Nathaniel Hawthorne, how to know him

Contents

Chapter Page

I Old New England 1

II Tales of an Elder Day 40

Chapter I

WHAT is more characteristic of old New England than a snow-storm ? Whittier's "Snow- Bound" is an epitome of the old home life. Emerson's "Snow Storm" —

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky" —

although bad meteorology, gives truly the windsculpture of the day after, out-of-doors, with its soft farm-contours on "stake, or tree, or door," on "coop or kennel," in the brilliant air. They mix an exquisite homeliness with the wintry beauty, both true to the soil. Hawthorne, in "Snow-Flakes," a slight sketch, describes the approach of the storm, as mere weather, with a loving and minute care that makes it a real overture to winter. The scene is atmospheric, and the air bites. This is old New England on a December day :

"There is snow in yonder cold gray sky of the morning! — and, through the partially frosted window panes, I love to watch the gradual beginning of the storm. A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere. These are not the big flakes, heavy with moisture, which melt as they touch the ground, and are portentous of a soaking rain. It is to be, in good earnest, a wintry storm. The two or three people visible on the sidewalks have an aspect of endurance, a blue-nosed, frosty fortitude, which is evidently assumed in anticipation of a comfortless and blustering day. By nightfall, or at least before the sun sheds another glimmering smile upon us, the street and our little garden will be heaped with mountain snow-drifts. The soil, already frozen for weeks past, is prepared to sustain whatever burden may be laid upon it ; and, to a northern eye, the landscape will lose its melancholy bleakness and acquire a beauty of its own, when Mother Earth, like her children, shall have put on the fleecy garb of her winter's wear. The cloud spirits are slowly weaving her white mantle. As yet, indeed, there is barely a rime like hoarfrost over the brown surface of the street; the withered grass of the grass-plat is still discernible; and the slated ropfs of the houses do but begin to look gray instead of black. All the snow that has yet fallen within the circumference of my view, were it heaped up together, would hardly equal the hillock of a grave."

There is a snow-bound leisure in the very style!

A more fixed feature of ancestral New England, with which Hawthorne, boy and man, was familiar, is the fishing village on the coast. He knew the region, also, far and wide in the interior, both by residence and random bits of travel; but his birth and home were by the sea, and he had sea-blood from his fathers. His employment, too, in middle life, brought him in close contact Avith seafaring men. The touch of salt was not uncommon then, in New England blood. Longfellow had it ; and how happily the sea slips like a tide into his verse !

"I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea-tides tossing free ; And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea."

Longfellow looked like a sailor, in cheek, eye and build. Hawthorne, in the long tramps he was accustomed to take by the rocky ledges of the shore and upon the broad stretches of shining beach, must have felt the call of the blood. All the paraphernalia of the sea interested him ; and its human figures held his eye, alike by their reality and their picturesqueness. Consider this sketch of the coast village :

"It was a small collection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the sea, with the rockweed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or to have come ashore among the pipe staves and other lumber which had been washed from the deck of an eastern schooner. There was just space for the narrow and sandy street, between the beach in front and a precipitous hill that lifted its rockyforehead in the rear, among a waste of juniper bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. The village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though all were rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built perhaps of driftwood; there a row of boat-houses ; and beyond them a two-story dwelling, of dark and weather-beaten aspect, the whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages, painted white, a sufficiency of pigsties, and a shoemaker's shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite each other, in the center of the village. These were the places of resort, at their idle hours, of a hardy throng of fishermen, in red baize shirts, oilcloth trousers, and boots of brown leather covering the whole leg; true seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walk the earth. The wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep out of salt water to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful to see their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish, such as cling to rocks and old ship timber over which the tide ebbs and fiows."

And hearken to "Uncle Parker," as he sits "yarning" in the village store :

**His figure is before me now, enthroned upon a mackerel barrel, a lean old man, of great height, but bent with years and twisted into an uncouth shape by seven broken limbs ; furrowed also, and weatherworn, as if every gale, for the better part of a century, had caught him somewhere on the sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest; a shipmate of the Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and merchant-men, fishing schooners and chebacco boats, the old salt had become master of a handcart, which he daily trundled about the vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn through the streets of Salem. One of Uncle Parker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder, and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French, and battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike nail through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like fowl, which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle of Sables, where he had gladdened himself, amid polar snows, with the rum and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India schooner. And wrathfully did he shake his fist, as he related how a party of Cape Cod men had robbed him and his companions of their lawful spoil, and sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica, leaving him not a drop to drovv^n his sorrow. Villains they were, and of that wicked brotherhood who are said to tie lanterns to horses' tails, to mislead the mariner along the dangerous shores of the Cape.'*

When it comes the imaginary narrator's turn to take the old "uncle's" place, he tells of the marvelous sailors of a former age: "If the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I speak of pilots v/ho knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste, and could have steered bHndfold to any port between Boston and Mount Desert, guided only by the rote of the shore, — the peculiar sound of the surf on each island, beach, and line of rocks along the coast." This is the same pen that, at a riper period of life and experience, wrote reminiscences of ships' cabins at Boston and seacaptains' talk at Liverpool, and drew those toofaithful and yet-un forgotten portraits of the worthies of the Salem Custom House.

Hawthorne delighted in these local pen-drawings. He was a born observer; and this faculty of minute observation, with the attendant power to reproduce the scene in words, was perhaps the first literary discovery he made in the matter of his talent. He was an inveterate journalizer. "Keeping a diary" was a habit of old New England, and, though Hawthorne called the thing a "note-book," he must have produced endless reams of such writing. This daily exercise — it seems to have been practically thatsharpened and fixed his habit of observation; and, perhaps, it encouraged an indiscriminate attention to small matters. What he jotted in one of these note-books was apt to turn up afterward in a sketch or tale. It was out of such observation and annotation that his early local sketches grew — scenes of the Salem streets, landscapes from a steeple, figures in a railway station, a day in a toll-house on the bridge, and the like. The look of old New England might be almost reconstructed out of these and similar passages in Hawthorne's work.

But it was not only the local aspect of his immediate vicinity that Hawthorne saw and recorded. Old New England was not merely a winter scene or a fishing village, nor even a whole county; it embraced a mode of life scattered over a wide district. Hawthorne had summered and wintered it in many parts besides Salem, his birthplace, and its surrounding country. He spent his boyhood at Sebago Lake, in Maine, in a region almost primitive; his college days were passed at Bowdoin; and, later, he knew some sort of vacation travels that took him to New Hampshire, Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, and apparently as far as Niagara. There are even whispers of Detroit, as a far-western terminal to his wayfaring. Those were the days of the stage-coach, with its abundant opportunity to see the world on a journey, and not merely to speed through it. There was a vagabond streak in Hawthorne at that age, a desire to wander, natural to his years. It seems to have been rather a slow fever, it is true ; it did not take him far, except in his mind, perhaps; but it made him very sympathetic with the things of "the road." The nucleus of the story-telhng faculty, from Chaucer's day, has often been a pilgrimage. Among Hawthorne's early plans in literature, that never worked out, was one to weave a chain of such vagabond tales by an itinerant story-teller and his companion. Such literary schemes in his mind derived both their material and their method from his little journeys in rural communities, where the freemasonry of the stage-coach and the tavern prevailed. The scenes and the characters of these excursions into the provincial world of New England, are often set forth in their raw state in his contemporary note-book, minutely and at length. These are very informal writings, with little intention in them, best described by their editor as "the results of an early formed taste for exercising his pen upon the simplest objects of notice that surrounded him." For this very reason they are almost a photographic rendering of New England.

The note-books, indeed, are so continuous and abundant that they constitute, taken together, a motion-picture, so to speak, of Hawthorne's environment from youth to age. The scene is more crowded with humanity, when he is abroad in the world ; when he comes home again, nature comes to the foreground. The diary of his Concord days, after his marriage, illustrates this. It is a history of

OLD NEW ENGLAND S

his farm. Its main interest may be said to be vegetables. This is his garden :

"The natural taste of man for the original Adam's occupation is fast developing itself in me. I find that I am a good deal interested in our garden, although, as it was planted before we came here, I do not feel the same affection for the plants that I should if the seed had been sown by my own hands. It is something like nursing and educating another person's children. Still, it was a very pleasant moment when I gathered the first string-beans, which were the earliest esculent that the garden contributed to our table. And I love to watch the successive development of each new vegetable, and mark its daily growth, which always affects me with surprise. It is as if something were being created under my own inspection, and partly by my own aid. One day, perchance, I look at my bean-vines, and see only the green leaves clambering up the poles; again, to-morrow, I give a second glance, and there are the delicate blossoms; and a third day, on a somewhat closer observation, I discover the tender young beans, hiding among the foliage. Then, each morning, I watch the swelling of the pods and calculate how soon they will be ready to yield their treasures. All this gives a pleasure and an ideality, hitherto unthought of, to the business of providing sustenance for my family. I suppose Adam felt it in Paradise ;

and, of merely and exclusively earthly enjoyments, there are few purer and more harmless to be experienced. Speaking of beans, by the way, they are a classical food, and their culture must have been the occupation of many ancient sages and heroes. Summer-squashes are a very pleasant vegetable to be acquainted with. They grow in the forms of urns and vases, — some shallow, others deeper, and all with a beautifully scalloped edge. Almost any squash in our garden might be copied by a sculptor, and would look lovely in marble, or in china; and, if I could afford it, I would have exact imitations of the real vegetable as portions of my dining-service. They would be very appropriate dishes for holding garden-vegetables. Besides the summersquashes, we have the crook-necked winter-squash, which I always delight to look at, when it turns up its big rotundity to ripen in the autumn sun. Except a pumpkin, there is no vegetable production that imparts such an idea of warmth and comfort to the beholder. Our own crop, however, does not promise to be very abundant ; for the leaves formed such a superfluous shade over the young blossoms, that most of them dropped off without producing the germ of fruit. Yesterday and to-day I have cut oft* an immense number of leaves, and have thus given the remaining blossoms a chance to profit by the air and sunshine; but the season is too far advanced, I am afraid, for the squashes to attain any great bulk, and grow yellow in the sun. We have muskmelons and watermelons, which promise to supply us with as many as we can eat.

After all, the greatest interest of these vegetables does not seem to consist in their being articles of food. It is rather that we love to see something born into the world ; and w^hen a great squash or melon is produced, it is a large and tangible existence, which the imagination can seize hold of and rejoice in. I love, also, to see my own works contributing to the life and well-being of animate nature. It is pleasant to have the bees come and suck honey out of my squash-blossoms, though, when they have laden themselves, they fly away to some unknown hive, which will give me back nothing in return for what my garden has given them. But there is much more honey in the world, and so I am content. Indian corn, in the prime and glory of its verdure, is a very beautiful vegetable, both considered in the separate plant, and in a mass in a broad field, rustling and waving, and surging up and down in the breeze and sunshine of a summer afternoon. We have as many as fifty hills, I should think, which will give us an abundant supply. Pray Heaven that we may be able to eat it all ! for it is not pleasant to think that anything which Nature has been at the pains to produce should be thrown away. But the hens will be glad of our superfluity, and so will the pigs, though we have neither hens nor pigs of our own. But hens we must certainly keep. There Is something very sociable and quiet, and soothing, too, in their soliloquies and converse among themselves; and, in an idle and half -meditative mood, it is very pleasant to watch a party of hens picking up their daily subsistence, with a gallant chanticleer in the midst of them. Milton had evidently contemplated such a picture with delight.

"I find that I have not given a very complete idea of our garden, although it certainly deserves an ample record in this chronicle, since my labors in it are the only present labors of my life. Besides what I have mentioned, we have cucumber-vines, which to-day yielded us the first cucumber of the season, a bed of beets, and another of carrots, and another of parsnips and turnips, none of which promise a very abundant harvest. In truth, the soil is worn out, and, moreover, received very little manure this season. Also, we have cabbages in superfluous abundance, inasmuch as we neither of us have the least affection for them; and it would be unreasonable to expect Sarah, the cook, to eat fifty head of cabbages. Tomatoes, too, we shall have by and by. At our first arrival, we found green peas ready for gathering, and these, instead of the string-beans, were the first offering of the garden to our board.'*

The mild vein of meditation slipping in between the squashes and the corn, in this extract, indicates that "sunthin' in the pastoral line," long native to the New England literary temperament, though it seldom crops out m recent years. Thoreau was its most distinguished prose prophet; but it covered all our pastures with a mist of sentiment. The mood clung about persons as well as products. There is an adjoining passage, in the diary, about Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the summer woods of Concord, near the Old Manse farm described above, which is a true Yankee idyl. Hawthorne is especially happy in his descriptions of the forest landscape and country atmosphere of his early Concord days. It was, indeed, an enchanted region ; the eyes that looked on it had been touched by fairy herbs. Thoreau confounded Concord River with the Nile, and spoke slightingly of travel except in the Maine woods or on Cape Cod. Emerson, it must be owned, was a fellow conspirator with him in this advocacy of the parish.

It requires large minds and immense vistas to do away with perspectives and proportion, in this high Concord way. It is to forego the telescope for the microscope, as if minuteness of observation could compensate for the world's horizons. A certain pettiness creeps inevitably upon the daily page that records the habitual and the commonplace, no matter how truthfully. "Yesterday I found two mushrooms in the woods, probably of the preceding night's growth. Also I saw a mosquito, frostpinched, and so wretched that I felt avenged for all the injuries which his tribe inflicted ujx^n me last summer, and so did not molest this lone survivor.

... I found a maple-leaf to-day, yellow all over, except its extremest point, which was bright scarlet. It looked as if a drop of blood were hanging from it." Hawthornesque remarks, truly. These things belong to the fecundity of universal nature, and the infinitesimal has a large share in that. Yet, even in trifles, Hawthorne never loses for long his vivid literary touch. "A gust of violets along a wood-path," — that is the whole note; simple, elemental, like an eastern drawing. But such simplicity, applied to a whole summer and a countryside, requires the tolerance of a strolling mind. His own spirit was of a leisurely make. Small things easily absorbed his attention; they illustrate the nicety of his senses, and, often, the wings of his imagination; but, though it may seem a paradox to say so, this habit of small thinking points to an indolence in his mentality, as if it grew comatose in such lethargic surroundings as he found himself in from time to time.

But when he lifts his eyes from insect life, the pigsty and the kitchen-garden, how the winding Concord River comes into view, the grape-vine thickets by Brook Farm, Cow Island with its stately pines — "Somewhat like looking among the pillars of a church;" or, to quote once more his infinite panorama of the countryside, the "American autumn" emerges, drenched in sunlight, a tranquil scene worthy of his own romances!

"I returned home by the high-road. On my right, separated from the road by a level field, perhaps fifty yards across, was a range of young foresttrees, dressed in their garb of autumnal glory. The sun shone directly upon them; and sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn. In its absence, one doubts whether there be any truth in what poets have told about the splendor of an American autumn; but when this charm is added, one feels that the effect is beyond description. As I beheld it to-day, there was nothing dazzling; it was gentle and mild, though brilliant and diversified, and had a most quiet and pensive influence. And yet there were some trees that seemed really made of sunshine, and others were of a sunny red, and the whole picture was painted with but little relief of darksome hues, — only a few evergreens. But there was nothing inharmonious ; and, on closer examination, it appeared that all the tints had a relationship among themselves. And this, I suppose, is the reason that, while nature seems to scatter them so carelessly, they still never shock the beholder by their contrasts, nor disturb, but only soothe. The brilliant scarlet and the brilliant yellow are different hues of the maple-leaves, and the first changes into the last. I saw one maple-tree, its center yellow as gold, set in a framework of red. The native poplars have different shades of green, verging towards yellow, and are very cheerful in the sunshine. Most of the oak-leaves have still the deep verdure of summer; but where a change has taken place, it is into a russet-red, warm, but sober. These colors, infinitely varied by the progress which different trees have made in their decay, constitute almost the whole glory of autumnal woods; but it is impossible to conceive how much is done with such scanty materials."

This is like a glass of Donatello's golden wine at Monte Beni.

As characteristic a scene of Hawthorne's old New England is this sketch in the heart of the city, at no less locally famous a rendezvous than the *'Frog Pond" on Boston Common :

''One of my chief amusements is to see the boys sail their miniature vessels on the Frog Pond. There is a great variety of shipping owned among the young people, and they appear to have a considerable knowledge of the art of managing vessels. There is a full-rigged man-of-war, with, I believe, every spar, rope, and sail, that sometimes makes its appearance ; and, when on a voyage across the pond, it so identically resembles a great ship, except in size, that it has the effect of a picture. All its motions,— its tossing up and down on the small waves, and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling to the breeze, — the whole effect, in short, is that of a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do. If we see a real, great ship, the mind grasps and possesses, within its real clutch, all that there is of it; while here the mimic ship is the representation of an ideal one, and so gives us a more imaginative pleasure."

The lesson as to the imagination is significant, and illustrates the nearness of Hawthorne's meditation or fancy or sentiment to any object his eye noted; reflection seems instantaneous with observation, and almost to coincide with it. Neither eye nor mind was less hospitable, it seems, to one thing than another.

But to bring to an end these extracts from many times and seasons and varieties of place, which show different aspects of Hawthorne's native world and the kind of interest he took in it, observe the vivid detail, both material and human, of this Dutch picture, as it were, of the old original Boston hostelry, renowned as 'Tarker's" :

"I did not go out yesterday afternoon, but after tea I went to Parker's. The drinking and smoking shop is no bad place to see one kind of life. The front apartment is for drinking. The door opens into Court Square, and is denoted, usually, by some choice specimens of dainties exhibited in the windows, or hanging beside the door-post; as, for instance, a pair of canvas-back ducks, distinguishable by their delicately mottled feathers; an admirable cut of raw beefsteak; a ham, ready boiled, and with curious figures traced in spices on its outward fat; a half, or perchance the whole, of a large salmon, when in season; a bunch of partridges, etc., etc. A screen stands directly before the door, so as to conceal the interior from an outside barbarian. At the counter stand, at almost all hours, — certainly at all hours when I have chanced to observe, — tipplers, either taking a solitary glass, or treating all round, veteran topers, flashy young men, visitors from the country, the various petty officers connected with the law, whom the vicinity of the Court-House brings hither. Chiefly, they drink plain liquors, gin, brandy, or whiskey, sometimes a Tom and Jerry, a gin cocktail (which the bar-tender makes artistically, tossing it in a large parabola from one tumbler to another, until fit for drinking), a brandy-smash, and numerous other concoctions. All this toping goes forward with little or no apparent exhilaration of spirits; nor does this seem to be the object sought, — it being rather, I imagine, to create a titillation of the coats of the stomach and a general sense of invigoration, without affecting the brain. Very seldom does a man grow wild and unruly.

"The inner room is hung round with pictures and engravings of various kinds, — a painting of a premium ox, a lithograph of a Turk and of a Turkish lady, . . . and various showily engraved tailors' advertisements, and other shop-bills; among them all, a small painting of a drunken toper, sleeping on a bench beside the grog-shop, — a ragged, half -hatless, bloated, red-nosed, jolly, miserable-looking devil, very well done, and strangely suitable to the room in which it hangs. Round the walls are placed some half a dozen marble-topped tables, and a center-table in the midst; most of them strewn with theatrical and other show-bills; and the large theater-bills, with their type of gigantic solidity and blackness, hung against the walls. . . .

"Pacing the sidewalk in front of this grog-shop of Parker's (or sometimes, on cold and rainy days, taking his station inside), there is generally to be observed an elderly ragamufhn, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody, but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling into decay (perhaps by dint of too frequent visits at Parker's bar), he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered, 'to collect his rents,' as Parker says, — that is, to catch an occasional nine-pence from some charitable acquaintances, or a glass of liquor at the bar. The word 'ragamuffin,' which I have used above, does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety too, and a kind of decency in his groggy and red-nosed destitution."

In this fresh print from life one recognizes at a glance ''old Moodie," of TJie Blithcdale Romance, on his native or adopted heath, the "saloon," where he was wont to *'lurk." The absence of Moodie, at the moment when, in the romance, the author enters on the scene in search of him, gives an opportunity for a minute description of the saloon, which is an interesting example of how Hawthorne reworked his note-books in more elaborate composition for the press. That autumn foliage, just spread upon the page, is a vista from Blithedale, and could not have been far from "Eliot's pulpit," which is one of the high lights of the rural landscape in the story. In fact, the whole Blithcdale Romance is embedded in contemporaneity to a degree not paralleled in any other of Hawthorne's w^orks, and reproduces scenes from the life of the community in which he lived, that startle the memory by their vivid truth. Their veracity is that of a crude realism.

Blithedale is set in the midst of wood and pasture, and in the breath of agricultural toil. Its story enfolds episodes of quiet beauty and many sentimental delights; but, as to the life depicted, one closes the pages with a prevailing sense of the trivial and the meager, the anaemic, the dingy and the dull

It is intellectually mediocre, and at loose ends ; and, to a degree unusual even in Hawthorne's art, it grows by agglomeration of scene and incident more than by inward development. It shares one great advantage of historical fiction, although it is not history, in that it is based on actual events and social characteristics that had a high interest at the time, and still retain a legendary charm of faded romance; and the opportunity it affords for presenting old New England life, though greatly narrowed by its reform atmosphere, makes it a true chronicle of the time, of permanent local value. It enshrines, as is well known, the economic and spiritual episode of Brook Farm, but rather as a romantic incident in the community than as a material fact. Brook Farm, however, is only the fountain and origin of the story, which wanders off into quiet dreary suburban places and sinks in mean surroundings.