Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860

by Henrietta Christian Wright

In this same letter, which forms the dedication to one of his books, he adds that it is this friend, if any one, who is responsible for his becoming a writer, as it was here, in the shadow of the tall pines which sheltered Bowdoin College, that the first prophecy concerning his destiny was made. He was to be a writer of fiction, the friend said, little dreaming of the honors that were to crown one of the great novelists of the world.

After leaving Bowdoin Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the next twelve years of his life. Here he produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals and won for him a narrow reputation. But the years which a man usually devotes to his best work were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of a great future, for good 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 afterward collected and published under the title Twice-Told Tales and The Snow Image. Full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, they were the best imaginative work yet produced in America, but in speaking of them Hawthorne himself says that in this result of twelve years there is little to show for its thought and industry.

But the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance. Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of 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 was exactly like a large family bound together by mutual interests, the acts of each life being regarded as affecting the whole community. Hawthorne has preserved this 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 given new life. 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. With his steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock at his side he had left the pleasant New-England farm lands and was found only in the court-houses, where his deeds were recorded. Hawthorne brought him back from the past, set him in the midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and showed him a sufferer for conscience' sake.

This first romance, published under the title The Scarlet Letter, revealed to Hawthorne himself, as well as to the world outside, the transcendent power of his genius. Hawthorne, who was despondent of the little popularity of his other books, told the publisher who saw the first sketch of The Scarlet Letter, that he did not know whether the story was very good or very bad. The publisher, however, at once perceived its worth and brought it out one year from that time, and the public saw that it had been entertaining a genius unawares. Hawthorne's next book, The House of the Seven Gables, is a story of the New England of his own day. A clever critic has called it an impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New-England town. Through its pages flit quaint contrasting figures that one might find in New England and nowhere else. The old spinster of ancient family, obliged to open a toy and gingerbread shop, but never forgetting the time when the house with seven gables was a mansion of limitless hospitality, is a pathetic picture of disappointed hope and broken-down fortune. So is her brother, who was falsely imprisoned for twenty years, and who in his old age must lean upon his sister for support; and the other characters are equally true to the life that has almost disappeared 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 and Tanglewood Tales. In The Wonder Book Hawthorne writes as if he were a child himself, so simple is the charm that he weaves around these old, old tales. Not content with the Greek myths, he created little incidents and impossible characters that glance in and out with elfin grace. One feels that these were the very stories that were told by the centaurs, fauns, and satyrs themselves in the shadows of the old Attic 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 shining metal. We learn, 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. Every child who reads The Wonder Book doubts not that Hawthorne had hobnobbed many a moonlit night with Pan and Bacchus in their vine-covered grottos by the riverside. This dainty, ethereal touch appears in all his work for children.

A like quality gives distinction to his fourth great novel, which deals with a man supposed to be a descendant of the old fauns. This creation, named Donatello, from his resemblance to the celebrated statue of the Marble Faun, is not wholly human, although he has human interests and feeling. Hawthorne makes Donatello ashamed of his pointed ears, though his spirit is as wild and untamed as that of his rude ancestors. In this book there is a description of a scene where Count Donatello joins in a peasant dance around a public fountain. And so vividly is his half-human nature here brought out that Hawthorne seems to have witnessed somewhere the mad revels of the veritable fauns and satyrs in the days of their life upon the earth. Throughout this story Hawthorne shows the same subtle sympathy with uncommon natures, the mystery of such souls having the same fascination for him that the secrets of the earth and air have for the scientist and philosopher.

The book coming between The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun is called The Blithedale Romance. It is in part the record of a period of Hawthorne's life when he joined a community which hoped to improve the world by combining healthy manual labor with intellectual pursuits, and proving that self-interest and all differences in rank must be hurtful to the commonwealth. This little society lived in a suburb of Boston, and called their association Brook Farm. Each member performed daily some manual labor on the farm or in the house, hours being set aside for study. Here Hawthorne ploughed the fields and joined in the amusements, or sat apart while the rest talked about art and literature, danced, sang, or read Shakespeare aloud. Some of the cleverest men and women of New England joined 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.

These serious-minded men and women, who tried to solve a great problem by leading the lives of Arcadian shepherds, at length dispersed, each one going back to the world and working on as bravely as if the experiment had been a great success. The experiences of Brook Farm were shadowed forth in The Blithedale Romance, although it was not a literal narrative.

Immediately after this Hawthorne was married and went to live in 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 one of the greatest American men 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 his old friend and schoolmate, President Pierce, appointed Hawthorne American Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad seven years, spending the last four on the Continent, some transcriptions of his experience being found in the celebrated Marble Faun and in several volumes of Note-Books. The Marble Faun, published in Europe under the title Transformation, was written in Rome, and was partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa which he occupied near Florence. 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 in 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, which he did by making the villa the old family castle of Donatello, although the scene of the story is laid in Rome.