Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (840 page)

“Would you have me a damned author?” exclaims Oberon, in “The Devil in Manuscript,” [Footnote: See the Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] “to undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint praise bestowed against the giver's conscience!… An outlaw from the protection of the grave, — one whose ashes every careless foot might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death!” This, to be sure, is a heated statement, in the mouth of a young author who is about to cast his unpublished works into the fire; but the dread expressed here is by no means unfounded. Even the publication of Hawthorne's Note-Books has put it in the power of various writers of the day to assume an omniscience not altogether just, and far from acceptable. Why, then, should further risk of this be incurred, by issuing the present work?

It is precisely to put a limit to misconstructions, as well as to meet — however imperfectly — the desire of genuine appreciators, that it has been written. If this study for a portrait fulfils its aim, it will at least furnish an outline, fix a definite shape, within which whatever is observed by others may find its place with a truer effect and more fitting relation. The mistakes that have been made, indeed, are in no wise alarming ones; and it would be difficult to find any author who has been more carefully considered, on the whole, or with such generally fair conclusions, as Hawthorne. Still, if one sees even minor distortions current, it can do no harm to correct them. Besides, there has as yet been no thorough attempt at a consistent synthetic portraiture; and the differences of different critics' estimates need some common ground to meet and be harmonized upon. If this can be supplied, there will be less waste of time in future studies of the same subject.

It will be seen, therefore, that my book makes no pretension to the character of a Life. The wish of Hawthorne on this point would alone be enough, to prevent that. If such a work is to be undertaken, it should be by another hand, in which the right to set aside this wish is much more certainly vested than in mine. But I have thought that an earnest sympathy with the subject might sanction the present essay. Sympathy, after all, is the talisman which may preserve even the formal biographer from giving that injury to his theme just spoken of. And if the insight which guides me has any worth, it will present whatever material has already been made public with a selection and shaping which all researchers might not have time to bestow.

Still, I am quite alive to the difficulties of my task; and I am conscious that the work may to some appear supererogatory. Stricture and praise are, it will perhaps be said, equally impertinent to a fame so well established. Neither have I any rash hope of adding a single ray to the light of Hawthorne's high standing. But I do not fear the charge of presumption. Time, if not the present reader, will supply the right perspective and proportion.

On the ground of critical duty there is surely defence enough for such an attempt as the one now offered; the relative rank of Hawthorne, and other distinctions touching him, seem to call for a fuller discussion than has been given them. I hope to prove, however, that my aim is in no wise a partisan one. Criticism is appreciative estimation. It is inevitable that the judgments of competent and cultivated persons should flatly contradict each other, as well as those of incompetent persons; and this whether they are coeval or of different dates. At the last, it is in many respects matter of simple individual impression; and there will always be persons of high intelligence whom it will be impossible to make coincide with us entirely, touching even a single author. So that the best we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of our diverse admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way, everything good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become catholic.

Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it? But there are two ways in which he may express himself, — through speech and through silence, — both of them sacred alike. Which of these we will use on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too surely fraught with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of arbitrary prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that I have adopted only another kind of silence.

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II.

SALEM.

Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers, that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he died, — little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects; almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations, opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action, these changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of Parnell which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: “A poet while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much attention…. When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian splendor.” The bustle of American life certainly does away with “the dews of morning” very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the century. But there are resources for doing so. To begin with, we shall view Salem as it is. Vigorous and thriving still, the place has fortunately not drifted so far from its moorings of seventy years since as to take us out of our bearings, in considering its present aspect. Pace its quiet, thoroughfares awhile, and you will find them leading softly and easily into the past.

You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort. Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink, as it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex Street, or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come upon shy, ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses stand out here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold the whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient pumps like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear and sparkling little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into so many and such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now disappeared, having been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of all, by ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over the past and the present of the place. Looking down from here you behold the ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears a probable aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would have chosen for the standpoint of his “Sights from a Steeple”; and the two kinds of spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the Puritan aspiration that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond the gray and sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective seems to rise above it and to dominate the place with its dim, half-threatening blue; as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great measure, bringing first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many successive generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary privateering or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too, Hawthorne's name again is connected, as we shall presently notice. Then, quitting the brimming blue, our eyes return over the “flat, unvaried surface covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,” with its “irregularity which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame”; and retracing the line upon which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in “Main Street,” [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] we fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name. At its foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world full of witches. But here on the hill there is no special suggestion of the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the witches and their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering with their own barren little dwellings the three sides of the height facing the town. Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line. One small area at the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting place for execution, indeed! It looms up visible for many miles of lower country around; and as you stand upon the top, earth seems to fall away with such a fatal ease around it!

The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed with bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous “witch-pins.” These are the identical little instruments which the afflicted children drew from different parts of their dress, in the trial-room, declaring that some one of the accused had just caused them to be sharply inserted into their persons. The pins are kept in a small glass bottle, and are thin and rudely made; and as one looks at the curious, homely little relics, it is hard to know whether to laugh at the absurdly insignificant sight, or shudder at the thought of what deadly harm they worked in the hands of the bewitched. So, while one is hesitating, one gives the bottle back to the clerk, who locks it up speedily, and at the next instant is absorbed in the drawing up of some document; leaving the intruder free to pursue his search for antiquities elsewhere. But the monuments and remains of the past are nowhere large enough, in our American towns, to furnish the pilgrim a complete shelter and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion, or “Witch House,” to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark and grimy room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a solid scrap of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been fastened on to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a wasp's nest, — as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The descendants of the first settlers have with pious care preserved the remains of the First Church of Salem, and the plain little temple may still be seen, though hidden away in the rear of the solid, brick-built Essex Institute. Yet, after all, it is only the skeleton of the thing, the original framework set into a modern covering for protection, — the whole church being about as large as a small drawing-room only. Into this little space a few dumb and shrinking witnesses of the past have been huddled: the old communion-table, two ancient harpsichords, a single pew-door, a wooden samp-mortar, and a huge, half-ruinous loom; and some engraved portraits of ancient ministers hang upon the walls. When I visited the place, a party of young men and women were there, who hopelessly scattered any slight dust of revery that might have settled on me from the ancient beams, and sent the ghosts fleeing before their light laughter. The young women fingered the old harpsichords, and incontinently thrummed upon them; and one cried, “Play a waltz!” She was a pretty creature; and, as her gay tone mingled with the rattle of protesting strings in the worn-out instrument, one might easily have divined how dire a fate would have been hers, in the days when men not only believed in bewitchment, but made it punishable. Then a young man who had clung for guidance amid her spells to the little printed pamphlet that describes the church, read aloud from its pages, seriously: “'Nowhere else in this land may one find so ancient and worshipful a shrine. Within these walls, silent with the remembered presence of Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, Roger Williams, and their grave compeers, the very day seems haunted, and the sunshine falls but soberly in.'“

“O don't!” besought the siren, again. “We're not in a solemn state.”

And, whether it was the spell of her voice or not, I confess the sunshine did not seem to me either haunted or sober.

Thus, all through Salem, you encounter a perverse fate which will not let you be alone with the elusive spirit of the past. Yet, on reflection, why should it? This perverse fate is simply the life of to-day, which has certainly an equal right to the soil with that of our dreams and memories. And before long the conflict of past and present thus occasioned leads to a discovery.

In the first place, it transpires that the atmosphere is more favorable than at first appears for backward-reaching revery. The town holds its history in reverence, and a good many slight traces of antiquity, with the quiet respect maintained for them in the minds of the inhabitants, finally make a strong cumulative attack on the imagination. The very meagreness and minuteness of the physical witnesses to a former condition of things cease to discourage, and actually become an incitement more effective than bulkier relics might impart. The delicacy of suggestion lends a zest to your dream; and the sober streets open out before you into vistas of austere reminiscence. The first night that I passed in Salem, I heard a church-bell ringing loudly, and asked what it was. It was the nine-o'clock bell; and it had been appointed to ring thus every night, a hundred years ago or more. How it reverberated through my mind, till every brain-cell seemed like the empty chamber of a vanished year! Then, in the room where I slept, there was rich and ponderous furniture of the fashion of eld; the bed was draped and canopied with hangings that seemed full of spells and dreamery; and there was a mirror, tall, and swung between stately mahogany posts spreading their feet out on the floor, which recalled that fancy of Hawthorne's, in the tale of “Old Esther Dudley,” [Footnote: See also American Note-Books, Vol. I.; and the first chapter of The House of the Seven Gables.] about perished dames and grandees made to sweep in procession through “the inner world” of a glass. Such small matters as these engage the fancy, and lead it back through a systematic review of local history with unlooked-for nimbleness. Gradually the mind gets to roving among scenes imaged as if by memory, and bearing some strangely intimate relation to the actual scenes before one. The drift of clouds, the sifting of sudden light from the sky, acquire the import of historic changes of adversity and prosperity. The spires of Salem, seen one day through a semi-shrouding rain, appeared to loom up through the mist of centuries; and the real antiquity of sunlight shone out upon me, at other times, with cunning quietude, from the weather-worn wood of old, unpainted houses. Every hour was full of yesterdays. Something of primitive strangeness and adventure seemed to settle into my mood, and the air teemed with anticipation of a startling event; as if the deeds of the past were continually on the eve of returning. With all this, too, a certain gray shadow of unreality stole over everything.

Then one becomes aware that this frame of mind, produced by actual contact with Salem, is subtly akin to the mood from which so many of Hawthorne's visions were projected. A flickering semblance, perhaps, of what to him must have been a constant though subdued and dreamy flame summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but from this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the founders themselves.