Nathaniel Hawthorne

by George Edward Woodberry

II.

THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES.

In the summer of 1825 Hawthorne returned to Salem, going back to the old house on Herbert Street,—the home of his childhood, where his mother, disregarding his boyish dissuasions, had again taken up her abode three years before. He occupied a room on the second floor in the southwest sunshine under the eaves, looking out on the business of the wharf-streets; and in it he spent the next twelve years, a period which remained in his memory as an unbroken tract of time preserving a peculiar character. The way of his life knew little variation from the beginning to the end. He lived in an intellectual solitude deepened by the fact that it was only an inner cell of an outward seclusion almost as complete, for the house had the habits of a hermitage. His mother, after nearly a score of years of widowhood, still maintained her separation even from her home world; she is said to have seen none of her husband's relatives and few of her own, and a visitor must have been a venturesome person. The custom of living apart spread through the household. The elder sister, Elizabeth, who was of a strong and active mind capable of understanding and sympathizing with her brother, and the younger sister, Louisa, who was more like other people, stayed in their rooms. The meals of the family, even, which usually go on when everything else fails in the common life of house-mates, had an uncertain and variable element in their conduct, as was not unnatural where the mother never came to the table. The recluse habits of all doubtless increased with indulgence, and after a while Hawthorne himself, who was plainly the centre of interest there, fell into the common ways of isolation. "He had little communication," writes Mr. Lathrop, "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, as might be imagined from the picture which Mr. Fields draws of the young author reciting his new productions to his listening family; though, when they met, he sometimes read older literature to them. 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!'" He seldom went out by day, unless for long excursions in the country; an early sea bath on summer mornings and a dark walk after supper, longer in the warm weather, shorter in the winter season, were habitual, and a bowl of thick chocolate with bread crumbed into it, or a plate of fruit, on his return prepared him for the night's work. Study in the morning, composition in the afternoon, and reading in the evening, are described as his routine, but it is unlikely that any such regularity ruled where times and seasons were so much at his own command. He had no visitors and made no friends; hardly twenty persons in the town, he thought, were aware of his existence; but he brought home hundreds of volumes from the Salem Athenaeum, and knew the paths of the woods and pastures and the way along the beaches and rocky points, and he had the stuff of his fantasy with which to occupy himself when nature and books failed to satisfy him. At first there must have been great pleasure in being at home, for he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer and his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind, to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances: but as youth passed and manhood came, and yet fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence became insufficient for him,—it grew burdensome as it showed barren, and depression set in upon him like a chill and obscure fog over the marshes where he walked. This, however, year dragging after year, was a slow process; and the kind of life he led, its gray and deadening monotone, sympathetic though it was with his temperament, was seen by him better in retrospect than in its own time.

It is singular that Hawthorne should have undertaken to live by his pen, or been allowed to do so by his friends, as a practical way of life, but he was indulged at home, the young lord of the family. "We were in those days," says Elizabeth, "almost absolutely obedient to him." Occasionally he thought of going into his uncle's counting-room and so obtaining a business and place in the world, but he never took this step. He probably drifted, more or less, into authorship, partly through a dilatory reluctance to do anything else, and partly led on by the hope of a success with some one of his tales which would justify him.

The first attempts he made in the craft are involved in some obscurity. He may have merely carried over from college days what he then had in hand. At all events his sister Elizabeth, from whom the information comes in respect to these details, remembered a little collection which he had prepared for publication with the title "Seven Tales of my Native Land," and she says that she read it in the summer of 1825; in that case these stories must have been written at college, but her memory may have erred. She gives the names of two of them as "Alice Doane" and "Susan Grey," and adds that he told her, while the volume was still in the stage of being offered to publishers, that he would first "write a story which would make a smaller book, and get it published immediately if possible, before the arrangements for bringing out the 'Tales' were completed." This was presumably "Fanshawe," which may also have been the novel she recollected his writing to her about while at college.

"Fanshawe" [Footnote: Fanshawe. A Tale. Boston: Marsh & Capen, 362 Washington St. Press of Putnam and Hunt, 1828. 12mo. Pp. 141.] was published in 1828 by Marsh and Capen, at Boston, without the author's name but at his expense, one hundred dollars being the sum paid; it failed, and Hawthorne looked on it with so much subsequent displeasure that he called in all the copies he could find and destroyed them, and thus nearly succeeded in sinking the book in oblivion, but the few copies which survived secured its republication after his death. The novel is brief, with a melodramatic plot, well-marked scenes, and strongly contrasted character; the style flows on pleasantly; but the book is without distinction. Like many a just graduated collegian, Hawthorne had recourse to his academic experience in lieu of anything else, and in the setting of the story and some of its delineation of character Longfellow recognized the strong suggestion of Bowdoin days; in the same way the hero, Fanshawe, borrowed something from Hawthorne's own temperament. The figure of the villain, too, adumbrates, though faintly, the type which engaged Hawthorne's mind in later years. "Fanshawe" as a whole in all its scenes, whether in the house of the old President, the tavern, the hut, or the outdoor encounters of the lovers and rivals, is strongly reminiscent of Scott, the management being entirely in his manner; its low-life tragedy, its romantic scenery, and its bookish humor, as well as the characterization in general, are also from Scott; in fact, notwithstanding what Hawthorne had taken from his own observation and feelings, this provincial sketch, for it is no more, is a Scott story, done with a young man's clever mastery of the manner, but weak internally in plot, character, and dramatic reality. It is as destitute of any brilliant markings of his genius as his undergraduate life itself had been, and is important only as showing the serious care with which he undertook the task of authorship. It is the only relic, except the shadowy "Seven Tales," of his literary work in the first three years after leaving college. The "Tales" he is said to have burned; no better publisher appearing, a young Salem printer, Ferdinand Andrews, undertook to bring them out, but as he delayed the matter through lack of capital, Hawthorne, growing impatient and exasperated, recalled the manuscript and destroyed it.

The example of Scott was, perhaps, the potent influence in fixing Hawthorne's attention on a definite object, and incited him to seek in the history of his own country, and especially in the colonial tradition of New England, which was so near at hand, the field of fiction. He stored his mind, certainly, with the story of his own people during the two centuries since the settlement, and prepared himself to describe its stirring events and striking characters under the veil of imaginative history. The nature of his reading shows that this was a conscious aim; and, besides, it was an opinion, loudly proclaimed and widely shared in that decade, that American writers should look to their own country for their themes; Cooper was doing so in fiction, and Longfellow felt this predilection in his choice of subject for verse. Salem was a true centre of the old times; and a young imagination in that town and neighborhood, already disposed to writing prose romance, would feel the charm of historical association and naturally catch impulse from the past, especially if, as in the case of Hawthorne, the history of his ancestors was inwoven with its good and evil. It is not surprising therefore that, as Hawthorne had begun, though unsuccessfully, with tales of his native land, he should continue to work the vein; and, to adopt what seems to be a reasonable inference, he now gathered from his materials a new series which he knew as "Provincial Tales," in which it remains doubtful how much of the old survived, for the burnt manuscripts of youth have something of the phoenix in their ashes.

The first trace of these is "The Young Provincial," an anonymous piece, [Footnote: It is unquestionable that Hawthorne contributed to annuals and periodicals anonymous tales and sketches that he never claimed, as he states in the preface to Twice-Told Tales and in a letter to Fields in which he beseeches him not to revive them. The identification of such work, however, is beset with much temptation to find a tale genuine, if it can be plausibly so represented, and in few cases can the proof be conclusive. Mr. F. B. Sanborn presents the fullest list, all from The Token, which he accepts as genuine, as follows: The Adventures of a Raindrop, 1828, The Young Provincial, 1830, The Haunted Quack and The New England Village, 1831, My Wife's Novel, 1832, The Bald Eagle, 1833, The Modern Job, or The Philosopher's Stone, 1834. The correspondence with Goodrich does not indicate that Hawthorne contributed to The Token before the issue for 1831. The Young Provincial seems to be the same sort of a tale as The Downer's Banner, as has been intimated above: yet it would, perhaps, be more readily accepted, together with The Haunted Quack and The Modern Job. The latest edition of Hawthorne includes all of these tales, given above, except the first and last, but its editor does not vouch for their authenticity.] ascribed to him on internal evidence and contributed to "The Token," an annual published at Boston, for its issue of 1830. The story relates the adventures of a youthful Revolutionary soldier who had handed down to his descendants a "grandfather's gun;" it tells of Bunker Hill, of imprisonment at Halifax and of escape, and it may be from Hawthorne's pen. It must have been written early in 1829, if not before, and it is noticed in the review of "The Token" in Willis's Boston periodical, "The American Monthly Magazine" for September, 1829, where it is described as a "pleasing story, told quite inartificially," and is illustrated by a brief extract. It may not be irrelevant to observe that a similar "provincial tale" appeared in this number of the magazine, "The Downer's Banner," and if it was not by the same youthful author, it shows that the same kind of subject had singularly interested two writers in that neighborhood. It is, however, only in "The Token" that Hawthorne can be further traced.

The editor of this annual, which was intended as a literary gift-book for Christmas, was S. G. Goodrich, famous as "Peter Parley" in after days, and to him belongs the honor of being Hawthorne's first literary friend, and he always remained a faithful one. He was a promoter of publishers' enterprises, in that part of the field of literature which is distinctly pervaded with business; and in it he was successful, as the millions of the Peter Parley books abundantly attest. At this time he was sincerely interested, it must be believed, in furthering the interests of American writers and artists, according to his lights and means, and Griswold, who was a good judge, said of him, "It is questionable whether any other person has done as much to improve the style of the book manufacture or to promote the arts of engraving." With such ambitions he had begun, in 1828, the issue of the annual, which is now best remembered, and which in its own day longest survived the changes of public taste. The nature of these volumes, of which there were many in different publishing centres, is well described by a writer in Willis's "Magazine" for 1829: "A few years ago, an elegant taste, joined, perhaps, to a love of 'filthy lucre,' induced some English publishers to give to the world the first specimens of those souvenirs and 'Forget Me Nots' which are now so common through our country. How beautiful they were at their first appearance, the eagerness with which they were read will testify. How rapid was their increase, may be seen by referring to the counters of every book-store. America, ready and willing as she ever is to acknowledge the excellence, and imitate the example of the parent country in every good thing, has imitated and improved upon the plan. We can now boast of a species of literature, which is conducted almost wholly by young men, and which has merited the affection, because it has developed the power of our native genius. Those who have made their first essays in literature, through the medium of the pages of a Souvenir, will gain confidence in proportion as they have tested their own strength. The American annuals do not profess to be the works of the most finished or most accomplished writers of this country. They should not be taken as specimens of what our literature is, but as indications of what it may one day be. They are not the matured fruits, but the bright promise and blossoming of genius; and thus far they have been an honor to the taste and talent of American writers, and monuments of the swift progress of our artists towards excellence in their profession."

Such was the contemporary view of the annuals, and it is justified, perhaps, by the fact that Longfellow, for example, was then contributing to the "Atlantic Souvenir" of Philadelphia, the first of the brood, and that Hawthorne found in "The Token" the principal opportunity to obtain a hearing for himself in his first productive years.