A trait of Hawthorne’s character comes out in the following incident. He proposed to dedicate Our Old Home to Franklin Pierce. This was in 1863. The publishers, it is said, were filled with ‘consternation and distress.’ The ex-president’s name was not one to conjure with. Hawthorne explained his position: ‘I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter.... If Pierce is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do.... As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I see fit to give it, or let it alone.’
Friendship sometimes has in it an element of perversity, and has been known to delight in petty martyrdom. There was nothing of this in Hawthorne. All he notes is that friendship is not a commodity.
III
THE WRITER
Hawthorne knew the secret of producing magical effects by quiet means. He had perfect command of the materials by which are rendered the half tones, the delicate shadings, the mysterious opalescent hues of beautiful prose. Yet his manner is unostentatious and his vocabulary simple. There are writers in whose work the feeling excited of pleasurable surprise can be traced to a particular word glittering like a diamond or a sapphire. With Hawthorne the effects are elusive, not always to be apprehended at the moment.
The beauty of his prose is best explained by the beauty of the ideas; the natural phrasing serves but to define it, as physical loveliness may be accentuated by simplicity of dress. Hawthorne’s thoughts, being exquisite in themselves, make ornament superfluous.
There is no trace of effort in his writing. The Scarlet Letter, for example, reads as if it had come ‘like a breath of inspiration.’ Such directness and precision of touch must always be a source of wonder and delight, not alone to writers who fumble their sentences but to skilled literary craftsmen as well. In Henry James’s admirable story ‘The Death of the Lion’[41] is a paragraph which suggests Hawthorne’s manner. The regal way in which the famous novelist, Neil Paraday, adds perfect sentence to perfect sentence is altogether like Hawthorne.
Economy of phrase is one of his virtues. In Hawthorne there are no wasted or superfluous sentences, not even a word in excess. Something inexorably logical enters into his work, as in the poetic art. This economy extends to his books as a whole. For stories so rich in ideas, so heavy with suggestion, they are short rather than long. Yet the movement is always leisurely. There is no haste or eagerness. A few strokes of the pen, made with restful deliberation, serve to carry the reader into the very heart of a tragedy. He cannot but admire the superb strength which with so little visible effort could bring him so far.
IV
THE SHORT STORIES TWICE-TOLD TALES, MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE, THE SNOW-IMAGE
Hawthorne’s real entrance into literature dates from the publication of the Twice-Told Tales, a series of harmoniously framed narratives which have maintained their rank unmoved by the capriciousness of popular taste.
The sources are in part colonial history or historical legend and tradition. ‘The Gray Champion’ is an incident of the tyranny of Andros. ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount’ celebrates the madcap revelries of the first settlers at Wollaston. In ‘Endicott and the Red Cross’ Hawthorne records a dramatic incident in the history of his native town, and introduces, by the way, a motive that later was to develop into his masterpiece.