Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (852 page)

Hawthorne indeed admired Scott, when a youth; and after he had returned from abroad, in 1860, he fulfilled a tender purpose, formed on a visit to Abbotsford, of re-reading all the Waverley novels. Yet he had long before arrived at a ripe, unprejudiced judgment concerning him. The exact impression of his feeling appears in that delightfully humorous whimsey, “P.'s Correspondence,” which contains the essence of the best criticism. [Footnote: See Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] In allusion to Abbotsford, Scott, he says, “whether in verse, prose, or architecture, could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety.” And he adds: “For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame, rather than that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation even what Scott has been to the past?” Now, in “Fanshawe” there is something that reminds one of Sir Walter; but the very resemblance makes the essential unlikeness more apparent.

The scene of the tale is laid at Harley College, “in an ancient, though not very populous settlement in a retired corner of one of the New England States.” This, no doubt, is a reproduction of Bowdoin. Mr. Longfellow tells me that the descriptions of the seminary and of the country around it strongly suggest the Brunswick College. The President of Harley is a Dr. Melmoth, an amiable and simple old delver in learning, in a general way recalling Dominie Sampson, whose vigorous spouse rules him somewhat severely: their little bickerings supply a strain of farce indigenous to Scott's fictions, but quite unlike anything in Hawthorne's later work. A young lady, named Ellen Langton, daughter of an old friend of Dr. Melmoth's, is sent to Harley, to stay under his guardianship. Ellen is somewhat vaguely sketched, in the style of Scott's heroines; but this sentence ends with a trace of the young writer's quality: “If pen could give an adequate idea of Ellen Langton's beauty, it would achieve what pencil … never could; for though the dark eyes might be painted, the pure and pleasant thoughts that peeped through them could only be seen and felt.” This maiden the doctor once took into his study, to begin a course of modern languages with her; but she “having discovered an old romance among his heavy folios, contrived by the sweet charm of her voice to engage his attention,” and quite beguiled him from severer studies. Naturally, she inthralls two young students at the college: one of whom is Edward Wolcott, a wealthy, handsome, generous, healthy young fellow from one of the seaport towns; and the other, Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor but ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline through overmuch devotion to books and meditation. Fanshawe, though the deeper nature of the two, and intensely moved by his new passion, perceiving that a union between himself and Ellen could not be a happy one, resigns the hope of it from the beginning. But circumstances bring him into intimate relation with her. The real action of the book, after the preliminaries, takes up only some three days, and turns upon the attempt of a man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his protection, then marry her, and secure the fortune to which she is heiress. This scheme is partly frustrated by circumstances, and Butler's purpose towards Ellen then becomes a much more sinister one. From this she is rescued by Fanshawe; and, knowing that he loves her, but is concealing his passion, she gives him the opportunity and the right to claim her hand. For a moment, the rush of desire and hope is so great that he hesitates; then he refuses to take advantage of her generosity, and parts with her for the last time. Ellen becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had won her heart from the first; and Fanshawe, sinking into rapid consumption, dies before his class graduates. It is easy to see how the sources of emotion thus opened attracted Hawthorne. The noble and refined nature of Fanshawe, and the mingled craftiness, remorse, and ferocity of Butler, are crude embodiments of the same characteristics which he afterward treated in modified forms. They are the two poles, the extremes, — both of them remote and chilly, — of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew, after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a few characteristic portions of the book which suggest its tone.

When the young lady's flight with the stranger actually takes place, young Wolcott and President Melmoth ride together in the pursuit, and at this point there occurs a dialogue which is certainly as laughable and is better condensed than most similar passages in Scott, whom it strongly recalls. A hint of Cervantes appears in it, too, which makes it not out of place to mention that Hawthorne studied “Don Quixote” in the original, soon after leaving college.

* * * * *

“'Alas, youth! these are strange times,' observed the President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate set forth like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there he no encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons.'

“'I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous comparison.

“'Ay, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the divine. 'But wherewith shall I defend myself? — my hand being empty except of this golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton.'

“'One of those, if you will accept it,' answered Edward, exhibiting a brace of pistols, 'will serve to begin the conflict, before you join the battle hand to hand.'

“'Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly instrument, since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. 'But were it not better, seeing we are so well provided with artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some stone-wall or other place of strength?'

“'If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, 'you, as being most valiant and experienced, should ride forward, lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while I annoy the enemy from afar.'

“'Like Teucer behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. Melmoth, 'or David with his stone and sling. No, no, young man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, important not only to the present age, but to posterity, for whose sakes I must take heed to my safety. But lo! who rides yonder?'“

* * * * *

In one place only does the author give full rein to his tragic power; but this is a vigorous burst, and remarkable also for its sure and trenchant analysis. During his escape with Ellen, Butler is moved to stop at a lonely hut inhabited by his mother, where he finds her dying; and, torn by the sight of her suffering while she raves and yearns for his presence, he makes himself known to her.

* * * * *

“At that unforgotten voice, the darkness burst away at once from her soul. She arose in bed, her eyes and her whole countenance beaming with joy, and threw her arms about his neck. A multitude of words seem struggling for utterance; but they gave place to a low moaning sound, and then to the silence of death. The one moment of happiness, that recompensed years of sorrow, had been her last…. As he [Butler] looked, the expression of enthusiastic joy that parting life had left upon the features faded gradually away, and the countenance, though no longer wild, assumed the sadness which it had worn through a long course of grief and pain. On beholding this natural consequence of death, the thought perhaps occurred to him that her soul, no longer dependent on the imperfect means of intercourse possessed by mortals, had communed with his own, and become acquainted with all its guilt and misery. He started from the bedside and covered his face with his hands, as if to hide it from those dead eyes…. But his deep repentance for the misery he had brought upon his parent did not produce in him a resolution to do wrong no more. The sudden consciousness of accumulated guilt made him desperate. He felt as if no one had thenceforth a claim to justice or compassion at his hands, when his neglect and cruelty had poisoned his mother's life, and hastened her death.”

* * * * *

What separates this story from the rest of Hawthorne's works is an intricate plot, with passages of open humor, and a rather melodramatic tone in the conclusion. These are the result in part of the prevalent fashion of romance, and in part of a desire to produce effects not quite consonant with his native bent. The choice of the title, “Fanshawe,” too, seems to show a deference to the then prevalent taste for brief and quaint-sounding names; and the motto, “Wilt thou go on with me?” from Southey, placed on his title-page, together with quotations at the heads of chapters, belongs to a past fashion. Fanshawe and Butler are powerful conceptions, but they are so purely embodiments of passion as to assume an air of unreality. Butler is like an evil wraith, and Fanshawe is as evanescent as a sad cloud in the sky, touched with the first pale light of morning. Fanshawe, with his pure heart and high resolves, represents that constant aspiration toward lofty moral truth which marked Hawthorne's own mind, and Butler is a crude example of the sinful spirit which he afterward analyzed under many forms. The verbal style has few marks of the maturer mould afterward impressed on it, except that there is the preference always noticeable in Hawthorne for Latin wording. Two or three phrases, however, show all the limpidness and ease for which he gained fame subsequently. For instance, when Fanshawe is first surprised by his love for Ellen, he returns to his room to study: “The books were around him which had hitherto been to him like those fabled volumes of magic, from which the reader could not turn away his eye, till death were the consequence of his studies.” This, too, is a pretty description of Ellen: “Terror had at first blanched her as white as a lily…. Shame next bore sway; and her blushing countenance, covered by her slender white fingers, might fantastically be compared to a variegated rose, with its alternate stripes of white and red.” Its restraint is perhaps the most remarkable trait of the novel; for though this comes of timidity, it shows that Hawthorne, whether this be to his advantage or not, was not of the order of young genius which begins with tumid and excessive exhibition of power. His early acquaintance with books, breeding a respect for literary form, his shy, considerate modes of dealing with any intellectual problem or question requiring judgment, and the formal taste of the period in letters, probably conspired to this end.

IV.

TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES.

1828-1838.

We have now reached the point where the concealed foundations of Hawthorne's life terminate, and the final structure begins to appear above the surface, like the topmost portion of a coral island slowly rising from the depths of a solitary ocean.

When he left college, his friends Cilley and Pierce entered into law, the gateway to politics; Bridge returned to his father's estate at Bridgton, to engage later in a large enterprise there; and other classmates took up various activities in the midst of other men; but for Hawthorne no very clear path presented itself. Literature had not yet attained, in the United States, the rank of a distinct and powerful profession. Fifteen years before, Brockden Brown had died prematurely after a hapless struggle, worn out with overwork, — the first man who had undertaken to live by writing in this country since its colonization. “The North American Review,” indeed, in Boston, was laying the corner-stone of a vigorous periodical literature; and in this year of 1825 William Cullen Bryant had gone to New York to edit “The New York Review,” after publishing at Cambridge his first volume of poetry, “The Ages.” Irving was an author of recent but established fame, who was drawing chiefly from the rich supplies of European manners, legend, and history; while Cooper, in his pleasant Pioneer-land beside Otsego Lake, had begun to make clear his claim to a wide domain of native and national fiction. But to a young man of reserved temper, having few or no friends directly connected with publication, and living in a sombre, old-fashioned town, isolated as all like towns were before the era of railroads, the avenue to publicity and a definite literary career was dark and devious enough.

I suppose it was after his venture of “Fanshawe,” that he set about the composition of some shorter stories which he called “Seven Tales of my Native Land.” [Footnote: The motto prefixed to these was, “We are seven.”] His sister, to whom he read these, has told me that they were very beautiful, but no definite recollection of them remains to her, except that some of them related to witchcraft, and some to the sea, being stories of pirates and privateers. In one of these latter were certain verses, beginning, —

“The pirates of the sea, they were a fearful race.”

Hawthorne has described in “The Devil in Manuscript,” while depicting a young author about to destroy his manuscript, his own vexations in trying to find a publisher for these attempts. “They have been offered to some seventeen booksellers. It would make you stare to read their answers…. One man publishes nothing but school-books; another has five novels already under examination; … another gentleman is just giving up business on purpose, I verily believe, to escape publishing my book…. In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he — a literary dabbler himself, I should judge — has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding … that he will not be concerned on any terms…. But there does seem to be one honest man among these seventeen unrighteous ones; and he tells me fairly that no American publisher will meddle with an American work, seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new one, unless at the writer's risk.” He indeed had the most discouraging sort of search for a publisher; but at last a young printer of Salem promised to undertake the work. His name was Ferdinand Andrews; and he was at one time half-owner with Caleb Cushing of an establishment from which they issued “The Salem Gazette,” in 1822, the same journal in which Hawthorne published various papers at a later date, when Mr. Caleb Foote was its editor. Andrews was ambitious, and evidently appreciative of his young townsman's genius; but he delayed issuing the “Seven Tales” so long that the author, exasperated, recalled the manuscript. Andrews, waiting only for better business prospects, was loath to let them go; but Hawthorne insisted, and at last the publisher sent word, “Mr. Hawthorne's manuscript awaits his orders.” The writer received it and burned it, to the chagrin of Andrews, who had hoped to bring out many works by the same hand.

This, at the time, must have been an incident of incalculable and depressing importance to Hawthorne, and the intense emotion it caused may be guessed from the utterances of the young writer in the sketch just alluded to, though he has there veiled the affair in a light film of sarcasm. The hero of that scene is called Oberon, one of the feigned names which Hawthorne himself used at times in contributing to periodicals. “'What is more potent than fire!' said he, in his gloomiest tone. 'Even thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape it…. All that I had accomplished, all that I planned for future years, has perished by one common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The deed has been my fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life; a long repentance of this hour; and at last an obscure grave, where they will bury and forget me!'“ There is also an allusion to the tales founded on witchcraft: “I could believe, if I chose,” says Oberon, “that there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have read them, and know what I mean, — that conception in which I endeavored to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written records of witchcraft. O, I have a horror of what was created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a sort of material existence!' You remember how the hellish thing used to suck away the happiness of those who … subjected themselves to his power.” This is curious, as showing the point from which Hawthorne had resolved to treat the theme. He had instinctively perceived that the only way to make the witchcraft delusion available in fiction was to accept the witch as a fact, an actual being, and expend his art upon developing the abnormal character; while other writers, who have attempted to use the subject for romantic ends, have uniformly taken the historical view, and sought to extract their pathos from the effect of the delusion on innocent persons. The historical view is that of intelligent criticism; but Hawthorne's effort was the harbinger and token of an original imagination.

After the publication of “Fanshawe” and the destruction of his “Seven Tales,” Hawthorne found himself advanced not so much as by a single footstep on the road to fame. “Fame!” he exclaims, in meditation; “some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it, — as the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable, — and they are known to everybody; while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow-citizens.” But the fame that he desired was, I think, only that which is the recognition by the public that a man is on the way to truth. An outside acknowledgment of this is invaluable even to the least vain of authors, because it assures him that, in following his own inner impulse through every doubt and discouragement, he has not been pursuing a chimera, and gives him new heart for the highest enterprises of which he is capable. To attain this, amid the peculiar surroundings of his life, was difficult enough. At that time, Salem society was more peculiarly constituted than it has been in later years. A strong circle of wealthy families maintained rigorously the distinctions of class; their entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent, and the fame of the beautiful women born amongst them has been confirmed by a long succession reaching into the present day. They prescribed certain fashions, customs, punctilios, to disregard which was social exile for the offending party; and they were divided even among themselves, I am told, by the most inveterate jealousies. It is said that certain people would almost have endured the thumb-screw rather than meet and speak to others. There seems to be good authority for believing that Hawthorne could have entered this circle, had he so chosen. He had relatives who took an active part within it; and it appears that there was a disposition among some of the fashionable coterie to show him particular favor, and that advances were made by them with the wish to draw him out. But one can conceive that it would not be acceptable to him to meet them on any but terms of entire equality. The want of ample supplies of money, which was one of the results of the fallen fortunes of his family, made this impossible; those who held sway were of older date in the place than some of the Hawthornes, and, like many another long-established stock, they had a conviction that, whatever their outward circumstances might be, a certain intrinsic superiority remained theirs. They were, like the lady of Hawthorne blood mentioned in the “American Note-Books,” “proud of being proud.” The Hawthornes, it was said, were as unlike other people as the Jews were to Gentiles; and the deep-rooted reserve which enveloped Hawthorne himself was a distinct family trait. So that, feeling himself to be in an unfair position, he doubtless found in these facts enough to cause him acute irritation of that sort which only very young or very proud and shrinking men can know. Besides this, the altered circumstances of his line, and his years in Maine, had brought him acquainted with humbler phases of life, and had doubtless developed in him a sympathy with simpler and less lofty people than these magnates. His father had been a Democrat, and loyalty to his memory, as well as the very pride just spoken of, conspired to lead him to that unpopular side. This set up another barrier between himself and the rich and powerful Whigs, for political feeling was almost inconceivably more bitter then than now. Thus there arose within him an unquiet, ill-defined, comfortless antipathy that must have tortured him with wearisome distress; and certainly shut him out from the sympathy and appreciation which, if all the conditions had been different, might have been given him by sincere and competent admirers. So little known among his own townsfolk, it is not to be wondered at that no encouraging answer reached him from more distant communities.

In his own home there was the faith which only love can give, but outside of it a chill drove his hopes and ardors back upon himself and turned them into despairs. His relatives, having seen him educated by the aid of his uncle, and now arrived at maturity, expected him to take his share in practical affairs. But the very means adopted to train him for a career had settled his choice of one in a direction perhaps not wholly expected; all cares and gains of ordinary traffic seemed sordid and alien to him. Yet a young man just beginning his career, with no solid proof of his own ability acquired, cannot but be sensitive to criticism from those who have gained a right to comment by their own special successes. As he watched these slow and dreary years pass by, from his graduation in 1825 to the time when he first came fully before the public in 1837, he must often have been dragged down by terrible fears that perhaps the fairest period of life was being wasted, losing forever the chance of fruition. “I sat down by the wayside of life,” he wrote, long after, “like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity.” Judge in what a silence and solitary self-communing the time must have passed, to leave a thought like this: “To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course of the day, — events of ordinary occurrence; as, the clocks have struck, the dead have been buried.” Or this: “A recluse like myself, or a prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his chamber.” His Note-Books show how the sense of unreality vexed and pursued him; and how the sadness and solemnity of life returned upon him again and again; and how he clothed these dark visitants of his brain with the colors of imagination, and turned them away from him in the guise of miraculous fantasies. He talks with himself of writing “the journal of a human heart for a single day, in ordinary circumstances. The lights and shadows that flit across it, its internal vicissitudes.” But this is almost precisely what his printed Note-Books have revealed to us. Only now and then do we get precisely the thought that is passing through his mind at the moment; it more often throws upon the page a reflected image, — some strange and subtle hint for a story, the germs of delicate fabrics long afterward matured, some merry or sad conceit, some tender yet piercing inference, — like the shadows of clouds passing quickly across a clear sky, and casting momentary glooms, and glances of light, on the ground below. These journals do not begin until a date seven years after “Fanshawe” was published; but it is safe to assume that they mirror pretty closely the general complexion of the intervening years.

His mode of life during this period was fitted to nurture his imagination, but must have put the endurance of his nerves to the severest test. The statement that for several years “he never saw the sun,” is entirely an error; but it is true that he seldom chose to walk in the town except at night, and it is said that he was extremely fond of going to fires if they occurred after dark. In summer he was up shortly after sunrise, and would go down to bathe in the sea. The morning was chiefly given to study, the afternoon to writing, and in the evening he would take long walks, exploring the coast from Gloucester to Marblehead and Lynn, — a range of many miles. Or perhaps he would pace the streets of the town, unseen but observing, gathering material for something in the vein of his delicious “Night Sketches.” “After a time,” he writes, “the visions vanish, and will not appear again at my bidding. Then, it being nightfall, a gloomy sense of unreality depresses my spirits, and impels me to venture out before the clock shall strike bedtime, to satisfy myself that the world is not made of such shadowy materials as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies, that the things without him will seem as unreal as those within.” Or, if he chose a later hour, he might go abroad to people the deserted thoroughfares with wilder phantoms. Sometimes he took the day for his rambles, wandering perhaps over Endicott's ancient Orchard Farm and among the antique houses and grassy cellars of old Salem village, the witchcraft ground; or losing himself among the pines of Montserrat and in the silence of the Great Pastures, or strolling along the beaches to talk with old sailors and fishermen. His tramps along the Manchester and Beverly shores or from Marblehead to Nahant were productive of such delicate tracings as “Footprints by the Sea-shore,” or the dream-autobiography of “The Village Uncle.” “Grudge me not the day,” he says, in the former sketch, “that has been spent in seclusion, which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion, and the little sea-birds my friends, and the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around my hermitage. Such companionship works an effect upon a man's character, as if he had been admitted to the society of creatures that are not mortal.” This touches the inmost secret of those lonely, youthful years, which moulded the pure-hearted muser with ethereal, unsuspected fingers. Elsewhere, Hawthorne has given another glimpse into his interior life at this time: “This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing air I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale in which I wrapped myself during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at midnight; they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came, and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own enchantments!” Susan, the imaginary wife in “The Village Uncle,” is said to have had a prototype in the daughter of a Salem fisherman, whose wit and charm gave Hawthorne frequent amusement; and I suppose that not seldom he reaped delightful suggestions from his meetings with frank, unconscious, and individual people of tastes and life unlike his own. I have heard it told with a polite, self-satisfied scorn, that he was in the habit of visiting now and then a tavern patronized by 'longshore-men and nautical veterans, to listen to their talk. I can well believe it, for it is this sort of intercourse that a person of manly genius, with a republican fellow-feeling for the unrenowned, most covets. How well he gives the tone of these old sea-dogs, when he writes: “The blast will put in its word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them!” It was this constant searching among the common types of men, and his ready sympathy with them, refined as it was hearty, that stored his mind with a variety of accurate impressions which afterward surprised observers, in a man of habits so retired.