Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (846 page)

More than once has Nathaniel Hawthorne touched the delicate fibres of the heart that thrill again in this memorial grief of his mother's; and, incongruous as is the connection of the following passage out of one of the Twice-Told Tales, it is not hard to trace the origin of the sensibility and insight which prompted it: “It is more probably the fact,” so it runs, “that while men are able to reflect upon their lost companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other hand, are
conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed, whithersoever he has gone
” [Footnote: “drippings with a Chisel,” in Vol. II. of the Twice-Told Tales.] But the most perfect example of his sympathy with this sorrow of widowhood is that brief, concentrated, and seemingly slight tale, “The Wives of the Dead,” [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] than which I know of nothing more touching and true, more exquisitely proportioned and dramatically wrought out among all English tales of the same scope and length. It pictures the emotions of “two young and comely women,” the “recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman; and two successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic.” The action occupies the night after the news, and turns upon the fact that each sister is roused, unknown to the other, at different hours, to be told that the report about her husband is false. One cannot give its beauty without the whole, more than one can separate the dewdrop from the morning-glory without losing the effect they make together. It is a complete presentment, in little, of all that dwells in widowhood. One sentence I may remind the reader of, nevertheless: “Her face was turned partly inward to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake, had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within it.” Even as his widowed mother's face looked, to the true-souled boy, when they dwelt there together in the forest of pines, beside the placid lake!

Yet clear and searching as must then have been his perceptions, he had not always formulated them or made them his chief concern. On May 16, 1819 (the first spring after coming to the new abode), he writes to his uncle Robert that “we are all very well”; and “the grass and some of the trees look very green, the roads are very good, there is no snow on Lymington mountains. The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted…. I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brooke. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again.” Happy boy! he thinks he has found his vocation: it is, to shoot henhawks and catch trout. But his uncle, fortunately, is otherwise minded, though Nathaniel writes, in the same note: “Mother says she can hardly spare me.” The sway of outdoor life must have been very strong over this stalwart boy's temperament. One who saw a great deal of him has related how in the very last year of his life Hawthorne reverted with fondness, perhaps with something of a sick and sinking man's longing for youthful scenes, to these early days at Sebago Lake; “Though it was there,” he confessed, “I first got my cursed habits of solitude.” “I lived in Maine,” he said, “like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed.” During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. “Ah,” he said, “how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!… Everything is beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!” The same writer mentions the author's passion for the sea, telling how, on the return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way: “I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the shore again.” I have it from his sister that he used to declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the salt spray in his blood.

Still it is difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if it does not find the right influences at first, presses forth, breaks out to right and left and keeps on pushing, until it feels itself at ease. It cannot wholly
make
its own influences, but it fights to the death before it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it must seek other and more fertile conditions. Hawthorne had an ancestry behind him connected with a singular and impressive history, had remarkable parents, and especially a mother pure and lofty in spirit; lived in a suggestive atmosphere of private sorrow and amid a community of much quaintness; he was also enabled to know books at an early age; yet these things only helped, and not produced, his genius. Sometimes they helped by repression, for there was much that was uncongenial in his early life; yet the clairvoyance, the unconscious wisdom, of that interior quality,
genius
, made him feel that the adjustment of his outer and his inner life was such as to give him a chance of unfolding. Had he gone to sea, his awaking power would have come violently into contact with the hostile conditions of sailor-life: he would have revolted against them, and have made his way into literature against head-wind or reluctant tiller-rope alike. It may, of course, be said that this prediction is too easy. But there are evidences of the mastering bent of Hawthorne's mind, which show that it would have ruled in any case.

As we have seen, he returned to Salem in 1819, to school; and on March 7, 1820, he wrote thus to his mother: —

“I have left school, and have begun to fit for College under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in your family. Mr. Oliver thought I could enter College next commencement, but Uncle Robert is afraid I should have to study too hard. I get my lessons at home, and recite them to him [Mr. Oliver] at 7 o'clock in the morning…. Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A minister I will not be.” This is the first dawn of the question of a career, apparently. Yet he still has a yearning to escape the solution. “I am extremely homesick,” he says, in one part of the letter; and at the close he gives way to the sentiment entirely: “O how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a gunning. But the happiest days of my life are gone…. After I have got through college, I will come down to learn E —
 
— Latin and Greek.” (Is it too fanciful to note that at this stage of the epistle “college” is no longer spelt with a large C?) The signature to this letter shows the boy so amiably that I append it.

“I remain,” he says,
  ”Your
    Affectionate
      and
        Dutiful
          son,
            and
              Most
                Obedient
                  and
                    Most
                      Humble
                        Servant,
                          and
                            Most
                              Respectful
                                and
                                  Most
                                    Hearty
                                      Well-wisher,
                            NATHANIEL HATHORNE.”

A jesting device this, which the writer, were he now living, would perhaps think too trivial to make known; yet why should we not recall with pleasure the fact that in his boyish days he could make this harmless little play, to throw an unexpected ray of humor and gladness into the lonely heart of his mother, far away in the Maine woods? And with this pleasure, let there be something of honor and reverence for his pure young heart.

In another letter of this period [Footnote: This letter, long in the possession of Miss E. P. Peabody, Mr. Hawthorne's sister-in-law, unfortunately does not exist any longer. The date has thus been forgotten, but the passage is clear in Miss Peabody's recollection.] he had made a long stride towards the final choice, as witness this extract: —

“I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an author. How would you like some day to see a whole shelf full of books, written by your son, with 'Hawthorne's Works' printed on their backs?”

But, before going further, it will be well to look at certain “Early Notes,” purporting to be Hawthorne's, and published in the Portland “Transcript” at different times in 1871 and 1873. A mystery overhangs them; [Footnote: See Appendix I.] and it has been impossible, up to this time, to procure proof of their genuineness. Most of the persons named in them have, nevertheless, been identified by residents of Cumberland County, who knew them in boyhood, and the internal evidence of authorship seems to make at least some of them Hawthorne's. On the first leaf of the manuscript book, said to contain them, was written (as reported by the discoverer) an inscription, to the effect that the book had been given to Nathaniel Hawthorne by his uncle Richard Manning, “with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can, upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language”; and this was dated at Raymond, June 1, 1816. This account, if true, puts the book into the boy's hands at the age of twelve. He did not go to Raymond to live until two years later, but had certainly been there, before, and his Uncle Richard was already living there in 1816. So that the entries may have begun soon after June, of that year, though their mature character makes this improbable. In this case, they must cover more than a year's time. The dates were not given by the furnisher of the extracts, and only one item can be definitely provided with a date. This must have been penned in or after 1819; and yet it seems also probable that the whole series was written before the author's college days. If genuine, then, they hint the scope and quality of Hawthorne's perceptions during a few years antecedent to his college-course, and — whether his own work or not — they picture the sort of life which he must have seen at Raymond.

“Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that flies from one to the other, over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be miserable cowards, to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet seen one turn to defend himself.

“Swapped pocket knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fishing pole this morning, and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never cheat.”

Richard Manning had married Susan Dingley; this Jacob was probably her nephew. In this allusion to Quakers one might fancy a germ of tolerance which ripened into “The Gentle Boy.”

“Captain Britton from Otisfield was at Uncle Richard's today. Not long ago, uncle brought here from Salem a new kind of potatoes called 'Long Reds.' Captain Britton had some for seed, and uncle asked how he liked them. He answered, 'They yield well, grow very long, — one end is very poor, and the other good for nothing.' I laughed about it after he was gone, but uncle looked sour and said there was no wit in his answer, and that the saying was 'stale.' It was new to me, and his way of saying it very funny. Perhaps uncle did not like to hear his favorite potato spoken of in that way, and that if the captain had praised it he would have been called witty.”

“Captain Britton promised to bring 'Gulliver's Travels' for me to read, the next time he comes this way, which is every time he goes to Portland. Uncle Richard has not the book in his library.

“This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not consent, for fear the wall might cave in, but hired Samuel Shane to go down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs. Shane not quite so valuable as the son of the Widow Hawthorne. God bless her for all her love for me, though it may be some selfish. We are to have a pump in the well, after this mishap.

“Washington Longley has been taking lessons of a drumming master. He was in the grist-mill to day, and practised with two sticks on the half-bushel. I was astonished at the great number of strokes in a second, and if I had not seen that he had but two sticks, should have supposed that he was drumming with twenty.”

“Major Berry went past our house with a large drove of sheep yesterday. One, a last spring's lamb, gave out; could go no farther. I saw him down near the bridge. The poor dumb creature looked into my eyes, and I thought I knew just what he would say if he could speak, and so asked Mr. Berry what he would sell him for. 'Just the price of his pelt, and that will bring sixty-five cents,' was the answer. I ran and petitioned mother for the money, which she soon gave me, saying with a smile that she tried to make severe, but could not, that I was 'a great spendthrift.' The lamb is in our orchard now, and he made a bow (without taking off his hat) and thanked me this morning for saving him from the butcher.