Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Child.—Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) was the daughter of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she was principal of a young ladies’ school for half a century. Her duties as a teacher did not prevent her from becoming a voluminous novelist. Her first story was “A New England Tale” (1822), which at once found favour. “Redwood” (1824) was translated into three or four Continental languages; on the title-page of the French translation, the novel was ascribed to Fenimore Cooper. Other novels which achieved great popularity for their faithful portraiture of early and contemporary New England life were “Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachusetts” (1827), “Clarence, a Tale of Our Own Times” (1830), “The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America” (1835), and “Married or Single” (1857). While Miss Sedgwick never rises to the height of absorbing interest, she is rarely dull, and some of her women, if we allow for the difference in time, do not suffer in comparison with those of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman. Her descriptions of simple country life were superior to any that had hitherto appeared. Mrs. Child, born Lydia Maria Francis (1802–1880), who likewise spent her life in Massachusetts, began writing early, producing her first novel, “Hobomok,” in 1824 and her second, “The Rebels,” a year later. The former deals with Salem life in colonial times; the latter is a story of the Revolution, describing the sack of Governor Hutchinson’s house and the Boston massacre. Although they give true pictures of early Puritan customs, they are not powerful as fiction. In 1836 she essayed a more ambitious flight in “Philothea,” a romance of the days of Pericles, which, in spite of its stilted rhetoric, reveals some imaginative power and deserves mention as a pioneer attempt to interpret Greek life to America.
Timothy Flint.—A voluminous writer and in his day a well-known figure was Timothy Flint (1780–1840), a native of Reading, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1800. Becoming a Congregational minister, in 1815, in search for health, he crossed the Alleghany Mountains with his family, and after travelling in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, became a missionary, first at St. Charles, Missouri, and then in Arkansas. The success of his “Recollections of the Last Ten Years” (1826) led him to publish a novel, “Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot” (1826), dealing with adventures with the Comanche Indians, and with the Mexican struggle of 1821, which resulted in the fall of Iturbide. The story was crude and improbable, but some of its descriptions found favour. “Arthur Clenning,” his second novel, published in 1828, includes a shipwreck in the Southern Ocean, after which the hero and heroine arrive in New Holland and later settle in Illinois. He wrote some other novels, but none has survived. For a time (1833), Flint edited The Knickerbocker; and in 1835 he contributed some “Sketches of the Literature of the United States” to the London Athenæum.
William Austin (1788–1841) a lawyer of Charlestown, Massachusetts, deserves to be noticed for the remarkable story of “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” which he wrote for The New England Galaxy (1827–8; reprinted in “The Boston Book,” 1841, and in other books and papers). The theme is the same as that of “The Wandering Jew.” While “originating in the inventive genius of its author,” as Joseph Buckingham says of it, it doubtless owed something also to German romance.
Nathaniel Hawthorne.—The greatest genius among American writers of romance, by many held to be the supreme literary artist of America, was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was peculiarly a product of New England and frankly admitted that New England was quite as large a lump of earth as his heart could take in. His ancestor, William Hathorne, came to the New World in 1630, in the ship with John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, and became a leader in the colony. Hathorne’s son John was one of the judges in the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1691. The grandfather and father of Nathaniel Hawthorne were both sea-captains. The novelist was born at Salem on July 4, 1804. Four years later, his father, never apparently a robust man, died at Surinam, and the widowed mother began to live in a deep seclusion which could not fail to have its effect upon the quick sensibilities of her son. In 1818, the family removed to Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine, where his grandfather Manning owned large tracts of land. Hawthorne’s boyhood environment, therefore, was not widely different from that of Fenimore Cooper. But he was more of a reader than Cooper. As a boy, he became familiar with Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Clarendon, Froissart, Rousseau, and Godwin. Entering Bowdoin College, he was graduated in 1825 in the class with Longfellow. While he did not distinguish himself in his studies, he became a respectable Latin and English scholar; and he devoted much time to reading in the little library of the Athenæan Society. At graduation, he ranked eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight. Meanwhile his family had returned to Salem, and thither Hawthorne now went, to begin a period of literary apprenticeship. It was seemingly a bold undertaking to attempt to live by his pen; however, he seems to have drifted into the attempt through aversion to a more active life. In 1828, he published anonymously a novel called “Fanshawe,” dealing with some of his college experiences and recalling vaguely the methods of Scott. Some characters, it must be said, are vigorously conceived, and here and there the volume gave promise of the author’s future skill; but there is about the whole a suggestion of unreality, not to say crudeness. The book found, as it deserved, an indifferent public, and Hawthorne subsequently recalled as many copies as he could procure and burned them. For several years, he continued to live in seclusion, contributing stories and sketches to various annuals and periodicals. For the stories he got $35 each. In March, 1837, having been encouraged by his friend Horatio Bridge, he published the first volume to appear with his name, “Twice-Told Tales.” They were eighteen in number, being only half of the stories he is known to have printed up to this time. The “Tales” gave Hawthorne a considerable reputation; Longfellow praised it in The North American Review, then influential in literary affairs. Again helped by his friends, in January, 1839, Hawthorne assumed the position of weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom-House. At first, the novelty of contact with the practical world interested him; but he soon found that his work, always monotonous, left him no time or strength for writing, and he was not sorry to lose his post when the Whigs came into power in 1841. For a few months, he tried life at Brook Farm, thinking that in this new community he should find a suitable way of combining manual and intellectual labour; but the work was too hard, and he had too little opportunity for writing. Accordingly in 1842 he left the Farm, married Miss Sophia A. Peabody, to whom he had been engaged for four years, and settled at the Old Manse, an idyllic retreat at Concord, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, he had published (1841) two volumes of historical tales for young people, “Grandfather’s Chair” and “Famous Old People”; and to these he now added a third series, “The Liberty Tree,” as well as a second series of “Twice-Told Tales” and a volume of “Biographical Stories for Children” (1842). Of these, none except the “Tales” rises much above the level of respectable writing to sell. In the next four years, Hawthorne wrote for periodicals some eighteen more tales, which, together with a number of earlier uncollected stories, he republished in 1846 as “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Hawthorne now returned to his native Salem as surveyor of customs (1846–9), and proved an able administrator of the office. Another period of literary barrenness ensued, but in 1847 he resumed his writing and produced a few tales. The idea of a longer romance had come to him, and after his dismissal from office in 1849 he found the leisure necessary for writing “The Scarlet Letter.” Once more, then, he exchanged the world of affairs for that realm of the imagination where he was so much more at home. Working resolutely amid sickness and poverty, he at length completed the splendid romance, the publication of which distinguishes the year 1850 in American letters as Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Wordsworth’s “Prelude” do in English poetry. Hawthorne had now entered upon a period of great productivity. In the next two years he published “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), “A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys” (1851), “The Snow Image and Other Tales” (1851), “Tanglewood Tales,” (1852), “The Blithedale Romance” (1852), a tale based on his Brook Farm life, and a campaign “Life of Franklin Pierce,” his college friend, now a candidate for the Presidency. Promptly after his election, President Pierce made Hawthorne consul at Liverpool, an office which he held from July, 1853, until September, 1857. Though rich in experience and in fruitful observation, his life in England was outwardly quiet and uneventful. The years 1857–9 the Hawthornes spent in Italy, where they mingled somewhat more with the world than had been their wont. The fruit of the Italian life was “The Marble Faun” (1860), written in Italy and at Redcar, on the shore of the North Sea, and published in England as “Transformation.” Returning to America in 1860, Hawthorne passed the next four years at the Wayside, Concord. In 1863 he contributed “Our Old Home” to The Atlantic Monthly and began “The Dolliver Romance,” which he was destined not to finish. He died suddenly on May 18, 1864, at Plymouth, N. H., while on a journey to the New Hampshire lakes in search of health.
His literary remains must be at least mentioned. In 1868 appeared “Passages from American Note-Books”; in 1870, “Passages from English Note-Books”; and in 1871, “Passages from French and Italian Note-Books.” These volumes throw much light on Hawthorne’s favourite haunts and wandering propensities, as well as his eagerness for minute observation. “Septimius Felton, or, The Elixir of Life” (1871) was to be a story, placed in Revolutionary times, of a man who sought earthly immortality. The theme was a powerful one; but Hawthorne’s strength was evidently exhausted, and the story must be pronounced a failure. The last works to appear were “The Dolliver Romance” (1876) and “Doctor Grimshaw’s Secret,” which are fragmentary and ineffective studies of the same theme as “Septimius Felton.” Their failure, in all probability, was due not only to the waning of Hawthorne’s powers but also to the difficulties attending the theme itself.
Hawthorne was one of the shyest of men. Kenyon, in “The Marble Faun,” says: “Between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf”; such a gulf at any rate separated Kenyon’s creator from the rest of mankind. Always fond of solitude, he lived in a world of his own, apart from humankind; longing at times for more familiar converse with men, but never quite successful in establishing cordial relations (outside of his own family) with any but a few friends. Possessed of an exquisitely sensitive nature, he made no effort to conceal the pleasure which honest praise afforded him; and he was easily rebuffed by the coolness of his public. Perhaps the bane of his life was self-distrust. Each of his books when first written seemed to him well-nigh worthless. James T. Fields has told of the difficulty with which he extracted from Hawthorne the first manuscript of “The Scarlet Letter.” “Thus it is with winged horses,” says Hawthorne in “The Chimæra,” “and with such wild and solitary creatures. If you can catch and overcome them, it is the surest way to win their love.” Such was the devotion with which Hawthorne repaid those who had “captured” him that their confident encouragement greatly strengthened and inspired him. As might be supposed, however, with the world at large he was lacking in sympathy. His point of view was fixed; he could not see the world with the eyes of another. This helps to account for the effect of harshness and asperity which his chapter on “The Custom House” in “The Scarlet Letter” had upon the people of Salem whom he there described; and for the similar effect of the descriptions of English life in “Our Old Home” upon the English people in general. As Professor Woodberry remarks, too, he had “the critical spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural attendant, the habit of speaking his mind.” He had, moreover, deeply rooted prejudices and a natural hatred of shams. He disliked literary friendships. While in England, for example, he remained a stranger to the brilliant literary set in London where he might have been warmly welcomed. He saw Tennyson once in Manchester, but made no effort to meet the poet. Another of his aversions concerned the manifestations of spiritualism—rappings, tipping of tables, spirit writing, and the like; he was a good hater of shams in general.
To his family, Hawthorne was always deeply devoted. When his mother died, although there had always been “a sort of coldness of intercourse” between them, he spoke of the time as the darkest hour he had ever lived through. His wife worshipped him, and the attitude of his children is sufficiently indicated by the words of his son Julian: “In my thought of him he has a quality not to be described; that is associated with the early impressions which make the name of home beautiful; with a child’s delight in the glory of nature; with a boy’s aspirations towards a pure and generous career; with intimate conceptions of truth, bravery, and simplicity.”
So much for the man; what now, shall be said of the artist? In the first place, as he was the peculiar product of New England Puritanism, so his genius was in a sense confined to setting forth New England and the problems of New England Calvinism. Even when he lays the scene of his tale in Rome, there is the same interest in the working out of the consequences of sin, and part of the characters are Americans living in the Eternal City. Hawthorne still stands alone in having given supreme literary expression to that earnest and virile if narrow and at times misguided life of early New England; its pathos, its tragedy, its legacy to modern times. Then it must be observed that in doing this he places himself in the ranks of the great masters in deducing from the individual the general experience; from the particular the universal moral life. In his earlier years he delighted in allegory, of which the “Tales” and the “Mosses” are full; and he was always fond of symbolism. Lady Eleanore’s mantle, for example, is a symbol of pride; the scarlet letter is a symbol of sin; no less is Donatello a symbol, a type of universal innocence tasting of the knowledge of good and evil—the missing link, as it were, in the evolution of moral instincts. Hawthorne constantly describes the unseen in terms of the seen, the spiritual world by means of the every day, material world.
The “Tales” have been most elaborately characterised by Professor Woodberry in his admirable biography.[7] Many of them are intrinsically slight—descriptions of the common events of daily life, always somewhat moralised, and to an increasing extent as the author grew older. In some the fancy has free rein, as in “The Seven Vagabonds” and “The Great Stone Face.” In “Tales of the Province House” and many others Hawthorne skilfully wove threads of colonial history with the rich woof of his imagination to produce a splendid romantic pageant. Sometimes he treats of individuals, as in “David Swan” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; often he studies the group, or the crowd, as in the “The Celestial Railroad,” “The Christmas Banquet,” “The Procession of Life.” In all, he studies the moral life and tries to understand the significance of some phase of universal human experience.
“The Scarlet Letter” has been called by Mr. James “the most distinctive piece of prose fiction that was to spring from American soil.” It is a grim tragedy, in which the consequences of sin are depicted with a simplicity, a steady movement, and a relentlessness characteristic of the tragedies of Euripides. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale living agonised lives which moved steadily towards the day of expiatory shame; Roger Chilingworth, outwardly the wise, benevolent physician, inwardly the ghastly demon gloating over his victim—these figures indeed move us to pity and fear, and give us a new sense of the depth and mystery of our human life, which no man liveth to himself alone, but which must be interpreted as the expression and result of racial upstriving through myriads of years. “The Scarlet Letter” is indeed, as Mr. W. C. Brownell says,[8] the Puritan “Faust”; and many will doubtless agree with him in calling it “our one prose masterpiece.”