Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman

by Henry A. Beers

Now and then, when he worked from observation, or utilized his own experiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobia is transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "The American Note Books," in which he tells of going out at night, with his neighbors, to drag for the body of a girl who had drowned herself in the Concord. Yet he did not refrain the touch of symbolism even here. There is a wound on Zenobia's breast, inflicted by the pole with which Hollingsworth is groping the river bottom.

And this is why one finds his "American Note Books" quite as interesting reading as his stories. Very remarkable things, these note books. They have puzzled Mr. James, who asks what the author would be at in them, and suggests that he is writing letters to himself, or practising his hand at description. They are not exactly a journal in-time; nor are they records of thought, like Emerson's ten volumes of journals. They are carefully composed, and are full of hints for plots, scenes, situations, characters, to be later worked up. In the three collections, "Twice-Told Tales," "Mosses from an Old Manse," and "The Snow Image," there are, in round numbers, a hundred tales and sketches; and Mr. Conway has declared that, in the number of his original plots, no modern author, save Browning, has equalled Hawthorne. Now, the germ of many, if not most, of these inventions may be found in some brief jotting—a paragraph, or a line or two—in "The American Note Books."

Yet it is not as literary material that these notes engage me most—by far the greater portion were never used,—but as records of observation and studies of life. I will even acknowledge a certain excitement when the diarist's wanderings lead him into my own neighborhood, however insignificant the result. Thus, in a letter from New Haven in 1830, he writes, "I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing that I was an Englishman." Mr. Lathrop thinks that it was on this trip through Connecticut that he hit upon his story, "The Seven Vagabonds," the scene of which is near Stamford, in the van of a travelling showman, where the seven wanderers take shelter during a thunderstorm. How quaintly true to the old provincial life of back-country New England are these figures—a life that survives to-day in out-of-the-way places. Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables," a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queer trades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, a salesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of a country newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of Cologne water and other essences." The Note Books tell us that, at North Adams in 1838, the author foregathered with a surgeon-dentist, who was also a preacher of the Baptist persuasion: and that, on the stage-coach between Worcester and Northampton, they took up an essence-vender who was peddling anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar, wormwood, opodeldoc, hair-oil, and Cologne water. Do you imagine that the essence-peddler is extinct? No, you may meet his covered wagon to-day on lonely roads between the hill-villages of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

It was while living that strange life of seclusion at Old Salem, compared with which Thoreau's hermitage at Walden was like the central roar of Broadway, that Hawthorne broke away now and then from his solitude, and went rambling off in search of contacts with real life. Here is another item that he fetched back from Connecticut under date of September, 1838: "In Connecticut and also sometimes in Berkshire, the villages are situated on the most elevated ground that can be found, so that they are visible for miles around. Litchfield is a remarkable instance, occupying a high plain, without the least shelter from the winds, and with almost as wide an expanse of view as from a mountain-top. The streets are very wide—two or three hundred feet at least—with wide green margins, and sometimes there is a wide green space between two road tracks.... The graveyard is on the slope, and at the foot of a swell, filled with old and new gravestones, some of red freestone, some of gray granite, most of them of white marble and one of cast iron with an inscription of raised letters." Do I not know that wind-swept hilltop, those grassy avenues? Do I not know that ancient graveyard, and what names are on its headstones? Yes, even as the heart knoweth its own bitterness.

As we go on in life, anniversaries become rather melancholy affairs. The turn of the year—the annual return of the day—birthdays or death-days or set festal occasions like Christmas or the New Year, bring reminders of loss and change. This is true of domestic anniversaries; while public literary celebrations, designed to recall to a forgetful generation the centenary or other dates in the lives of great writers, appear too often but milestones on the road to oblivion. Fifty years is too short a time to establish a literary immortality; and yet, if any American writer has already won the position of a classic, Hawthorne is that writer. Speaking in this country in 1883, Matthew Arnold said: "Hawthorne's literary talent is of the first order. His subjects are generally not to me subjects of the highest interest; but his literary talent is ... the finest, I think, which America has yet produced—finer, by much, than Emerson's." But how does the case stand to-day? I believe that Hawthorne's fame is secure as a whole, in spite of the fact that much of his work has begun to feel the disintegrating force of hostile criticism, and "the unimaginable touch of time."

For one thing, American fiction, for the past fifty years, has been taking a direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names that will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at the accepted estimates of Hawthorne. A very damaging bit of dissection is the recent essay by Mr. W. C. Brownell, one of the most acute and unsparingly analytic of American critics. It is full of cruelly clever things: for example, "Zenobia and Miriam linger in one's memory rather as brunettes than as women." And again, à propos of Roger Chillingworth in "The Scarlet Letter,"—"His characters are not creations, but expedients." I admire these sayings; but they seem to me, like most epigrams, brilliant statements of half-truths. In general, Mr. Brownell's thesis is that Hawthorne was spoiled by allegory: that he abused his naturally rare gift of imagination by declining to grapple with reality, which is the proper material for the imagination, but allowing his fancy—an inferior faculty—to play with dreams and symbols; and that consequently he has left but one masterpiece.

This is an old complaint. Long ago, Edgar Poe, who did not live to read "The Scarlet Letter," but who wrote a favorable review of "The Twice-Told Tales," advised the author to give up allegory. In 1880, Mr. Henry James wrote a life of Hawthorne for the English Men of Letters series. This was addressed chiefly to the English public and was thought in this country to be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in its patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The "American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who writes about Hawthorne. Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography, it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered it; but, in effect, cordially appreciative. He touches, however, on this same point, of the effect on Hawthorne's genius of his allegorizing habit. "Hawthorne," says Mr. James, "was not in the least a realist—he was not, to my mind, enough of one." The biographer allows him a liberal share of imagination, but adds that most of his short tales are more fanciful than imaginative. "Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very different story. I frankly confess that it has never seemed to me a first-rate literary form. It is apt to spoil two good things—a story and a moral."

Except in that capital satire, "The Celestial Railroad," an ironical application of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorne seldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definite symbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persists in the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures and incidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the way in which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents the moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful," for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair or the bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. It is characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether this symbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, or what it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would have added the botanical name.

"Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those "insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not always of much moment." The suggestion of this tale we find in a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne in "The American Note Books" for 1837: "A story there passeth of an Indian King that sent unto Alexander a fair woman fed with aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally to destroy him." Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint of psychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed to fascinate Hawthorne. He let his imagination dwell upon it, and gradually evolved the story of a physician who made his own daughter the victim of a scientific experiment. In this tale, Mr. Brownell thinks, the narrative has no significance apart from the moral; and yet the moral is quite lost sight of in the development of the narrative, which might have been more attractive if told simply as a fairy tale. This is quite representative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moral to "Rappacini's Daughter." But there are a number of parallels and applications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstain from making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded of Mithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons by their daily employment. The doctor's theory, that every disease can be cured by the use of the appropriate poison, suggests the aconite and belladonna of the homeopathists and their motto, similia similibus curantur. Again we think of Holmes's novel "Elsie Venner," of the girl impregnated with the venom of the rattlesnake, whose life ended when the serpent nature died out of her; just as Beatrice, in Hawthorne's story, is killed by the powerful antidote which slays the poison. A very obvious incidental reflection is the cruelty of science, sacrificing its best loved object to its curiosity. And may we not turn the whole tale into a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnatural rearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfitting the victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous?