The essayist in story-telling.
Hawthorne is one of the earliest story-tellers whom we remember as much for himself as for his books. He is loved or hated, as an essayist is loved or hated, without reference to the subjects on which he happened to write. He wrote in a community for whom a writer was still so novel as to possess some rags of the old splendours of the sage; an author was something wonderful, and no mere business man. He had not to expect any hostility in his reader, but rather a readiness to admire (of which he seldom took advantage), and an eagerness to enjoy him for his own sake. He could assume, as an essayist assumes when he dances naked before his readers, that they were not there to scoff. He brought a sweet ingenuous spirit into modern story-telling that would perhaps have been impossible had he been writing for a more sophisticated audience. We love him for it. He made books, he said, 'for his known and unknown friends.' As he says it, he brings us all into the circle. When we think of Fielding, Bunyan, or Cervantes, we think of Tom Jones, Pilgrim's Progress, and Don Quixote; when we think of Elia, Table Talk, and The Scarlet Letter, we think of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hawthorne.
Hawthorne and Poe.
This engaging, unsuspicious, essayistical attitude of his would have been quite impossible to Poe; but we must remember that Hawthorne and Poe, although contemporary, knew very different Americas. Poe's birth was a kind of accident, and he approached America penniless, so that she was a hostile place to him, a country of skinflint editors and large terrible towns, from which to escape in books, and, as far as possible, in life. He hated the New America, but he belonged to her. Hawthorne belonged to the old. His family connected him with her history; he was never at her mercy; as we learn from his rambling prefaces, that would be intolerable in a less lovable writer, she was endeared to him by a delightful boyhood, and did not refuse him a peaceful youth of devotion to his art. She never treated him otherwise than tenderly, and he did not leave her until as a representative of her people, nor sought escape from her in books, except for those of his shadowy creatures who could move with greater freedom in a less bread-and-buttery fairyland.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Hawthorne's life.
His life, as we learn it from those prefaces and from his biographers, was as gentle as the man himself. We read of quiet days of work in a study from whose windows he could watch the sunlight through the willow boughs; of days on the river with Thoreau in a canoe which that angular reformer had built with his own hands; of meetings with Emerson walking in the woods, 'with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his person like the garment of a shining one'; of evenings before the red fire in a little room with white moonlight bringing out the patterns on the carpet, weaving the tapestries of dream that were next day to come alive upon the paper. These people, who were to make the intellectual life of America, were not American in the peace of their existence. Hawthorne, in the newest of all countries, wrote 'in a clear, brown, twilight atmosphere.' He was a lover of secondhand things, and so clothed things with his imagination that all he touched was green with ivy. No contemporary or even historical romances have about them such ancient tenderness and legendary dusk as his. It is extraordinary to think that he was born within two years of Poe. He thought 'the world was very weary, and should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap.' America, at least, had a thousand other things to do, but it was not until he had seen Europe that Hawthorne recognised the fact.
His notebooks.