American prose

Front matter

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Contents

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. page

The Geeat Stone Face . . . .32 Drowne's Wooden Image ... 62 Howe's Masquerade . . • ... 82

WASHINGTON IRVING.

Introduction

IT was Hawthorne's wont to keep note-books, in which he recorded his observations and reflections ; sometimes he spoke in them of himself, his plans, and his prospects. He began the practice early, and continued it through life, and after his death selections from these note-books were published in six volumes, under the titles : Passages from the American Note-Boohs of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In these books, and in prefaces which appear in the front of the volumes containing his collected stories, one finds many frank expressions of the interest which Hawthorne took in his work, and the author appeals very ingenuously to the reader, speaking with an almost confidential closeness of his stories and sketches. Then the Note-Books contain the unwrought material of the books which the writer put out in his lifetime. One finds there the suggestions of stories, and frequently pages of 1 observation and reflection, which were afterward transferred, almost as they stood, into the author's works. It is a very interesting labor to trace Hawthorne's stories and sketches back to these records in his note-books, and to compare the finished work with the rough material. It seems, also, as if each reader was admitted into the privacy of the author's mind. That is the first impression, but a closer study reveals two facts very clearly. One is stated by Hawthorne himself in his preface to The Snow- Image and other Twice- Told Tales : "I have been especially careful [in my Introductions] to make no disclosures respecting myself which the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and which I was not perfectly willing that

my worst enemy should know I have taken

facts which relate to myself [when telling stories] because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And, as for egotism, a person who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance — and who pursues his researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as by the light of observation — will smile at incurring such an imputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the surface. These things hide the man instead of displaying him. You must make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits."

There has rarely been a writer of fiction, then, whose personality has been so absolutely separate from that of each character created by him, and at the same time has so intimately penetrated the whole body of his writing. Of no one of his characters, male or female, is one ever tempted to say, This is Hawthorne, except in the case of Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, where the circumstances of the story tempt one into an identification ; yet all of Hawthorne's work is stamped emphatically with his mark. Hawthorne wrote it, is very simple and easy to say of all but the merest trifle in his collected works ; but the world has yet to learn who Hawthorne was, and even if he had not forbidden a biography of himself, it is scarcely likely that any life could have disclosed more than he has chosen himself to reveal.

The advantage of this is that it leaves the student free to concentrate his attention upon the writings rather than on the man. Hawthorne, in the passage quoted above, speaks of himself as one "who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance," and this states, as closely as so short a 'sentence can, the controlling purpose and end of the author. The vitality of Hawthorne's characters is derived but little from any external description ; it resides in the truthfulness with which they respond to some permanent and controlling operation of the human soul. Looking into his own heart, and always, when studying others, in search of fundamental rather than occasional motives, he proceeded to develop these motives in conduct and life. Hence he had a leaning toward the allegory, where human figures are< merely masks for spiritual activities, and sometimes he employed the simple allegory, as in The Celestial Railroad. More often in his short stories he has a spiritual truth to illustrate, and uses the simplest, most direct means, taking no pains to conceal his purpose, yet touching his characters quietly or playfully with human sensibilities, and investing them with just so much real life as answers the purpose of the story. This is exquisitely done in The Snow-Image. The consequence of this " burrowing into the depths of our common nature " has been to bring much of the darker and concealed life into the movement of his stories. The fact of evil is the terrible fact of life, and its workings in the human soul had more interest for Hawthorne than the obvious physical manifestations. Since his observations are less of the men and women whom everybody sees and recognizes than of the souls which are hidden from most eyes, it is not strange that his stories should often lay bare secrets of sin, and that a somewhat dusky light should seem to be the atmosphere of much of his work. Now and then, especially when dealing with childhood, a warm, sunny glow spreads over the pages of his books ; but the reader must be prepared for the most part to read stories which lie in the shadow of life.

There was one class of subjects which had a peculiar interest for Hawthorne, and in a measure affected his work. He had a strong taste for New England history, and he found in the scenes and characters of that history favorable material for the representation of spiritual conflict. He was himself the most New England of New Englanders, and held an extraordinary sympathy with the very soil of his section of the country. By this sympathy, rather than by any painful research, he was singularly acquainted with the historic life of New England. His stories, based directly on historic facts, are true to the spirit of the times in something more than an archaeological way. One is astonished at the ease with which he seized upon characteristic features, and reproduced them in a word or phrase. Merely careful and diligent research would never be adequate to give the life-likeness of the images in Howe's Masquerade.

There is, then, a second fact discovered by a study of Hawthorne, that while one finds in the Note-Books, for example, the material out of which stories and sketches seem to have been constructed, and while the facts of New England history have been used without exaggeration or distortion, the result in stories and romances is something far beyond a mere report of what has been seen and read. The charm of a vivifying imagination is the crowning charm of Hawthorne's stories, and its medium is a graceful and often exquisitely apt diction. Hawthorne's sense of touch as a writer is very fine. He knows when to be light, and when to press heavily ; a very conspicuous quality is what one is likely to term quaintness, — a gentle pleasantry which seems to spring from the author's attitude toward his own work, as if ^he looked upon that, too, as a part of the spiritual universe which he was surveying.

Hawthorne spent much of his life silently, and there are touching passages in his note-books regarding his sense of loneliness and his wish for recognition from the world. His early writings were short stories, sketches, and biographies, scattered in magazines and brought together into Twice-Told Tales, in two volumes, published, the first in 1837, the second in 1842 ; Mosses from an Old Manse, in 1846 ; The Snow-Image and other Twice- Told Tales, in 1851. They had a limited circle of readers. Some recognized his genius, but it was not until the publication of The Scarlet Letter, in 1850, that Hawthorne's name was fairly before the world as a great and original writer of romance. The House of the Seven Gables followed in 1851. The Blithedale Romance in 1852. He spent the years 1853-1860 in Europe, and the immediate result of his life there is in Our Old Home : A Series of English Sketches, published in 1863, and The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni, in 1864. For young people he wrote Grandfather s Chair, a collection of stories from New England history, The Wonder-Booh and Tanglewood Tales, containing stories out of classic mythology. There are a few other scattered writings which have been collected into volumes and published in the complete series of his works.

Hawthorne was born July 4, 1804, and died May 19, 1864.

The student of Hawthorne will find in G. P. Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne, and Henry James Jr.'s Hawthorne, in the series English Men of Letters, material which will assist him. Dr. Holmes published, shortly after Hawthorne's death, a paper of reminiscences which is included in Soundings from the Atlantic ; and Longfellow welcomed Twice- Told Tales with a glowing article in the North American Review, xlviii. 59, which is reproduced in his prose works. The reader will find it an agreeable task to discover what the poets, Longfellow, Lowell, Stedman, and others have said of this man of genius.

I. A Childish Miracle

One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their mother to run out and play m the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an excellent but exceediDgly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration. With a heart about as tender as other people's, he had a head as hard and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother's character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty, — a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.

So Violet and Peony, as I began with saying, besought their mother to let them run and play in the new snow ; for, though it had looked so dreary and dismal, drifting downward out of the gray sky, it had a very cheerful aspect now that the sun was shining on it. The children dwelt in a city, and had no wider play-place than a little garden before the house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a pear-tree and two or three plum-trees overshadowing it, and some rose-bushes just in front of the parlor windows. The trees and shrubs, however, were now leafless, and their twigs were enveloped in the light snow, which thus made a kind of wintry foliage, with here and there a pendent icicle for the fruit.

" Yes, Violet, — yes, my little Peony," said their kind mother ; " you may go out and play in the new snow."

Accordingly, the good lady bundled up her darlings in woollen jackets and wadded sacks, and put comforters round their necks, and a pair of striped gaiters on each little pair of legs, and worsted mittens on their hands, and gave them a kiss apiece, by way of a spell to keep away Jack Frost. Forth sallied the two children, with a hop-skip-and-jump that carried them at once into the very heart of a huge snow-drift, whence Violet emerged like a snowbunting, while little Peony floundered out with his round face in full bloom. Then what a merry time had they ! To look at them, frolicking in the wintry garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for Violet and Peony ; and that they themselves had been created, as the snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white mantle which it spread over the earth.

At last, when they had frosted one another all over with handfuls of snow, Violet, after laughing heartily at little Peony's figure, was struck with a new idea.

" You look exactly like a snow-image, Peony," said she, " if your cheeks were not so red. And that puts me in mind ! Let us make an image out of snow, — an image of a little girl, — and it shall be our sister, and shall run about and play with us all winter long. Won't it be nice ? "

" Oh, yes ! " cried Peony, as plainly as he could speak, for he was but a little boy. " That will be nice ! And mamma shall see it ! "

" Yes," answered Violet ; " mamma shall see the new little girl. But she must not make her come into the warm parlor ; for, you know, our little snow-sister will not love the warmth."

And forthwith the children began this great business of making a snow-image that should run about ;

while their mother, who was sitting at the window and overheard some of their talk, could not help smiling at the gravity with which they set about it. They really seemed to imagine that there would be no difficulty whatever in creating a live little girl out of the snow. And to say the truth, if miracles are ever to be wrought, it will be by putting our hands to the work in precisely such a simple and undoubting frame of mind as that in which Violet and Peony now undertook to perform one, without so much as knowing that it was a miracle. So thought the mother ; and thought, likewise, that the new snow, just fallen from heaven, would be excellent material to make new beings of, if it were not so very cold. She gazed at the children a moment longer, delighting to watch their little figures, — the girl, tall for her age, graceful and agile, and so delicately colored that she looked like a cheerful thought, more than a physical reality ; while Peony expanded in breadth rather than height, and rolled along on his short and sturdy legs as substantial as an elephant, though not quite so big. Then the mother resumed her work; what it was I forget, but she was either trimming a silken bonnet for Violet, or darning a pair of stockings for little Peony's short legs. Again, however, and again, and yet other agains, she could not help turning her head to the window to see how the children got on with their snow-image.

Indeed, it was an exceedingly pleasant sight, those bright little souls at their tasks ! Moreover, it was really wonderful to observe how knowingly and skilfully they managed the matter. Violet assumed the chief direction, and told Peony what to do, while, with her own delicate fingers, she shaped out all the nicer parts of the snow-figure. It seemed, in fact, not so much to be made by the children, as to grow up under their hands, while they were playing and prattling about it. Their mother was auite surprised at this ; and the longer she looked the more and more surprised she grew.

" What remarkable children mine are ! " thought she, smiling with a mother's pride ; and, smiling at herself, too, for being so proud of them. " What other children could have made anything so like a little girl's figure out of snow at the first trial ? Well ; — but now I must finish Peony's new frock, for his grandfather is coming to-morrow, and I want the little fellow to look handsome."

So she took up the frock, and was soon as busily at work again with her needle as the two children with their snow-image. But still, as the needle travelled hither and thither through the seams of the dress, the mother made her toil light and happy by listening to the airy voices of Violet and Peony. They kept talking to one another all the time, their tongues being quite as active as their feet and hands. Except at intervals, she could not distinctly hear what was said, but had merely a sweet impression that they were in a most loving mood, and were enjoying themselves highly, and that the business of making the snow-image went prosperously on.

Now and then, however, when Violet and Peony happened to raise their voices, the words were as audible as if they had been spoken in the very parlor where the mother sat. Oh, how delightfully those words echoed in her heart, even though they meant nothing so very wise or wonderful, after

all !

But you must know a mother listens with her heart much more than with her ears ; and thus she is often delighted with the trills of celestial music, when other people can hear nothing of the kind.

" Peony, Peony ! " cried Violet to her brother, who had gone to another part of the garden, " bring me some of that fresh snow, Peony, from the very farthest corner, where we have not been trampling. I want it to shape our little snow-sister's bosom with. You know that part must be quite pure, just as it came out of the sky ! "

" Here it is, Violet ! " answered Peony, in his bluff tone, — but a very sweet tone, too, — as he came floundering through the half-trodden drifts. " Here is the snow for her little bosom. O Violet, how b'eau-ti-ful she begins to look ! "

"Yes," said Violet, thoughtfully and quietly; " our snow-sister does look very lovely. I did not quite know, Peony, that we could make such a sweet little girl as this."

The mother, as she listened, thought how fit and delightful an incident it would be, if fairies, or, still better, if angel-children were to come from paradise and play invisibly with her own darlings, and help them to make their snow-image, giving it the features of celestial babyhood ! Violet and Peony would not be aware of their immortal playmates, — only they would see that the image grew very beautiful while they worked at it, and would think that they themselves had done it all.

" My little girl and boy deserve such playmates, if mortal children ever did ! " said the mother to herself; and then she smiled again at her own motherly pride.

Nevertheless, the idea seized upon her imagination ; and, ever and anon, she took a glimpse out of the window, half dreaming that she might see the golden-haired children of paradise sporting with her own golden-haired Violet and bright-cheeked Peony.

Now, for a few moments, there was a busy and earnest, but indistinct, hum of the two children's voices, as Violet and Peony wrought together with one happy consent. Violet still seemed to be the guiding spirit, while Peony acted rather as a laborer, and brought her the snow from far and near. And yet the little urchin evidently had a proper understanding of the matter, too !

" Peony, Peony ! " cried Violet ; for her brother was again at the other side of the garden. " BriEg me those light wreaths of snow that have rested on the lower branches of the pear-tree. You can. clamber on the snow-drift, Peony, and reach them easily. I must have them to make some ringlets for our snow-sister's head ! "

" Here they are, Violet ! " answered the little boy. " Take care you do not break them. Well done ! "Well done ! How pretty ! "

" Does she not look sweetly ? " said Violet, with a very satisfied tone ; " and now we must have some little shining bits of ice, to make the brightness of her eyes. She is not finished yet. Mamma will see how very beautiful she is ; but papa will say, * Tush ! nonsense ! — come in out of the cold ! ' "

" Let us call mamma to look out," said Peony ; and then he shouted lustily, "Mamma! mamma! ! mamma ! ! ! Look out, and see what a nice little girl we are making ! "

The mother put down her work, for an instant, and looked out of the window. But it so happened that the sun — for this was one of the shortest days of the whole year — had sunken so nearly to the edge of the world that his setting shine came obliquely into the lady's eyes. So she was dazzled, you must understand, and could not very distinctly observe what was in the garden. Still, however, through all that bright, blinding dazzle of the sun and the new snow she beheld a small white figure in the garden that seemed to have a wonderful deal of human likeness about it. And she saw Violet and Peony, — indeed, she looked more at them than at the image, — she saw the two children still at work ; Peony bringing fresh snow, and Violet applying it to the figure as scientifically as a sculptor adds clay to his model.. Indistinctly as she discerned the snow-child, the mother thought to herself that never before was there a snow-figure so cunningly made, nor ever such a dear little girl and boy to make it.

" They do everything better than other children," said she, very complacently. " No wonder they make better snow-images ! "

She sat down again to the work, and made as much haste with it as possible; because twilight would soon come, and Peony's frock was not yet finished, and grandfather was expected, by railroad, pretty early in the morning. Faster and faster, therefore, went her flying fingers. The children, likewise, kept busily at work in the garden, and still the mother listened, whenever she could catch a word. She was amused to observe how their little imaginations had got mixed up with what they were doing, and were carried away by it. They seemed positively to think that the snow-child would run about and play with them.

" What a nice playmate she will be for us, all winter long ! " said Violet. " I hope papa will not be afraid of her giving us a cold ! Shan't you ' love her dearly, Peony ? "

" Oh, yes ! " cried Peony. "And I will hug her, and she shall sit down close by me, and drink some of my warm milk ! "

" Oh, no, Peony ! " answered Violet, with grave wisdom. " That will not do at all. Warm milk will not be wholesome for our little snow-sister. Little snow-people, like her, eat nothing but icicles. No, no, Peony; we must not give her anything warm to drink ! "

There was a minute or two of silence ; for Peony, whose short legs were never weary, had gone on a pilgrimage again to the other side of the garden. All of a sudden Violet cried out, loudly and joyfully, —

" Look here, Peony ! Come quickly ! A light has been shining on her cheek out of that rosecolored cloud ! and the color does not go away ! Is not that beautiful ! "

" Yes ; it is beau-ti-ful," answered Peony, pronouncing the three syllables with deliberate accuracy. " O Violet, only look at her hair ! It is all like gold ! "

" Oh, certainly," said Violet, with tranquillity, as if it were very much a matter of course. " That color, you know, comes from the golden clouds that we see up there in the sky. She is almost finished now. But her lips must be made very red, — redder than her cheeks. Perhaps, Peony, it will make them red if we both kiss them ! "

Accordingly, the mother heard two smart little smacks, as if both her children were kissing the snow-image on its frozen mouth. But, as this did not seem to make the lips quite red enough, Violet next proposed that the snow-child should be invited to kiss Peony's scarlet cheek.

" Come, 'ittle snow-sister, kiss me ! " cried Peony.

"There! she has kissed you," added Violet, " and now her lips are very red. And she blushed a little, too ! "

" Oh, what a cold kiss ! " cried Peony. 2

Just then came a breeze of the pure west-wind, sweeping through the garden and rattling the parlor windows. It sounded so wintry cold that the mother was about to tap on the window-pane with her thimbled finger, to summon the two children in, when they both cried out to her with one voice. The tone was not a tone of surprise, although they were evidently a good deal excited ; it appeared rather as if they were very much rejoiced at some event that had now happened, but which they had been looking for, and had reckoned upon all along.

" Mamma! mamma ! We have finished our little snow-sister, and she is running about the garden with us ! "

" What imaginative little beings my children are ! " thought the mother, putting the last few stitches into Peony's frock. " And it is strange, too, that they make me almost as much a child as they themselves are ! I can hardly help believing, now, that the snow-image has really come to life ! "

" Dear mamma ! " cried Violet, " pray look out and see what a sweet playmate we have ! "

The mother, being thus entreated, could no longer delay to look forth from the window. The sun was now gone out of the sky, leaving, however, a rich inheritance of his brightness among those purple and golden clouds which make the sunsets of winter so magnificent. But there was not the slightest gleam or dazzle, either on the window or on the snow ; so that the good lady could look all over the garden, and see everything ana" everybody in it. And what do you think she saw there ? Violet and Peony, of course, her own two darling children. Ah, but whom or what did she see besides ? Why, if you will believe me, there was a small figure of a girl, dressed all in white, with rose-tinged cheeks and ringlets of golden hue, playing about the garden with the two children ! A stranger though she was, the child seemed to be on as familiar terms with Violet and Peony, and they with her, as if all the three had been playmates during the whole of their little lives. The mother thought to herself that it must certainly be the daughter of one of the neighbors, and that, seeing Violet and Peony in the garden, the child had run across the street to play with them. So this kind lady went to the door, intending to invite the little runaway into her comfortable parlor; for, now that the sunshine was withdrawn, the atmosphere out of doors was already growing very cold.

But, after opening the house-door, she stood an instant on the threshold, hesitating whether she ought to ask the child to come in, or whether she should even speak to her. Indeed, she almost doubted whether it were a real child, after all, or only a light wreath of the new-fallen snow, blown hither and thither about the garden by the intensely cold west-wind. There was certainly something very singular in the aspect of the little stranger. Among all the children of the neighborhood, the lady could remember no such face, with its pure white, and delicate rose-color, and the golden ringlets tossing about the forehead and cheeks. And as for her dress, which was entirely of white, and fluttering in the breeze, it was such as no reasonable woman would put upon a little girl, when sending her out to play, in the depth of winter. It made this kind and careful mother shiver only to look at those small feet, with nothing in the world on them except a very thin pair of white slippers. Nevertheless, airily as she was clad, the child seemed to feel not the slightest inconvenience from the cold, but danced so lightly over the snow that the tips of her toes left hardly a print in its surface ; while Violet could but just keep pace with her, and Peony's short legs compelled him to lag behind.