HAWTHORNE AND HIS WRITINGS
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4, 1804. His New England ancestors bore the name Hathorne, as did the author’s sea-captain father—also a Nathaniel—who died at Surinam, Dutch Guiana, when his son was four years old. In 1818 the family moved to Raymond, Maine, but most of the youth’s education was gotten at Salem, and there his family returned in 1820. The following year he entered Bowdoin College, from which he was graduated in 1825. At this time—when he was twenty-one—he had already begun Twice-Told Tales; it was then, too, that he inserted the w into his name. He was now writing industriously, often under a pseudonym; he also did considerable hack and editorial work. During 1839 and a part of 1840 he served in the Boston Custom House; then he joined the Brook Farm Community in 1841, but remained there only a short time. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842. In 1846 he returned to the Customs service, in Salem, remaining this time about three years. In 1853 he was appointed by his classmate, President Pierce, as United States Consul at Liverpool. During the more than three years of his consulship he traveled widely in Great Britain, and later spent much time in Italy, where some of his best work was accomplished. During the last years of his life he wrote but intermittently, being a prey to depression and ill health. He died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, May 19, 1864, and is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a remarkable novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, are his greatest novels. The House of the Seven Gables is a series of related sketches rather than a romance. Probably his best short-stories are “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” in Mosses From An Old Manse; “The Gray Champion,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Gentle Boy,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “The Ambitious Guest,” “Wakefield,” and “The White Old Maid,” from Twice-Told Tales; and “The Great Stone Face,” “Ethan Brand” and “The Snow-Image,” in The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales. These three collections contain also many charming sketches, while The Wonder Book, and Tanglewood Tales are rich in interest for younger readers.
“The White Old Maid,” given herewith in full, was first published in the New England Magazine for July, 1835, and was entitled “The Old Maid in the Winding Sheet, by the Author of The Gray Champion.”
Hawthorne enjoyed the distinction of winning in his day the almost unanimous approval of critics both at home and abroad, and this in a period when criticism was not a gentle art. Time, moreover, has only added to his praises. As a fiction writer he had depth, breadth, and height. Hawthorne alone among the fictionists of his era may justly be said to have a philosophy of his own; his themes cover a wide range; and the loftiness of his ideals is well recognized. As Longfellow discerned, and generously announced as early as 1837, Hawthorne was a poet who wrote prose. He knew a mood in nature to match every human emotion, and in her multiform life he saw images to enforce a thousand striking comparisons. He was a student of the soul, too, albeit a gloomy one, for the most part. But while the sombreness of lives beset by stern problems oppressed him, and but little humor brightens his pages, one searches in vain for a pessimistic spirit—Hawthorne’s knowledge of the human heart saddened him, but it did not make him misanthropic. One feels the reality, the vital bearing, of the things he writes about. It is impossible to read him appreciatively and not realize the sincerity of the man, and the fine earnestness, the upright though severe justness, with which he viewed life. Sweetness, beauty—haunting beauty, indeed—and a certain airy lightness, were not wanting in his work; but the big tones—resonant, solemn at times, and inspiring always—were poetic insight, fervid intensity, and lofty purpose. Hawthorne was a seer. The inside of things was disclosed to him. That which he could not see, he felt. And with a classic purity of style he worded the fantastic, gloomy, lightsome, or tragic pageantry of his creations in sentences that live and live.
I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny book.—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to James T. Fields.
Soon to be all spirit, I have already a spiritual sense of human nature, and see deeply into the hearts of mankind, discovering what is hidden from the wisest.... My glance comprehends the crowd, and penetrates the breast of the solitary man.—Nathaniel Hawthorne, My Home Return, in Tales and Sketches.
He uses his characters, like algebraic symbols, to work out certain problems with; they are rather more, yet rather less, than flesh and blood.—H. A. Beers, quoted in Tappan’s Topical Notes on American Authors.
Hawthorne’s style, at its best, is one of the most perfect media employed by any writer using the English language. Dealing, as it usually does, with an immaterial subject-matter, with dream-like impressions, and fantastic products of the imagination, it is concrete without being opaque,—luminously concrete, one might say. No other writer that I know of has the power of making his fancies visible and tangible without impairing their delicate immateriality. If any writer can put the rainbow into words, and yet leave it a rainbow, surely that writer is Hawthorne.—Richard Le Gallienne, Attitudes and Avowals.
In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural; and though he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he violate the laws of nature.... A brutal misuse of the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest degradation of the art of fiction. But “to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour than as any actual portion of the substance,” to quote from the preface to the House of the Seven Gables, this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of Short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.—Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-story.
Hawthorne has been called a mystic, which he was not,—and a psychological dreamer, which he was in very slight degree. He was really the ghost of New England. I do not mean the “spirit,” nor the “phantom,” but the ghost in the older sense in which that term is used, the thin, rarefied essence which is to be found somewhere behind the physical organization: embodied, indeed, and not by any means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly tabernacle, but yet only half embodied in it, endowed with a certain painful sense of the gulf between his nature and its organization, always recognizing the gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always more or less unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit in them. They are ghostly writings.... I may, perhaps, accept a phrase of which Hawthorne himself was fond,—“the moonlight of romance,”—and compel it to explain something of the secret of his characteristic genius.—R. H. Hutton, Essays in Literary Criticism.
This, too [“The White Old Maid”], is a story, in the sense that something happens; and yet the real story, by which I mean the narrative which would logically connect and develop these events, is just hinted at, and is not very important. It is subordinated, indeed, to a new aim. “The White Old Maid” is narrative for a purpose, and this purpose is to suggest an impression, and to leave us with a vivid sensation rather than a number of remembered facts. In short, it is contrived, not to leave a record of such and such an old woman who did this or that, but rather to stamp upon our minds the impression of a mystery-haunted house, mysterious figures entering, strange words, and a terrible sorrow behind all. Towards such a result the structure of the plot, every bit of description, every carefully chosen word, directly tends.—Henry Seidel Canby, The Book of the Short Story.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON HAWTHORNE
Hours in a Library, Leslie Stephen (1874); Study of Hawthorne, George Parsons Lathrop (1876); Life, in the English Men of Letters series, Henry James (1880); Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Julian Hawthorne (1885); Life, in the Great Writers series, Moncure D. Conway (1890); Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horatio Bridge (1893); Memories of Hawthorne, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897); Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anne Fields (1899); Life, in the American Men of Letters series, George Edward Woodberry (1902).