air and climate do not agree with
my health at all, and for the first time since I was a boy I have felt languid and dispirited.... O that Providence
would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a rood or two of garden ground, near the sea-coast!"
He was at this time for a while out of health; and it is proper to remember that though the Massachusetts
Berkshire, with its mountains and lakes, was charming during the ardent American[132] summer, there was a
reverse to the medal, consisting of December snows prolonged into April and May. Providence failed to
provide him with a cottage by the sea; but he betook himself for the winter of 1852 to the little town of West
Newton, near Boston, where he brought into the world The Blithedale Romance.

This work, as I have said, would not have been written if Hawthorne had not spent a year at Brook Farm, and
though it is in no sense of the word an account of the manners or the inmates of that establishment, it will
preserve the memory of the ingenious community at West Roxbury for a generation unconscious of other
reminders. I hardly know what to say about it save that it is very charming; this vague, unanalytic epithet is
the first that comes to one's pen in treating of Hawthorne's novels, for their extreme amenity of form
invariably suggests it; but if on the one hand it claims to be uttered, on the other it frankly confesses its
inconclusiveness. Perhaps, however, in this case, it fills out the measure of appreciation more completely than
in others, for The Blithedale Romance is the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest, of this company of
unhumorous fictions.

The story is told from a more joyous point of view—from a point of view comparatively
humorous—and a number of objects and incidents touched with the light of the profane
world—the vulgar, many-coloured world of actuality, as distinguished from the crepuscular realm of
the writer's own reveries—are mingled with its course. The book indeed is a mixture of elements, and it
leaves in the memory an impression analogous to that of an April day—an alternation of brightness and
shadow, of broken sun-patches and sprinkling clouds.[133] Its dénoûment is tragical—there is indeed
nothing so tragical in all Hawthorne, unless it be the murder-of Miriam's persecutor by Donatello, in
Transformation, as the suicide of Zenobia; and yet on the whole the effect of the novel is to make one think
more agreeably of life. The standpoint of the narrator has the advantage of being a concrete one; he is no
longer, as in the preceding tales, a disembodied spirit, imprisoned in the haunted chamber of his own
contemplations, but a particular man, with a certain human grossness.

Of Miles Coverdale I have already spoken, and of its being natural to assume that in so far as we may measure
this lightly indicated identity of his, it has a great deal in common with that of his creator. Coverdale is a
picture of the contemplative, observant, analytic nature, nursing its fancies, and yet, thanks to an element of
strong good sense, not bringing them up to be spoiled children; having little at stake in life, at any given
moment, and yet indulging, in imagination, in a good many adventures; a portrait of a man, in a word, whose
passions are slender, whose imagination is active, and whose happiness lies, not in doing, but in
perceiving—half a poet, half a critic, and all a spectator. He is contrasted, excellently, with the figure of
Hollingsworth, the heavily treading Reformer, whose attitude with regard to the world is that of the hammer
to the anvil, and who has no patience with his friend's indifferences and neutralities. Coverdale is a gentle
sceptic, a mild cynic; he would agree that life is a little worth living—or worth living a little; but would

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remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal. He confesses to a want of
earnestness, but in reality he is evidently an excellent[134] fellow, to whom one might look, not for any
personal performance on a great scale, but for a good deal of generosity of detail. "As Hollingsworth once told
me, I lack a purpose," he writes, at the close of his story. "How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an over
plus of the same ingredient the want of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an
emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet were there any cause in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth
a sane man's dying for, and which my death would benefit, then—provided, however, the effort did not
involve an unreasonable amount of trouble—methinks I might be bold to offer up my life. If Kossuth,
for example, would pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a
mild sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave
rush upon the levelled bayonets. Further than that I should be loth to pledge myself."

The finest thing in The Blithdale Romance is the character of Zenobia, which I have said elsewhere strikes me
as the nearest approach that Hawthorne has made to the complete creation of a person. She is more concrete
than Hester or Miriam, or Hilda or Phoebe; she is a more definite image, produced by a greater multiplicity of
touches. It is idle to inquire too closely whether Hawthorne had Margaret Fuller in his mind in constructing
the figure of this brilliant specimen of the strong-minded class and endowing her with the genius of
conversation; or, on the assumption that such was the case, to compare the image at all strictly with the model.
There is no strictness in the representation by novelists of persons who have struck them in life,[135] and
there can in the nature of things be none. From the moment the imagination takes a hand in the game, the
inevitable tendency is to divergence, to following what may be called new scents. The original gives hints, but
the writer does what he likes with them, and imports new elements into the picture. If there is this amount of
reason for referring the wayward heroine of Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished
woman of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady of eminence whom there is any
sign of his having known, that she was proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the
little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook Farm sprung, and that she had a
miserable end and a watery grave—if these are facts to be noted on one side, I say; on the other, the
beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque temperament and physical aspects, offers
many points of divergence from the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine culture in the
suburbs of the New England metropolis. This picturesqueness of Zenobia is very happily indicated and
maintained; she is a woman, in all the force of the term, and there is something very vivid and powerful in her
large expression of womanly gifts and weaknesses. Hollingsworth is, I think, less successful, though there is
much reality in the conception of the type to which he belongs—the strong-willed, narrow-hearted
apostle of a special form of redemption for society. There is nothing better in all Hawthorne than the scene
between him and Coverdale, when the two men are at work together in the field (piling stones on a dyke), and
he gives it to his companion to choose whether he[136] will be with him or against him. It is a pity, perhaps,
to have represented him as having begun life as a blacksmith, for one grudges him the advantage of so logical
a reason for his roughness and hardness.

"Hollingsworth scarcely said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then indeed he
would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest
reply possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and mind.... His heart, I imagine, was
never really interested in our socialist scheme, but was for ever busy with his strange, and as most people
thought, impracticable plan for the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts. Much
as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have commenced
his investigation of the subject by committing some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the
condition of his-higher instincts afterwards."

The most touching element in the novel is the history of the grasp that this barbarous fanatic has laid upon the
fastidious and high-tempered Zenobia, who, disliking him and shrinking, from him at a hundred points, is
drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The portion of the story that strikes me as least felicitous is

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that which deals with Priscilla and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia—with her mesmeric gifts,
her clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled Lady, her divided subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt,
and her numerous other graceful but fantastic properties—her Sibylline attributes, as the author calls
them. Hawthorne is rather too fond of Sibylline attributes—a taste of the same order as his disposition,
to which I have already alluded, to talk about spheres and sympathies. As the action advances,[137] in The
Blithdale Romance, we get too much out of reality, and cease to feel beneath our feet the firm ground of an
appeal to our own vision of the world, our observation. I should have liked to see the story concern itself more
with the little community in which its earlier scenes are laid, and avail itself of so excellent an opportunity for
describing unhackneyed specimens of human nature. I have already spoken of the absence of satire in the
novel, of its not aiming in the least at satire, and of its offering no grounds for complaint as an invidious
picture. Indeed the brethren of Brook Farm should have held themselves slighted rather than misrepresented,
and have regretted that the admirable genius who for a while was numbered among them should have treated
their institution mainly as a perch for starting upon an imaginative flight. But when all is said about a certain
want of substance and cohesion in the latter portions of The Blithedale Romance, the book is still a delightful
and beautiful one. Zenobia and Hollingsworth live in the memory, and even Priscilla and Coverdale, who
linger there less importunately, have a great deal that touches us and that we believe in. I said just now that
Priscilla was infelicitous; but immediately afterwards I open the volume at a page in which the author
describes some of the out-of-door amusements at Blithedale, and speaks of a foot-race across the grass, in
which some of the slim young girls of the society joined. "Priscilla's peculiar charm in a foot-race was the
weakness and irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers,
she had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting buoyantly forth therefore, as if no rival less
swift than Atalanta could compete[138] with her, she ran falteringly, and often tumbled on the grass. Such an
incident—though it seems too slight to think of—was a thing to laugh at, but which brought the
water into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far greater joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as
antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was full of trifles that affected me in just this way." That seems
to me exquisite, and the book is full of touches as deep and delicate.

After writing it, Hawthorne went back to live in Concord, where he had bought a small house in which,
apparently, he expected to spend a large portion of his future. This was in fact the dwelling in which he passed
that part of the rest of his days that he spent in his own country. He established himself there before going to
Europe, in 1853, and he returned to the Wayside, as he called his house, on coming back to the United States
seven years later. Though he actually occupied the place no long time, he had made it his property, and it was
more his own home than any of his numerous provisional abodes. I may therefore quote a little account of the
house which he wrote to a distinguished friend, Mr. George Curtis.

"As for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it
in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it, and no
venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century.
He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and
invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the
foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing. Mr.
Alcott[139] expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hillside
behind the house into terraces, and building arbours and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and
trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much
decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly with locust
trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed
with a few young elms, and white pines and infant oaks—the whole forming rather a thicket than a
wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the
hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand, or some unwritten book in my
thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From the hill-top there is
a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterise

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the scenery of Concord.... I know nothing of the history of the house except Thoreau's telling me that it was
inhabited, a generation or two ago, by a man who believed he should never die. I believe, however, he is dead;
at least, I hope so; else he may probably reappear and dispute my title to his residence."

As Mr. Lathrop points out, this allusion to a man who believed he should never die is "the first intimation of
the story of Septimius Felton." The scenery of that romance, he adds, "was evidently taken from the Wayside
and its hill." Septimius Felton is in fact a young man who, at the time of the war of the Revolution, lives in the
village of Concord, on the Boston road, at the base of a woody hill which rises abruptly behind his house, and
of which the level summit supplies him with a promenade continually mentioned in the course of the tale.
Hawthorne used to exercise[140] himself upon this picturesque eminence, and, as he conceived the brooding
Septimius to have done before him, to betake himself thither when he found the limits of his dwelling too
narrow. But he had an advantage which his imaginary hero lacked; he erected a tower as an adjunct to the
house, and it was a jocular tradition among his neighbours, in allusion to his attributive tendency to evade
rather than hasten the coming guest, that he used to ascend this structure and scan the road for provocations to
retreat.

In so far, however, as Hawthorne suffered the penalties of celebrity at the hands of intrusive fellow-citizens,
he was soon to escape from this honourable incommodity. On the 4th of March, 1853, his old college-mate
and intimate friend, Franklin Pierce, was installed as President of the United States. He had been the candidate
of the Democratic party, and all good Democrats, accordingly, in conformity to the beautiful and rational
system under which the affairs of the great Republic were carried on, begun to open their windows to the
golden sunshine of Presidential patronage. When General Pierce was put forward by the Democrats,
Hawthorne felt a perfectly loyal and natural desire that his good friend should be exalted to so brilliant a
position, and he did what was in him to further the good cause, by writing a little book about its hero. His Life
of Franklin Pierce belongs to that class of literature which is known as the "campaign biography," and which
consists of an attempt, more or less successful, to persuade the many-headed monster of universal suffrage
that the gentleman on whose behalf it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Of Hawthorne's little
book there is nothing particular[141] to say, save that it is in very good taste, that he is a very fairly ingenious
advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President qualities which rather faded in the bright light of a
high office, this defect of proportion was essential to his undertaking. He dwelt chiefly upon General Pierce's
exploits in the war with Mexico (before that, his record, as they say in America, had been mainly that of a
successful country lawyer), and exercised his descriptive powers so far as was possible in describing the
advance of the United States troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the Montezumas. The mouthpieces of the
Whig party spared him, I believe, no reprobation for "prostituting" his exquisite genius; but I fail to see
anything reprehensible in Hawthorne's lending his old friend the assistance of his graceful quill. He wished
him to be President—he held afterwards that he filled the office with admirable dignity and
wisdom—and as the only thing he could do was to write, he fell to work and wrote for him. Hawthorne
was a good lover and a very sufficient partisan, and I suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made even less
of the stuff of a statesman, he would still have found in the force of old associations an injunction to hail him
as a ruler. Our hero was an American of the earlier and simpler type—the type of which it is doubtless
premature to say that it has wholly passed away, but of which it may at least be said that the circumstances
that produced it have been greatly modified. The generation to which he belonged, that generation which grew
up with the century, witnessed during a period of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development
of the young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on[142] which it took place, of the prosperity that
walked in its train and waited on its course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it conferred, of the broad
morning sunshine, in a word, in which it all went forward, there seems to be little room for surprise that it
should have implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity
from the usual troubles of earthly empires. This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an
element of genial optimism, in the light of which it appeared that the great American state was not as other
human institutions are, that a special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously for ever, and
that a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered a refuge to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of

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the world, must come off easily, in the battle of the ages. From this conception of the American future the
sense of its having problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme, no
looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication of the population, and its enjoyment of
the benefits of a common-school education and of unusual facilities for making an income—this was
the form in which, on the whole, the future most vividly presented itself, and in which the greatness of the
country was to be recognised of men. There was indeed a faint shadow in the picture—the shadow
projected by the "peculiar institution" of the Southern States; but it was far from sufficient to darken the rosy
vision of most good Americans, and above all, of most good Democrats. Hawthorne alludes to it in a passage
of his life of Pierce, which I will quote not only as a hint of the trouble that was in[143] store for a cheerful
race of men, but as an example of his own easy-going political attitude.

"It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin Pierce took that stand on the Slavery question from
which he has never since swerved by a hair's breadth. He fully recognised by his votes and his voice, the
rights pledged to the South by the Constitution. This, at the period when he declared himself, was an easy
thing to do. But when it became more difficult, when the first imperceptible murmur of agitation had grown
almost to a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes
threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole
united country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory."

This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not infrequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a
decisive limit to further legislation in favour of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country.
Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in speaking of his hero's having incurred obloquy by
his conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American world that suffered in the
smallest degree, at this time, from social persecution, was the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were
as unfashionable as they were indiscreet—which is saying much. Like most of his fellow-countrymen,
Hawthorne had no idea that the respectable institution which he contemplated in impressive contrast to
humanitarian "mistiness," was presently to cost the nation four long years of bloodshed and misery, and a
social revolution as complete as any the world has seen. When this event occurred, he was[144] therefore
proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long
felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such was the
bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which I have spoken; their illusions were rudely
dispelled, and they saw the best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This affair had no
place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but to hang their heads and close their eyes. The
subsidence of that great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may say that the
Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a
certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto
seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious
that good Americana will be more numerous than ever; but the good American, in days to come, will be a
more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He
will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his
well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and
that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to
say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a
specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this reason[145] that Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very
proper President.

The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a confidence was to offer his old friend one
of the numerous places in his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something of the world,
so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly
urged that something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at Liverpool there was not a
word of reasonable criticism to be offered on the matter. If General Pierce, who was before all things

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good-natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion than to confer this modest distinction
upon the most honourable and discreet of men of letters, he would have made a more brilliant mark in the
annals of American statesmanship. Liverpool had not been immediately selected, and Hawthorne had written
to his friend and publisher, Mr. Fields, with some humorous vagueness of allusion to his probable
expatriation.

"Do make some inquiries about Portugal; as, for instance, in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is an
empire, a kingdom, or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the expenses of living there, and whether the
Minister would be likely to be much pestered with his own countrymen. Also, any other information about
foreign countries would be acceptable to an inquiring mind."

It would seem from this that there had been a question of offering him a small diplomatic post; but the
emoluments of the place were justly taken into account, and it is to be supposed that those of the consulate at
Liverpool were at least as great as the salary of the American[146] representative at Lisbon. Unfortunately,
just after Hawthorne had taken possession of the former post, the salary attached to it was reduced by
Congress, in an economical hour, to less than half the sum enjoyed by his predecessors. It was fixed at 7,500
dollars (£1,500); but the consular fees, which were often copious, were an added resource. At midsummer
then, in 1853, Hawthorne was established in England.

[147]

CHAPTER VI.

ENGLAND AND ITALY.

Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age when he came to Europe—a fact that should be
remembered when those impressions which he recorded in five substantial volumes (exclusive of the novel
written in Italy), occasionally affect us by the rigidity of their point of view. His Note-Books, kept during his
residence in England, his two winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published after his death; his
impressions of England, sifted, revised, and addressed directly to the public, he gave to the world shortly
before this event. The tone of his European Diaries is often so fresh and unsophisticated that we find ourselves
thinking of the writer as a young man, and it is only a certain final sense of something reflective and a trifle
melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity which is on the whole the leading characteristic of their pages,
is, though the simplicity of inexperience, not that of youth. When I say inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's
experience had been narrow. His fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small American
towns—Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox, West Newton—and he had led
exclusively what one may call a[148] village-life. This is evident, not at all directly and superficially, but by
implication and between the lines, in his desultory history of his foreign years. In other words, and to call
things by their names, he was exquisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact not in the least in
condemnation, but, on the contrary, in support of an appreciative view of him. I know nothing more
remarkable, more touching, than the sight of this odd, youthful—elderly mind, contending so late in the
day with new opportunities for learning old things, and on the whole profiting by them so freely and
gracefully. The Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified degree, are the sketches of England,
in Our Old Home; but the beauty and delicacy of this latter work are so interwoven with the author's air of
being remotely outside of everything he describes, that they count for more, seem more themselves, and
finally give the whole thing the appearance of a triumph, not of initiation, but of the provincial point of view
itself.

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I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence in England. He appears to have enjoyed it
greatly, in spite of the deficiency of charm in the place to which his duties chiefly confined him. His
confinement, however, was not unbroken, and his published journals consist largely of minute accounts of
little journeys and wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through the rest of the country; together
with much mention of numerous visits to London, a city for whose dusky immensity and multitudinous
interest he professed the highest relish. His Note-Books are of the same cast as the two volumes of his
American Diaries, of which, I have given some account—chiefly occupied with external matters, with
the accidents of[149] daily life, with observations made during the long walks (often with his son), which
formed his most valued pastime. His office, moreover, though Liverpool was not a delectable home, furnished
him with entertainment as well as occupation, and it may almost be said that during these years he saw more
of his fellow-countrymen, in the shape of odd wanderers, petitioners, and inquirers of every kind, than he had
ever done in his native land. The paper entitled "Consular Experiences," in Our Old Home, is an admirable
recital of these observations, and a proof that the novelist might have found much material in the opportunities
of the consul. On his return to America, in 1860, he drew from his journal a number of pages relating to his
observations in England, re-wrote them (with, I should suppose, a good deal of care), and converted them into
articles which he published in a magazine. These chapters were afterwards collected, and Our Old Home (a
rather infelicitous title), was issued in 1863. I prefer to speak of the book now, however, rather than in
touching upon the closing years of his life, for it is a kind of deliberate résumé of his impressions of the land
of his ancestors. "It is not a good or a weighty book," he wrote to his publisher, who had sent him some
reviews of it, "nor does it deserve any great amount of praise or censure. I don't care about seeing any more
notices of it." Hawthorne's appreciation of his own productions was always extremely just; he had a sense of
the relations of things, which some of his admirers have not thought it well to cultivate; and he never
exaggerated his own importance as a writer. Our Old Home is not a weighty book; it is decidedly a light one.
But when he says it is not a good one, I[150] hardly know what he means, and his modesty at this point is in
excess of his discretion. Whether good or not, Our Old Home is charming—it is most delectable
reading. The execution is singularly perfect and ripe; of all his productions it seems to be the best written. The
touch, as musicians say, is admirable; the lightness, the fineness, the felicity of characterisation and
description, belong to a man who has the advantage of feeling delicately. His judgment is by no means always
sound; it often rests on too narrow an observation. But his perception is of the keenest, and though it is
frequently partial, incomplete, it is excellent as far as it goes. The book gave but limited satisfaction, I believe,
in England, and I am not sure that the failure to enjoy certain manifestations of its sportive irony, has not
chilled the appreciation of its singular grace. That English readers, on the whole, should have felt that
Hawthorne did the national mind and manners but partial justice, is, I think, conceivable; at the same time that
it seems to me remarkable that the tender side of the book, as I may call it, should not have carried it off
better. It abounds in passages more delicately appreciative than can easily be found elsewhere, and it contains
more charming and affectionate things than, I should suppose, had ever before been written about a country
not the writer's own. To say that it is an immeasurably more exquisite and sympathetic work than any of the
numerous persons who have related their misadventures in the United States have seen fit to devote to that
country, is to say but little, and I imagine that Hawthorne had in mind the array of English
voyagers—Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss Martineau, Mr. Grattan—when
he[151] reflected that everything is relative and that, as such books go, his own little volume observed the
amenities of criticism. He certainly had it in mind when he wrote the phrase in his preface relating to the
impression the book might make in England. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for
courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute in the least to any mutual advantage and
comfort if we were to besmear each other all over with butter and honey." I am far from intending to intimate
that the vulgar instinct of recrimination had anything to do with the restrictive passages of Our Old Home; I
mean simply that the author had a prevision that his collection of sketches would in some particulars fail to
please his English friends. He professed, after the event, to have discovered that the English are sensitive, and
as they say of the Americans, for whose advantage I believe the term was invented; thin-skinned. "The
English critics," he wrote to his publisher, "seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen, and it is
perhaps natural that they should, because their self-conceit can accept nothing short of indiscriminate

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adulation; but I really think that Americans have much more cause than they to complain of me. Looking over
the volume I am rather surprised to find that whenever I draw a comparison between the two people, I almost
invariably cast the balance against ourselves." And he writes at another time:—"I received several
private letters and printed notices of Our Old Home from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder
with which they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my part,
and never admitting the least suspicion that there may[152] be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of
their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious caricature.
But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate my own people." The idea
of his hating the English was of course too puerile for discussion; and the book, as I have said, is full of a rich
appreciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But it has a serious defect—a defect which
impairs its value, though it helps to give consistency to such an image of Hawthorne's personal nature as we
may by this time have been able to form. It is the work of an outsider, of a stranger, of a man who remains to
the end a mere spectator (something less even than an observer), and always lacks the final initiation into the
manners and nature of a people of whom it may most be said, among all the people of the earth, that to know
them is to make discoveries. Hawthorne freely confesses to this constant exteriority, and appears to have been
perfectly conscious of it. "I remember," he writes in the sketch of "A London Suburb," in Our Old Home, "I
remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first English fireside and watched the chill and
rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding occupant of the house
(evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as
if indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his sulky
shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in an entry
in his journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854.[153]

"The people, for several days, have been in the utmost anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation, about
Sebastopol—and all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it had fallen.
This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat grim in consequence. I am
glad of it. In spite of his actual sympathies, it is impossible for an American to be otherwise than glad.
Success makes an Englishman intolerable, and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a
prosperous conclusion of the war, the Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never
love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the meantime, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for
all parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely
comes to a proper conception of himself.... I seem to myself like a spy or traitor when I meet their eyes, and
am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in full confidence
of sympathy. Their heart 'knoweth its own bitterness,' and as for me, being a stranger and an alien, I
'intermeddle not with their joy.'"

This seems to me to express very well the weak side of Hawthorne's work—his constant mistrust and
suspicion of the society that surrounded him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I
think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and
the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They
are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family, of being placed
on the circumference of the circle of civilisation rather than at the centre, of the experimental element not
having as yet entirely dropped out of their great political undertaking. The sense of this relativity,[154] in a
word, replaces that quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards its own position in the world,
which reigns supreme in the British and in the Gallic genius. Few persons, I think, can have mingled much
with Americans in Europe without having made this reflection, and it is in England that their habit of looking
askance at foreign institutions—of keeping one eye, as it were, on the American personality, while with
the other they contemplate these objects—is most to be observed. Add to this that Hawthorne came to
England late in life, when his habits, his tastes, his opinions, were already formed, that he was inclined to look
at things in silence and brood over them gently, rather than talk about them, discuss them, grow acquainted
with them by action; and it will be possible to form an idea of our writer's detached and critical attitude in the

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country in which it is easiest, thanks to its aristocratic constitution, to the absence of any considerable public
fund of entertainment and diversion, to the degree in which the inexhaustible beauty and interest of the place
are private property, demanding constantly a special introduction—in the country in which, I say, it is
easiest for a stranger to remain a stranger. For a stranger to cease to be a stranger he must stand ready, as the
French say, to pay with his person; and this was an obligation that Hawthorne was indisposed to incur. Our
sense, as we read, that his reflections are those of a shy and susceptible man, with nothing at stake, mentally,
in his appreciation of the country, is therefore a drawback to our confidence; but it is not a drawback sufficient
to make it of no importance that he is at the same time singularly intelligent and discriminating, with a faculty
of feeling delicately and justly,[155] which constitutes in itself an illumination. There is a passage in the
sketch entitled About Warwick which is a very good instance of what was probably his usual state of mind. He
is speaking of the aspect of the High Street of the town.

"The street is an emblem of England itself. What seems new in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation
of what such a people as ourselves would destroy. The new things are based and supported on sturdy old
things, and derive a massive strength from their deep and immemorial foundations, though with such
limitations and impediments as only an Englishman could endure. But he likes to feel the weight of all the
past upon his back; and moreover the antiquity that overburdens him has taken root in his being, and has
grown to be rather a hump than a pack, so that there is no getting rid of it without tearing his whole structure
to pieces. In my judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable under the mouldy accretion, he had
better stumble on with it as long as he can. He presents a spectacle which is by no means without its charm for
a disinterested and unincumbered observer."

There is all Hawthorne, with his enjoyment of the picturesque, his relish of chiaroscuro, of local colour, of the
deposit of time, and his still greater enjoyment of his own dissociation from these things, his "disinterested
and unincumbered" condition. His want of incumbrances may seem at times to give him a somewhat naked
and attenuated appearance, but on the whole he carries it off very well. I have said that Our Old Home
contains much of his best writing, and on turning over the book at hazard, I am struck with his frequent
felicity of phrase. At every step there is something one would like to quote—something excellently
well said. These things are often of the[156] lighter sort, but Hawthorne's charming diction lingers in the
memory—almost in the ear. I have always remembered a certain admirable characterisation of Doctor
Johnson, in the account of the writer's visit to Lichfield—and I will preface it by a paragraph almost as
good, commemorating the charms of the hotel in that interesting town.

"At any rate I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary coffee-room, with its heavy old mahogany chairs and
tables, all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a word with except the waiter, who, like most of his class in
England, had evidently left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No former practice of solitary living, nor
habits of reticence, nor well-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and amusement, can quite avail, as
I now proved, to dissipate the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such circumstances as these,
with no book at hand save the county directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of five days ago.
So I buried myself, betimes, in a huge heap of ancient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in these old inns),
let my head sink into an unsubstantial pillow, and slept a stifled sleep, compounded of the night-troubles of all
my predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And when I awoke, the odour of a bygone century was in my
nostrils—a faint, elusive smell, of which I never had any conception before crossing the Atlantic."

The whole chapter entitled "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" is a sort of graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson, who
certainly has nowhere else been more tenderly spoken of.

"Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was
dense; his awful dread of death showed how much muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, before
he could be[157] capable of spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared to
penetrate further than to ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed

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clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my native
propensities were toward Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental
sustenance of a New Englander, it may not have been altogether amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to
keep pace with this heavy-footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. It is
wholesome food even now! And then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that enabled me to enjoy
the Old Country so well, and that so readily amalgamated themselves with the American ideas that seemed
most adverse to them, may have been derived from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great English moralist.
Never was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than that! Doctor Johnson's morality was as English
an article as a beef-steak."

And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear quoting this passage about the days in a fine English
summer:—

"For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your actual experience is concerned, the
English summer day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the
sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a
calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is
bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible.
Night, if there be any such season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day beholds its
successor; or if not quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts
of the island that To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden[158]
twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere
mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy."

The Note-Books, as I have said, deal chiefly with, the superficial aspect of English life, and describe the
material objects with which the author was surrounded. They often describe them admirably, and the rural
beauty of the country has never been more happily expressed. But there are inevitably a great many reflections
and incidental judgments, characterisations of people he met, fragments of psychology and social criticism,
and it is here that Hawthorne's mixture of subtlety and simplicity, his interfusion of genius with what I have
ventured to call the provincial quality, is most apparent. To an American reader this later quality, which is
never grossly manifested, but pervades the Journals like a vague natural perfume, an odour of purity and
kindness and integrity, must always, for a reason that I will touch upon, have a considerable charm; and such a
reader will accordingly take an even greater satisfaction in the Diaries kept during the two years Hawthorne
spent in Italy; for in these volumes the element I speak of is especially striking. He resigned his consulate at
Liverpool towards the close of 1857—whether because he was weary of his manner of life there and of
the place itself, as may well have been, or because he wished to anticipate supersession by the new
government (Mr. Buchanan's) which was just establishing itself at Washington, is not apparent from the
slender sources of information from which these pages have been compiled. In the month of January of the
following year he betook himself with[159] his family to the Continent, and, as promptly as possible, made
the best of his way to Rome. He spent the remainder of the winter and the spring there, and then went to
Florence for the summer and autumn; after which he returned to Rome and passed a second season. His Italian
Note-Books are very pleasant reading, but they are of less interest than the others, for his contact with the life
of the country, its people and its manners, was simply that of the ordinary tourist—which amounts to
saying that it was extremely superficial. He appears to have suffered a great deal of discomfort and depression
in Rome, and not to have been on the whole in the best mood for enjoying the place and its resources. That he
did, at one time and another, enjoy these things keenly is proved by his beautiful romance, Transformation,
which could never have been written by a man who had not had many hours of exquisite appreciation of the
lovely land of Italy. But he took It hard, as it were, and suffered himself to be painfully discomposed by the
usual accidents of Italian life, as foreigners learn to know it. His future was again uncertain, and during his
second winter in Rome he was in danger of losing his elder daughter by a malady which he speaks of as a
trouble "that pierced to my very vitals." I may mention, with regard to this painful episode, that Franklin

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Pierce, whose presidential days were over, and who, like other ex-presidents, was travelling in Europe, came
to Rome at the time, and that the Note-Books contain some singularly beautiful and touching allusions to his
old friend's gratitude for his sympathy, and enjoyment of his society. The sentiment of friendship has on the
whole been so much less commemorated in literature than might have been expected from the[160] place it is
supposed to hold in life, that there is always something striking in any frank and ardent expression of it. It
occupied, in so far as Pierce was the object of it, a large place in Hawthorne's mind, and it is impossible not to
feel the manly tenderness of such lines as these:—

"I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a
heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by the experience of life. We hold just the
same relation to one another as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on
together, still the same dear friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been
President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favour,
and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so
well; but each did his best for the other, as friend for friend."

The Note-Books are chiefly taken up with descriptions of the regular sights and "objects of interest," which
we often feel to be rather perfunctory and a little in the style of the traditional tourist's diary. They abound in
charming touches, and every reader of Transformation will remember the delightful colouring of the
numerous pages in that novel, which are devoted to the pictorial aspects of Rome. But we are unable to rid
ourselves of the impression that Hawthorne was a good deal bored by the importunity of Italian art, for which
his taste, naturally not keen, had never been cultivated. Occasionally, indeed, he breaks out into explicit sighs
and groans, and frankly declares that he washes his hands of it. Already, in England, he had made the
discovery that he could, easily feel overdosed with such things.[161] "Yesterday," he wrote in 1856, "I went
out at about twelve and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person
to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven
forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the
granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones."

The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better proof of it than his curious aversion to
the representation of the nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly returns to it,
exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists making naked figures. He apparently quite failed to see that
nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of
undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan
ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and whiteness of the
marble—speaks of the surface of the marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he
discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of the frame is an essential part of his
impression of the work—as he indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. Like a good American, he took
more pleasure in the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr. Powers and Mr. Hart, American
artists who were plying their trade in Italy, than in the works which adorned the ancient museums of the
country. He suffered greatly from the cold, and found little charm in the climate, and during the weeks of
winter that followed his arrival in Rome, he sat shivering[162] by his fire and wondering why he had come to
such a land of misery. Before he left Italy he wrote to his publisher—"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall
rejoice to bid it farewell for ever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it,
from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it."
Hawthorne presents himself to the reader of these pages as the last of the old-fashioned
Americans—and this is the interest which I just now said that his compatriots would find in his very
limitations. I do not mean by this that there are not still many of his fellow-countrymen (as there are many
natives of every land under the sun,) who are more susceptible of being irritated than of being soothed by the
influences of the Eternal City. What I mean is that an American of equal value with Hawthorne, an American
of equal genius, imagination, and, as our forefathers said, sensibility, would at present inevitably

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accommodate himself more easily to the idiosyncrasies of foreign lands. An American as cultivated as
Hawthorne, is now almost inevitably more cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised in
advance, more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in becoming so, he has lost something of his occidental
savour, the quality which excites the goodwill of the American reader of our author's Journals for the
dislocated, depressed, even slightly bewildered diarist. Absolutely the last of the earlier race of Americans
Hawthorne was, fortunately, probably far from being. But I think of him as the last specimen of the more
primitive type of men of letters; and when it comes to measuring what he succeeded in being, in his
unadulterated form, against what he failed of being,[163] the positive side of the image quite extinguishes the
negative. I must be on my guard, however, against incurring the charge of cherishing a national consciousness
as acute as I have ventured to pronounce his own.

Out of his mingled sensations, his pleasure and his weariness, his discomforts and his reveries, there sprang
another beautiful work. During the summer of 1858, he hired a picturesque old villa on the hill of
Bellosguardo, near Florence, a curious structure with a crenelated tower, which, after having in the course of
its career suffered many vicissitudes and played many parts, now finds its most vivid identity in being pointed
out to strangers as the sometime residence of the celebrated American romancer. Hawthorne took a fancy to
the place, as well he might, for it is one of the loveliest spots on earth, and the great view that stretched itself
before him contains every element of beauty. Florence lay at his feet with her memories and treasures; the
olive-covered hills bloomed around him, studded with villas as picturesque as his own; the Apennines, perfect
in form and colour, disposed themselves opposite, and in the distance, along its fertile valley, the Arno
wandered to Pisa and the sea. Soon after coming hither he wrote to a friend in a strain of high
satisfaction:—

"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America—a satisfaction that I never really
enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to be that the quintessence of nasal and
hand-shaking Yankeedom was gradually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward
and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome too it was not much better.
But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old
tracks, and[164] am really remote. I like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill,
overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each member of the family,
including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into
which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower,
haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to
being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight
dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance, which I have in my head, ready
to be written out."

This romance was Transformation, which he wrote out during the following winter in Rome, and re-wrote
during the several months that he spent in England, chiefly at Leamington, before returning to America. The
Villa Montauto figures, in fact, in this tale as the castle of Monte-Beni, the patrimonial dwelling of the hero. "I
take some credit to myself," he wrote to the same friend, on returning to Rome, "for having sternly shut
myself up for an hour or two every day, and come to close grips with a romance which I have been trying to
tear out of my mind." And later in the same winter he says—"I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy
heart, not expecting to be very well contented there.... If I were but a hundred times richer than I am, how very
comfortable I could be! I consider it a great piece of good fortune that I have had experience of the
discomforts and miseries of Italy, and did not go directly home from England. Anything will seem like a
Paradise after a Roman winter." But he got away at last, late in the spring, carrying his novel with him, and
the book was published, after, as I say, he had worked it[165] over, mainly during some weeks that he passed
at the little watering-place of Redcar, on the Yorkshire coast, in February of the following year. It was issued
primarily in England; the American edition immediately followed. It is an odd fact that in the two countries
the book came out under different titles. The title that the author had bestowed upon it did not satisfy the

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English publishers, who requested him to provide it with another; so that it is only in America that the work
bears the name of The Marble Fawn. Hawthorne's choice of this appellation is, by the way, rather singular, for
it completely fails to characterise the story, the subject of which is the living faun, the faun of flesh and blood,
the unfortunate Donatello. His marble counterpart is mentioned only in the opening chapter. On the other hand
Hawthorne complained that Transformation "gives one the idea of Harlequin in a pantomime." Under either
name, however, the book was a great success, and it has probably become the most popular of Hawthorne's
four novels. It is part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome, and is read by every
English-speaking traveller who arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go.

It has a great deal of beauty, of interest and grace; but it has to my sense a slighter value than its companions,
and I am far from regarding it as the masterpiece of the author, a position to which we sometimes hear it
assigned. The subject is admirable, and so are many of the details; but the whole thing is less simple and
complete than either of the three tales of American life, and Hawthorne forfeited a precious advantage in
ceasing to tread his native soil. Half the virtue of[166] The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables
is in their local quality; they are impregnated with the New England air. It is very true that Hawthorne had no
pretension to pourtray actualities and to cultivate that literal exactitude which is now the fashion. Had this
been the case, he would probably have made a still graver mistake in transporting the scene of his story to a
country which he knew only superficially. His tales all go on more or less "in the vague," as the French say,
and of course the vague may as well be placed in Tuscany as in Massachusetts. It may also very well be urged
in Hawthorne's favour here, that in Transformation he has attempted to deal with actualities more than he did
in either of his earlier novels. He has described the streets and monuments of Rome with a closeness which
forms no part of his reference to those of Boston and Salem. But for all this he incurs that penalty of seeming
factitious and unauthoritative, which is always the result of an artist's attempt to project himself into an
atmosphere in which he has not a transmitted and inherited property. An English or a German writer (I put
poets aside) may love Italy well enough, and know her well enough, to write delightful fictions about her; the
thing has often been done. But the productions in question will, as novels, always have about them something
second-rate and imperfect. There is in Transformation enough beautiful perception of the interesting character
of Rome, enough rich and eloquent expression of it, to save the book, if the book could be saved; but the style,
what the French call the genre, is an inferior one, and the thing remains a charming romance with intrinsic
weaknesses.

Allowing for this, however, some of the finest pages in[167] all Hawthorne are to be found in it. The subject,
as I have said, is a particularly happy one, and there is a great deal of interest in the simple combination and
opposition of the four actors. It is noticeable that in spite of the considerable length of the story, there are no
accessory figures; Donatello and Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda, exclusively occupy the scene. This is the more
noticeable as the scene is very large, and the great Roman background is constantly presented to us. The
relations of these four people are full of that moral picturesqueness which Hawthorne was always looking for;
he found it in perfection in the history of Donatello. As I have said, the novel is the most popular of his works,
and every one will remember the figure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a
man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to
self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather
vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself too little, and falls short, I think, of being a
creation. But he is enough of a creation to make us enter into the situation, and the whole history of his rise, or
fall, whichever one chooses to call it—his tasting of the tree of knowledge and finding existence
complicated with a regret—is unfolded with a thousand ingenious and exquisite touches. Of course, to
make the interest complete, there is a woman in the affair, and Hawthorne has done few things more beautiful
than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly-puzzled hero, with his
clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely-seeing feminine nature of
Miriam. Deeply[168] touching is the representation of the manner in which these two essentially different
persons—the woman intelligent, passionate, acquainted with life, and with a tragic element in her own
career; the youth ignorant, gentle, unworldly, brightly and harmlessly natural—are equalised and bound

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together by their common secret, which insulates them, morally, from the rest of mankind. The character of
Hilda has always struck me as an admirable invention—one of those things that mark the man of
genius. It needed a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the propriety of such a
figure as Hilda's and to perceive the relief it would both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid New
England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome, unacquainted with evil and untouched
by impurity, has been accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by which her
friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is her revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence.
She has done no wrong, and yet wrongdoing has become a part of her experience, and she carries the weight
of her detested knowledge upon her heart. She carries it a long time, saddened and oppressed by it, till at last
she can bear it no longer. If I have called the whole idea of the presence and effect of Hilda in the story a trait
of genius, the purest touch of inspiration is the episode in which the poor girl deposits her burden. She has
passed the whole lonely summer in Rome, and one day, at the end of it, finding herself in St. Peter's, she
enters a confessional, strenuous daughter of the Puritans as she is, and pours out her dark knowledge into the
bosom of the Church—then comes away with her conscience lightened, not a whit[169] the less a
Puritan than before. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but this admirable scene, and the pages
describing the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, afterwards,
of the guilty couple, through the "blood-stained streets of Rome," it would still deserve to rank high among
the imaginative productions of our day.

Like all of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many light threads of symbolism, which shimmer in the
texture of the tale, but which are apt to break and remain in our fingers if we attempt to handle them. These
things are part of Hawthorne's very manner—almost, as one might say, of his vocabulary; they belong
much more to the surface of his work than to its stronger interest. The fault of Transformation is that the
element of the unreal is pushed too far, and that the book is neither positively of one category nor of another.
His "moonshiny romance," he calls it in a letter; and, in truth, the lunar element is a little too pervasive. The
action wavers between the streets of Rome, whose literal features the author perpetually sketches, and a vague
realm of fancy, in which quite a different verisimilitude prevails. This is the trouble with Donatello himself.
His companions are intended to be real—if they fail to be so, it is not for want of intention; whereas he
is intended to be real or not, as you please. He is of a different substance from them; it is as if a painter, in
composing a picture, should try to give you an impression of one of his figures by a strain of music. The idea
of the modern faun was a charming one; but I think it a pity that the author should not have made him more
definitely modern, without reverting so much to his mythological properties and antecedents, which are[170]
very gracefully touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque conceits, much more than to that
of real psychology. Among the young Italians of to-day there are still plenty of models for such an image as
Hawthorne appears to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatello. And since I am speaking
critically, I may go on to say that the art of narration, in Transformation, seems to me more at fault than in the
author's other novels. The story straggles and wanders, is dropped and taken up again, and towards the close
lapses into an almost fatal vagueness.

[171]

CHAPTER VII.

LAST YEARS.
Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell that I have not already told. He returned to
America in the summer of 1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord before going to
Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted
upon the fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all things, during his residence in

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Europe, from the standpoint of that little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the good
Mohammedan carries the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to face towards Mecca. But it does not
appear, nevertheless, that he found himself treading with any great exhilaration the larger section of his native
soil upon which, on his return, he disembarked. Indeed, the closing part of his life was a period of dejection,
the more acute that it followed directly upon seven years of the happiest opportunities he was to have known.
And his European residence had been brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely with those habits
of extreme seclusion into which he was to relapse on his return to Concord. "You would be[172] stricken
dumb," he wrote from London, shortly before leaving it for the last time, "to see how quietly I accept a whole
string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London
life, somehow or other," he adds in the same letter, "has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better
than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I do."
"When he found himself once more on the old ground," writes Mr. Lathrop, "with the old struggle for
subsistence staring him in the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of depression
would follow." There is indeed not a little sadness in the thought of Hawthorne's literary gift, light, delicate,
exquisite, capricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy burden of the maintenance of a
family. We feel that it was not intended for such grossness, and that in a world ideally constituted he would
have enjoyed a liberal pension, an assured subsistence, and have been able to produce his charming prose only
when the fancy took him.

The brightness of the outlook at home was not made greater by the explosion of the Civil War in the spring of
1861. These months, and the three years that followed them, were not a cheerful time for any persons but
army-contractors; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud appears to have dropped a permanent shadow. The
whole affair was a bitter disappointment to him, and a fatal blow to that happy faith in the uninterruptedness
of American prosperity which I have spoken of as the religion of the old-fashioned American in general, and
the old-fashioned Democrat in particular. It was not a propitious time for cultivating the Muse;[173] when
history herself is so hard at work, fiction has little left to say. To fiction, directly, Hawthorne did not address
himself; he composed first, chiefly during the year 1862, the chapters of which our Our Old Home was
afterwards made up. I have said that, though this work has less value than his purely imaginative things, the
writing is singularly good, and it is well to remember, to its greater honour, that it was produced at a time
when it was painfully hard for a man of Hawthorne's cast of mind to fix his attention. The air was full of
battle-smoke, and the poet's vision was not easily clear. Hawthorne was irritated, too, by the sense of being to
a certain extent, politically considered, in a false position. A large section of the Democratic party was not in
good odour at the North; its loyalty was not perceived to be of that clear strain which public opinion required.
To this wing of the party Franklin Pierce had, with reason or without, the credit of belonging; and our author
was conscious of some sharpness of responsibility in defending the illustrious friend of whom he had already
made himself the advocate. He defended him manfully, without a grain of concession, and described the
ex-President to the public (and to himself), if not as he was, then as he ought to be. Our Old Home is
dedicated to him, and about this dedication there was some little difficulty. It was represented to Hawthorne
that as General Pierce was rather out of fashion, it might injure the success, and, in plain terms, the sale of his
book. His answer (to his publisher), was much to the point.

"I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter.
My long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the[174] dedication altogether proper, especially
as regards this book, which would have had no existence without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly
unpopular that his name ought to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should
stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have
deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication I should never look at the
volume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I
think fit to give it, or let it alone. Nevertheless I have no fancy for making myself a martyr when it is
honourably and conscientiously possible to avoid it; and I always measure out heroism very accurately
according to the exigencies of the occasion, and should be the last man in the world to throw away a bit of it

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needlessly. So I have looked over the concluding paragraph and have amended it in such a way that, while
doing what I know to be justice to my friend, it contains not a word that ought to be objectionable to any set
of readers. If the public of the North see fit to ostracise me for this, I can only say that I would gladly sacrifice
a thousand or two dollars, rather than retain the goodwill of such a herd of dolts and mean-spirited
scoundrels."

The dedication was published, the book was eminently successful, and Hawthorne was not ostracised. The
paragraph under discussion stands as follows:—"Only this let me say, that, with the record of your life
in my memory, and with a sense of your character in my deeper consciousness, as among the few things that
time has left as it found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful for ever to that grand idea of an
irrevocable Union which, as you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other
men there may be a choice of paths—for you but one; and it rests among my certainties that no man's
loyalty[175] is more steadfast, no man's hopes or apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more
deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness, than those of
Franklin Pierce." I know not how well the ex-President liked these lines, but the public thought them
admirable, for they served as a kind of formal profession of faith, on the question of the hour, by a loved and
honoured writer. That some of his friends thought such a profession needed is apparent from the numerous
editorial ejaculations and protests appended to an article describing a visit he had just paid to Washington,
which Hawthorne contributed to the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1862, and which, singularly enough, has not
been reprinted. The article has all the usual merit of such sketches on Hawthorne's part—the merit of
delicate, sportive feeling, expressed with consummate grace—but the editor of the periodical appears to
have thought that he must give the antidote with the poison, and the paper is accompanied with several little
notes disclaiming all sympathy with the writer's political heresies. The heresies strike the reader of to-day as
extremely mild, and what excites his emotion, rather, is the questionable taste of the editorial commentary,
with which it is strange that Hawthorne should have allowed his article to be encumbered. He had not been an
Abolitionist before the War, and that he should not pretend to be one at the eleventh hour, was, for instance,
surely a piece of consistency that might have been allowed to pass. "I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old
John Brown," he says, in a page worth quoting, "any further than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad
about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so[176] unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage whose
happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences"—the allusion here, I suppose, is to Mr.
Emerson—"as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honoured a name), that the death of this
blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged.
He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly. He himself, I am persuaded (such was his natural integrity),
would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to take the life which he had staked and lost; although it
would have been better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could generously have forgotten the
criminality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the
matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only
in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Now that the heat of that great conflict has
passed away, this is a capital expression of the saner estimate, in the United States, of the dauntless and
deluded old man who proposed to solve a complex political problem by stirring up a servile insurrection.
There is much of the same sound sense, interfused with light, just appreciable irony, in such a passage as the
following:—

"I tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a Southern army would be in a sober town of
Massachusetts; and the thought considerably lessened my wonder at the cold and shy regards that are cast
upon our troops, the gloom, the sullen demeanour, the declared, or scarcely hidden, sympathy with rebellion,
which are so frequent here. It is a strange thing in human life that the greatest errors both of[177] men and
women often spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of
warmhearted, generous, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause,
but because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay nearest the heart. There
never existed any other Government against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by such

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plausible arguments, as against that of the United States. The anomaly of two allegiances, (of which that of
the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General
Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and has no symbol but a flag,) is exceedingly
mischievous in this point of view; for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who seem to
themselves not merely innocent but patriotic, and who die for a bad cause with a quiet conscience as if it were
the best. In the vast extent of our country—too vast by far to be taken into one small human
heart—we inevitably limit to our own State, or at farthest, to our own little section, that sentiment of
physical love for the soil which renders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and
well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot, treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each
individual breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore, and is content to be ruined with her, let us shoot
him, if we can, but allow him an honourable burial in the soil he fights for."

To this paragraph a line of deprecation from the editor is attached; and indeed from the point of view of a
vigorous prosecution of the war it was doubtless not particularly pertinent. But it is interesting as an example
of the way an imaginative man judges current events—trying to see the other side as well as his own, to
feel what his adversary feels, and present his view of the case.

But he had other occupations for his imagination[178] than putting himself into the shoes of unappreciative
Southerners. He began at this time two novels, neither of which he lived to finish, but both of which were
published, as fragments, after his death. The shorter of these fragments, to which he had given the name of
The Dolliver Romance, is so very brief that little can be said of it. The author strikes, with all his usual
sweetness, the opening notes of a story of New England life, and the few pages which have been given to the
world contain a charming picture of an old man and a child.

The other rough sketch—it is hardly more—is in a manner complete; it was unfortunately
deemed complete enough to be brought out in a magazine as a serial novel. This was to do it a great wrong,
and I do not go too far in saying that poor Hawthorne would probably not have enjoyed the very bright light
that has been projected upon this essentially crude piece of work. I am at a loss to know how to speak of
Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life; I have purposely reserved but a small space for doing so, for the part of
discretion seems to be to pass it by lightly. I differ therefore widely from the author's biographer and
son-in-law in thinking it a work of the greatest weight and value, offering striking analogies with Goethe's
Faust; and still more widely from a critic whom Mr. Lathrop quotes, who regards a certain portion of it as
"one of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." It seems to me almost cruel to pitch in this exalted key
one's estimate of the rough first draught of a tale in regard to which the author's premature death operates,
virtually, as a complete renunciation of pretensions. It is plain to any reader that Septimius Felton, as it stands,
with its roughness, its gaps, its mere allusiveness and slightness of[179] treatment, gives us but a very partial
measure of Hawthorne's full intention; and it is equally easy to believe that this intention was much finer than
anything we find in the book. Even if we possessed the novel in its complete form, however, I incline to think
that we should regard it as very much the weakest of Hawthorne's productions. The idea itself seems a failure,
and the best that might have come of it would have been very much below The Scarlet Letter or The House of
the Seven Gables. The appeal to our interest is not felicitously made, and the fancy of a potion, to assure
eternity of existence, being made from the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom the distiller of
the potion has deprived of life, though it might figure with advantage in a short story of the pattern of the
Twice-Told Tales, appears too slender to carry the weight of a novel. Indeed, this whole matter of elixirs and
potions belongs to the fairy-tale period of taste, and the idea of a young man enabling himself to live forever
by concocting and imbibing a magic draught, has the misfortune of not appealing to our sense of reality or
even to our sympathy. The weakness of Septimius Felton is that the reader cannot take the hero
seriously—a fact of which there can be no better proof than the element of the ridiculous which
inevitably mingles itself in the scene in which he entertains his lady-love with a prophetic sketch of his
occupations during the successive centuries of his earthly immortality. I suppose the answer to my criticism is
that this is allegorical, symbolic, ideal; but we feel that it symbolises nothing substantial, and that the

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truth—whatever it may be—that it illustrates, is as moonshiny, to use Hawthorne's own
expression, as the[180] allegory itself. Another fault of the story is that a great historical event—the
war of the Revolution—is introduced in the first few pages, in order to supply the hero with a pretext
for killing the young man from whose grave the flower of immortality is to sprout, and then drops out of the
narrative altogether, not even forming a background to the sequel. It seems to me that Hawthorne should
either have invented some other occasion for the death of his young officer, or else, having struck the note of
the great public agitation which overhung his little group of characters, have been careful to sound it through
the rest of his tale. I do wrong, however, to insist upon these things, for I fall thereby into the error of treating
the work as if it had been cast into its ultimate form and acknowledged by the author. To avoid this error I
shall make no other criticism of details, but content myself with saying that the idea and intention of the book
appear, relatively speaking, feeble, and that even had it been finished it would have occupied a very different
place in the public esteem from the writer's masterpieces.

The year 1864 brought with it for Hawthorne a sense of weakness and depression from which he had little
relief during the four or five months that were left him of life. He had his engagement to produce The Dolliver
Romance, which had been promised to the subscribers of the Atlantic Monthly (it was the first time he had
undertaken to publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to write, and his consciousness of
an unperformed task weighed upon him, and did little to dissipate his physical inertness. "I have not yet had
courage to read the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his publisher in December, 1863;[181] "but will set
about it soon, though with terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful to you," he went
on, "for protecting me from that visitation of the elephant and his cub. If you happen to see
Mr.——, of L——, a young man who was here last summer, pray tell him anything
that your conscience will let you, to induce him to spare me another visit, which I know he intended. I really
am not well, and cannot be disturbed by strangers, without more suffering than it is worth while to endure." A
month later he was obliged to ask for a further postponement. "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make
an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down
authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit
and vigour. That trouble perhaps still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously,
my mind has, for the time, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better keep quiet.
Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." The winter passed away, but
the "new spirit of vigour" remained absent, and at the end of February he wrote to Mr. Fields that his novel
had simply broken down, and that he should never finish it. "I hardly know what to say to the public about this
abortive romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it. Yet it is not quite
pleasant for an author to announce himself, or to be announced, as finally broken down as to his literary
faculty.... I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it
will be my[182] death; not that I should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus
ending a life of much smoulder and a scanty fire, in a blaze of glory. But I should smother myself in mud of
my own making.... I am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to me realities in the
face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage
and the 'old Home' might set me all right."

But he was not to go to England; he started three months later upon a briefer journey, from which he never
returned. His health was seriously disordered, and in April, according to a letter from Mrs. Hawthorne, printed
by Mr. Fields, he had been "miserably ill." His feebleness was complete; he appears to have had no definite
malady, but he was, according to the common phrase, failing. General Pierce proposed to him that they should
make a little tour together among the mountains of New Hampshire, and Hawthorne consented, in the hope of
getting some profit from the change of air. The northern New England spring is not the most genial season in
the world, and this was an indifferent substitute for the resource for which his wife had, on his behalf,
expressed a wish—a visit to "some island in the Gulf Stream." He was not to go far; he only reached a
little place called Plymouth, one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain scenery of New
Hampshire, when, on the 18th of May, 1864, death overtook him. His companion, General Pierce, going into

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his room in the early morning, found that he had breathed his last during the night—had passed away,
tranquilly, comfortably, without a sign or a sound, in his sleep. This happened at the hotel of[183] the
place—a vast white edifice, adjacent to the railway station, and entitled the Pemigiwasset House. He
was buried at Concord, and many of the most distinguished men in the country stood by his grave.

He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been singularly exempt from worldly
preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his work. He had lived
primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the tenderest kind; and then—without eagerness,
without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion—in his charming art. His work will remain;
it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the men of imagination he will always have his niche. No
one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his
vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a
sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree the
spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems. Man's conscience was his theme, but
he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance, an interest, and, I may almost
say, an importance.

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