If Elizabeth possessed the genius which her brother supposed, she certainly does not indicate it in this letter; but genius in the ore is very different from genius smelted and refined by effort and experience. The one important fact in her statement is that Hawthorne was in the habit of taking solitary rambles after dark,—an owlish practice, but very attractive to romantic minds. Human nature appears in a more pictorial guise by lamplight, after the day’s work is over. The groups at the street corners, the glittering display in the watchmaker’s windows, the carriages flashing by and disappearing in the darkness, the mysterious errands of foot-passengers, all served as object-lessons for this student of his own kind.
Jonathan Cilley once said:
“I love Hawthorne; I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me to enter.” {Footnote: Packard’s “Bowdoin College,” 306.}
Long-continued thinking is sure to take effect at last, either in words or in action, and Hawthorne’s mind had to disburden itself in some manner. So, after the failure of “Fanshawe,” he returned to his original plan of writing short stories, and this time with success. In January, 1830, the well-known tale of “The Gentle Boy” was accepted by S. G. Goodrich, the editor of a Boston publication called the Token, who was himself better known in those days under the nom de plume of “Peter Parley.” “The Wives of the Dead,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” and “Major Molineaux” soon followed. In 1833 he published the “Seven Vagabonds,” and some others. The New York Knickerbocker published the “Fountain of Youth” and “Edward Fayne’s Rosebud.” After 1833 the Token and the New England Magazine {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 175.} stood ready to accept all the short pieces that Hawthorne could give them, but they did not encourage him to write serial stories. However, it was not the custom then for writers to sign their names to magazine articles, so that Hawthorne gained nothing in reputation by this. Some of his earliest pieces were printed over the signature of “Oberon.”
An autumn expedition to the White Mountains, Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario, and Niagara Falls, in 1832, raised Hawthorne’s spirits and stimulated his ambition. He wrote to his mother from Burlington, Vermont, September 16:
“I have arrived in safety, having passed through the White Hills, stopping at Ethan Crawford’s house, and climbing Mt. Washington. I have not decided as to my future course. I have no intention of going into Canada. I have heard that cholera is prevalent in Boston.”
It was something to have stood on the highest summit east of the Rocky Mountains, and to have seen all New England lying at his feet. A hard wind in the Crawford Notch, which he describes in his story of “The Ambitious Guest,” must have been in his own experience, and as he passed the monument of the ill-fated Willey family he may have thought that he too might become celebrated after his death, even as they were from their poetic catastrophe. This expedition provided him with the materials for a number of small plots.
The ice was now broken; but a new class of difficulties arose before him. American literature was then in the bud and promised a beautiful blossoming, but the public was not prepared for it. Monthly magazines had a precarious existence, and their uncertainty of remuneration reacted on the contributors. Hawthorne was poorly paid, often obliged to wait a long time for his pay, and occasionally lost it altogether. For his story of “The Gentle Boy,” one of the gems of literature, which ought to be read aloud every year in the public schools, he received the paltry sum of thirty-five dollars. Evidently he could not earn even a modest maintenance on such terms, and his letters to Bridge became more despondent than ever.
Goodrich, who was a writer of the Andrews Norton class, soon perceived that Hawthorne could make better sentences than his own, and engaged him to write historical abstracts for his pitiful Peter Parley books, paying him a hundred dollars for the whole work, and securing for himself all the credit that appertained to it. Everybody knew who Peter Parley was, but it has only recently been discovered that much of the literature which passed under his name was the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The editor of a New York magazine to which Hawthorne contributed a number of sketches repeatedly deferred the payment for them, and finally confessed his inability to make it,—which he probably knew or intended beforehand. Then, with true metropolitan assurance, he begged of Hawthorne the use of certain unpublished manuscripts, which he still had in his possession. Hawthorne with unlimited contempt told the fellow that he might keep them, and then wrote to Bridge: