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STORIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.
BY HENRIETTA CHRISTIAN WRIGHT.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
In the old seaport town of Salem, with its quaint houses with their carved doorways and many windows, with its pretty rose gardens, its beautiful overshadowing elms, its dingy court-house and celebrated town pump, Hawthorne passed his early life, his picturesque surroundings forming a suitable setting to the picture we may call up of the handsome imaginative boy whose early impressions were afterward to crystallize into the most beautiful art that America has yet known. Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with the memories of the witches who had been hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves and store-rooms held priceless stores of merchandise.
ONE OF THE BOY'S FAVORITE OCCUPATIONS.
Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town. He went to school and to church, loved the sea, and prophesied that he would go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading, and was not averse to a good fight with any of his school-fellows who had, as he expressed it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, and life seemed a very good thing to him, whether he was roaming the streets of Salem, sitting idly on the wharves, or at home stretched on the floor reading one of his favorite authors. As a rule all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and Hawthorne was no exception. When reading, he was living in the magic world of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Pilgrim's Progress. This last was a great and special favorite with him, its lofty and beautiful spirit carrying his soul with it into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without understanding.
For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in the life of the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Maine, where the family moved for a time. Here, he says, he lived the life of a bird of the air, with no restraint, and in absolute supreme freedom. In the summer he would take his gun and spend days in the forest, shooting, fishing, and doing whatever prompted his vagabond spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake, with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes passing the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, whose hearth would blaze with the burning trunks of the fallen evergreens.
He entered Bowdoin in 1821, and had among his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States, and several others who distinguished themselves in later life. Long afterward Hawthorne recalls his days at Bowdoin as among the happiest of his life, and in writing to one of his old college friends speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place, where he gathered blueberries in study hours; watched the great logs drifting down from the lumbering districts above along the current of the Androscoggin, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and squirrels at odd hours which ought to have been devoted to the classics.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
After leaving Bowdoin, Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the next twelve years of his life, and during which he must have marked out authorship as his profession, as he attempted nothing else. Here he produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals of the day, and which won for him a reputation among other American writers. But it is remarkable that the years which a man devotes usually to the best work of his life were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of what he meant to accomplish later on; for exquisite as is some of the work produced at this time, it never would have won for the author the highest place in American literature. These stories and sketches were collected later on, and published under the titles Twice-Told Tales and Snow Image. They are full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, but in speaking of them Hawthorne himself says that there is in this result of twelve years little to show for its thought and industry. But whatever may have been the cause of delay, the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance. In writing this book Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of old Puritan times in New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty.
In the days of which he wrote a Puritan town or village was exactly like a large family bound together by mutual interests, in which the acts of each life were regarded as affecting the whole community. In this novel Hawthorne imprisoned forever the spirit of colonial New England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears; and the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only in public records and church histories, was lifted into the realm of art.
In Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian fights, village pillories, town meetings, witch-burnings, and church councils, was already a memory. He had drifted into the past with his steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock. He had left the pleasant New England farm-lands with their pastures and meadows, hills and valleys and wild-pine groves, and lurked like a ghost among the old church-yards and court-houses where his deeds were recorded.
Hawthorne brought him back to life, rehabilitated him in his old garments, set him in the midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and gave him a perfect carnival of trials and worries for conscience' sake. He made the old Puritan live anew, and never again can his memory become dim. It is embalmed for all time by the cunning art of this master-hand.
This first romance, published under the title The Scarlet Letter, revealed both to Hawthorne himself and the world outside the transcendent power of his genius.
Hawthorne, when the work was first finished, was in a desperate frame of mind, because of the little popularity his other books had acquired, and told his publisher, who saw the first germ of the work, that he did not know whether the story was very good or very bad. The publisher, however, perceived at once the unusual quality of the work, prevailed upon Hawthorne to finish it immediately, and brought it out one year from that time, and the public, which had become familiar with Hawthorne as a writer of short stories, now saw that it had been entertaining a genius unawares.
Hawthorne's next work, The House of the Seven Gables, is a story of the New England of his own day. Through its pages flit the contrasting figures that one might find there and nowhere else. The old spinster of ancient family who is obliged in her latter years to open a toy and ginger-bread shop, and who never forgets the time when the house with seven gables was a mansion whose hospitality was honored by all, is a pathetic picture of disappointed hope and broken-down fortune. So also her brother, who was imprisoned under a false charge for twenty years, and who is obliged in his old age to lean upon his sister for support. The other characters are alike true to life—a life that has almost disappeared now in the changes of the half-century since its scenes were made the inspiration of Hawthorne's romance.
The House of the Seven Gables was followed by two beautiful volumes for children: The Wonder-Book, in which the stories of the Greek myths are retold, and Tanglewood Tales.
In The Wonder-Book Hawthorne writes as if he were a child himself, so delicious is the charm that he weaves around these old, old tales. Not content with the myths, he created little incidents and impossible characters, which glance in and out with elfin fascination. He feels that these were the very stories that were told by the centaurs, fairies, and satyrs themselves in the shadows of those old Grecian forests. Here we learn that King Midas not only had his palace turned to gold, but that his own little daughter Marigold, a fancy of Hawthorne's own, was also converted into the same shilling metal. We are told, too, the secrets of many a hero and god of this realm of fancy which had been unsuspected by any other historian of their deeds. No child in reading The Wonder-Book would doubt for a moment that Hawthorne had obtained the stories first hand from the living characters, and would easily believe that he had hobnobbed many a moonlit night with Pan and Bacchus and other sylvan deities in their vine-covered grottos by the famed rivers of Greece. This dainty ethereal touch of Hawthorne appears especially in all his work for children. It is as if he understood and entered into that mystery which ever surrounds child life and sets it sacredly apart. It is the same quality, nearly, which gives distinction to his fourth great novel, in which he is called upon to deal with the elusive character of a man who is supposed to be a descendant of the old fauns. We feel that this creation, which is named Donatello, from his resemblance to the celebrated statue of the Marble Faun by that sculptor, is not wholly human, and although he has human interests and feelings, Hawthorne is always a master in treating such a subject as this. He makes Donatello ashamed of his pointed ears, though his spirit is as wild and untamed as that of his crude ancestors. In this book—which takes its name from the statue—The Marble Faun, there is a description of a scene where Donatello, who is by title an Italian count, joins in a peasant dance around one of the public fountains. And so vividly is his half-human nature brought out that one feels as if Hawthorne must have witnessed somewhere the mad revels of the veritable fauns and satyrs in the days of their life upon the earth. In the whole development of this story Hawthorne shows the same subtle sympathy with natures so far out of the commonplace that they seem to belong to another world. The mystery of such souls having the same charm for him as the secrets of the earth and air have for the scientist and philosopher.
AT BROOK FARM.
The book coming between The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun is called The Blithedale Romance. It is founded partly upon a period of Hawthorne's life when he became a member of a community which hoped to improve the world by showing that to live healthily, manual labor must be combined with intellectual pursuits, and that self-interest and all differences in rank could only be injurious to a country. This little society of reformers lived in a suburb of Boston, and called their association Brook Farm. Each member was supposed to perform some manual labor on the farm or in the house each day, although hours were set aside for study and intellectual work. Here Hawthorne ploughed the fields like a farmer boy in the daytime, and in the evening joined in the amusements, or sat apart while the other members talked about art and literature and science, danced, sang, or read Shakespeare aloud.
Some of the cleverest men and women of New England became members of this community, the rules of which obliged the men to wear plaid blouses and rough straw hats, and the women to content themselves with plain calico gowns.
This company of serious-minded men and women, who tried to solve a great problem by leading the lives of Acadian shepherds, at length dispersed, each one going back into the world and working on as bravely as if the experiment had been a great success. The record of the life and experiences of Brook Farm are shadowed forth in The Blithedale Romance, although it is not by any means a literal narrative of its existence.
THE OLD MANSE.
Hawthorne's early married life was spent at Concord, near Boston, in a quaint old dwelling called the Manse, and as all his work partakes of the personal flavor of his own life, so his existence here is recorded in a delightful series of essays called Mosses from an Old Manse. Here we have a description of the old house itself and of the author's family life, of the kitchen-garden and apple orchards, of the meadows and woods, and of his friendship with that lover of nature, Henry Thoreau, whose writings form a valuable contribution to American literature. The Mosses from an Old Manse must ever be famous as the history of the quiet hours of the greatest American man of letters. They are full of Hawthorne's own personality, and reveal more than any other of his books, the depth and purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.
In 1853 Hawthorne was appointed American Consul at Liverpool by his old friend and school-mate Franklin Pierce, then President of the United States. He remained abroad seven years, spending the last four on the continent. The results of this experience are found in the celebrated Marble Faun, published in Europe under the title Transformation. It was written in Rome, and it is interesting to know that the story was partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa near Florence which he occupied with his family. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower, "haunted," as Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "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." He also states in the same letter that he meant to put the old castle bodily in a romance that was then in his head, and he carried out this threat by making the villa the old family castle of Donatello.
After Hawthorne returned to America he began two other novels, one founded upon the old legend of the elixir of life. This story was probably suggested to him by Thoreau, who spoke of the house in which Hawthorne lived at Concord, after leaving the old Manse, as having been the abode, a century or two before, of a man who believed that he should never die. This subject was a charming one for Hawthorne's peculiar genius, but the story, with another—the Dolliver Romance—was never completed, the death of Hawthorne in 1864 leaving the work unfinished.
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