A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne

F >> Frank Preston Stearns >> The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne




It is the same, more or less, all over the civilized world. We have
entered into a mechanical age, which is natural enough considering the
rapid advances of science and the numerous mechanical inventions, but
which is decidedly unfavorable to the development of art and
literature. Everything now goes by machinery, from Harvard University
to Ohio politics and the gigantic United States Steel Company; and
every man has to find his place in some machine or other, or he is
thrown out of line. Individual effort, as well as independence of
thought and action, is everywhere frowned upon; but without freedom of
thought and action there can be no great individualities, which is the
same as saying that there can be no poets like Longfellow, or writers
like Hawthorne and Emerson. Spontaneity is the life of the true artist,
and in a mechanical civilization there can be neither spontaneity nor
the poetic material which is essential to artistic work of a high
order. There can be no great orators, for masses of men are no longer
influenced by oratory, but by newspapers. Genius is like a plant of
slow growth, which requires sunshine and Mother Earth to nourish it,
not chemicals and electric lights.




CHAPTER IV

LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835


During the War of the American Revolution, the officers of the French
fleet, which was stationed at Newport, invented a game of cards, called
"Boston," of which one peculiarity was, that under certain conditions,
whoever held the lowest hand would win the count. This was called
"Little Misery," and this was the kind of hand which Nathaniel
Hawthorne had to play for fifteen years after leaving Bowdoin College.
Only his indomitable will could have carried him through it.

A college graduate who lacks the means to study a profession, and who
has no influential relative to make a place for him in the world, finds
himself in a most discouraging position. The only thing that his
education has fitted him to do is, to teach school, and he may not be
adapted to this, on account of some personal peculiarity. There was,
and I suppose is still, a prejudice among mercantile men against
college graduates, as a class of proud, indolent, neglectful persons,
very difficult to instruct. Undoubtedly there are many such, but the
innocent have to suffer with the guilty. It is natural that a man who
has not had a liberal education should object to employing a
subordinate who knows Latin and Greek. Whether Hawthorne's Uncle
Robert, who had thus far proved to be his guardian genius, would have
educated him for a profession, we have no means of knowing. This would
mean of course a partial support for years afterward, and it is quite
possible that Mr. Manning considered his duties to his own children
paramount to it. What he did for Nathaniel may have been the best he
could, to give him the position of book-keeper for the stage-company.
This was of course Pegasus in harness (or rather at the hitching-post),
but it is excellent experience for every young man; although the
compensation in Hawthorne's case was small and there could be no
expectation of future advancement.

In this dilemma he decided to do the one thing for which Nature
intended him,--to become a writer of fiction,--and he held fast to this
determination in the face of most discouraging obstacles. He composed a
series of short stories,--echoes of his academic years,--which he
proposed to publish under the title of Wordsworth's popular poem, "We
Are Seven." One of these is said to have been based on the witchcraft
delusion, and it is a pity that it should not have been preserved, but
their feminine titles afford no indication of their character. He carried
them to a publisher, who received him politely and promised to examine
them, but one month passed after another without Hawthorne's hearing from
him, so that he concluded at length to make inquiries. [Footnote: J.
Hawthorne, i. 124.] The publisher confessed that he had not even undertaken
to read them, and Nathaniel carried them back, with a sinking heart, to
his little chamber in the house on Herbert Street,--where he may have
had melancholy thoughts enough for the next few weeks.

Youth, however, soon outgrows its chagrins. In less than two years
Hawthorne was prepared to enter the literary lists, equipped with a
novelette, called "Fanshawe"; but here again he was destined to meet
with a rebuff. After tendering it to a number of publishers without
encouragement, he concluded to take the risk of publishing it himself.
This only cost him a few hundred dollars, but the result was
unsatisfactory, and he afterward destroyed all the copies that he could
regain possession of.

Hawthorne's genius was of slow development. He was only twenty-four
when he published this rather immature work, and it might have been
better if he had waited longer. It was to him what the "Sorrows of
Werther" was to Goethe, but while the "Sorrows of Werther" made Goethe
famous in many countries, "Fanshawe" fell still-born. The latter was
not more imitative of Scott than the "Sorrows of Werther" is of
Rousseau, and now that we consider it in the cool critical light of the
twentieth century, we cannot but wonder that the "Sorrows of Werther"
ever produced such enthusiasm. It is quite as difficult to see why
"Fanshawe" should not have proved a success. It lacks the grace and
dignity of Hawthorne's mature style, but it has an ingenious plot, a
lively action, and is written in sufficiently good English. One would
suppose that its faults would have helped to make it popular, for
portions of it are so exciting as to border closely on the sensational.
It may be affirmed that when a novel becomes so exciting that we wish
to turn over the pages and anticipate the conclusion, either the action
of the story is too heated or its incidents are too highly colored. The
introduction of pirates in a work of fiction is decidely sensational,
from Walter Scott downward, and, though Hawthorne never fell into this
error, he approaches closely to it in "Fanshawe." There is some dark
secret between the two villains of the piece, which he leaves to the
reader as an exercise for the imagination. This is a characteristic of
all his longer stories. There is an unknown quantity, an insoluble
point, in them, which tantalizes the reader.

What we especially feel in "Fanshawe" is the author's lack of social
experience. His heroine at times behaves in a truly feminine manner,
and at others her performances make us shiver. Her leaving her
guardian's house at midnight to go off with an unknown man, whom her
maidenly instinct should have taught her to distrust, even if Fanshawe
had not warned her against him, might have been characteristic of the
Middle Ages, but is certainly not of modern life. Bowdoin College
evidently served Hawthorne as a background to his plot, although
removed some distance into the country, and it is likely that the
portrait of the kindly professor might have been recognized there.
Ward's Tavern serves for the public-house where the various characters
congregate, and there is a high rocky ledge in the woods, or what used
to be woods at Brunswick, where the students often tried their skill in
climbing, and which Hawthorne has idealized into the cliff where the
would-be abductor met his timely fate. The trout-brook where Bridge and
Hawthorne used to fish is also introduced.

Fanshawe himself seems like a house of which only two sides have been
built. There are such persons, and it is no wonder if they prove to be
short-lived. Yet the scene in which he makes his noble renunciation of
the woman who is devoted to him, purely from a sense of gratitude, is
finely and tenderly drawn, and worthy of Hawthorne in his best years.
The story was republished after its author's death, and fully deserves
its position in his works.

It was about this time (1827) that Nathaniel Hathorne changed his name
to Hawthorne. No reason has ever been assigned for his doing so, and he
had no legal right to do it without an act of the Legislature, but he
took a revolutionary right, and as his family and fellow-citizens
acquiesced in this, it became an established fact. His living relatives
in the Manning family are unable to explain his reason for it. It may
have been for the sake of euphony, or he may have had a fanciful
notion, that such a change would break the spell which seemed to be
dragging his family down with him. Conway's theory that it was intended
to serve him as an incognito is quite untenable. His name first appears
with a _w_ in the Bowdoin Triennial Catalogue of 1828.

There are very few data existing as to Hawthorne's life during his
first ten years of manhood, but it must have been a hard, dreary period
for him. The Manning children, Robert, Elizabeth and Rebecca, were now
growing up, and must have been a source of entertainment in their way,
and his sister Louisa was always a comfort; but Horatio Bridge, who
made a number of flying visits to him, states that he never saw the
elder sister, even at table,--a fact from which we may draw our own
conclusions. Hawthorne had no friends at this time, except his college
associates, and they were all at a distance,--Pierce and Cilley both
flourishing young lawyers, one at Concord, New Hampshire, and the other
at Thomaston, Maine,--while Longfellow was teaching modern languages at
Bowdoin. He had no lady friends to brighten his evenings for him, and
if he went into society, it was only to be stared at for his personal
beauty, like a jaguar in a menagerie. He had no fund of the small
conversation which serves like oil to make the social machinery run
smoothly. Like all deep natures, he found it difficult to adapt himself
to minds of a different calibre. Salem people noticed this, and his
apparent lack of an object in life,--for he maintained a profound
secrecy in regard to his literary efforts,--and concluded that he was
an indolent young man without any faculty for business, and would never
come to good in this world. No doubt elderly females admonished him for
neglecting his opportunities, and small wits buzzed about him as they
have about many another under similar conditions. It was Hans
Andersen's story of the ugly duck that proved to be a swan.

No wonder that Hawthorne betook himself to the solitude of his own
chamber, and consoled himself like the philosopher who said, "When I am
alone, then I am least alone." He had an internal life with which only
his most intimate friends were acquainted, and he could people his room
with forms from his own fancy, much more real to him than the palpable
_ignota_ whom he passed in the street. Beautiful visions came to
him, instead of sermonizing ladies, patronizing money-changers,
aggressive upstarts, grimacing wiseacres, and that large class of
amiable, well-meaning persons that makes up the bulk of society. We
should not be surprised if angels sometimes came to hover round him,
for to the pure in heart heaven descends upon earth.

There is a passage in Hawthorne's diary under date of October 4, 1840,
which has often been quoted; but it will have to be quoted again, for
it cannot be read too often, and no biography of him would be adequate
without it. He says:

"Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber where I used to sit in days
gone by....This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands
upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of
them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a
biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my
memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here
my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and
hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long
time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes
wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know
me at all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed
as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled
and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least as happy as I then
knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by,
the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not
indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small
voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought
preferable to my solitude till now ... and now I begin to understand
why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I
could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had
sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and
rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have
become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in
solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my
youth, and the freshness of my heart."

During these dismal years Horatio Bridge was Hawthorne's good genius.
The letters that Hawthorne wrote to him have not been preserved, but we
may judge of their character by Bridge's replies to him--always frank,
manly, sympathetic and encouraging. Hawthorne evidently confided his
troubles and difficulties to Bridge, as he would to an elder brother.
Bridge finally destroyed Hawthorne's letters, not so much on account of
their complaining tone as for the personalities they contained;
[Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 69.] and this suggests to us that there was
still another side to Hawthorne's life at this epoch concerning which
we shall never be enlightened. A man could not have had a better friend
than Horatio Bridge. He was to Hawthorne what Edward Irving was to
Carlyle; and the world is more indebted to them both than it often
realizes.

There is in fact a decided similarity between the lives of Carlyle and
Hawthorne, in spite of radical differences in their work and
characters. Both started at the foot of the ladder, and met with a
hard, long struggle for recognition; both found it equally difficult to
earn their living by their pens; both were assisted by most devoted
friends, and both finally achieved a reputation among the highest in
their own time. If there is sometimes a melancholy tinge in their
writings, may we wonder at it? Pericles said, "We need the theatre to
chase away the sadness of life," and it might have benefited the whole
Hawthorne family to have gone to the theatre once a fortnight; but
there were few entertainments in Salem, except of the stiff
conventional sort, or in the shape of public dances open to firemen and
shop-girls. Long afterward, Elizabeth Hawthorne wrote of her brother:

"His habits were as regular as possible. In the evening after tea he
went out for about an hour, whatever the weather was; and in winter,
after his return, he ate a pint bowl of thick chocolate--(not cocoa,
but the old-fashioned chocolate) crumbed full of bread: eating never
hurt him then, and he liked good things. In summer he ate something
equivalent, finishing with fruit in the season of it. In the evening we
discussed political affairs, upon which we differed in opinion; he
being a Democrat, and I of the opposite party. In reality, his interest
in such things was so slight that I think nothing would have kept it
alive but my contentious spirit. Sometimes, when he had a book that he
particularly liked, he would not talk. He read a great many novels."
[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 125.]

If Elizabeth possessed the genius which her brother supposed, she
certainly does not indicate it in this letter; but genius in the ore is
very different from genius smelted and refined by effort and
experience. The one important fact in her statement is that Hawthorne
was in the habit of taking solitary rambles after dark,--an owlish
practice, but very attractive to romantic minds. Human nature appears
in a more pictorial guise by lamplight, after the day's work is over.
The groups at the street corners, the glittering display in the
watchmaker's windows, the carriages flashing by and disappearing in the
darkness, the mysterious errands of foot-passengers, all served as
object-lessons for this student of his own kind.

Jonathan Cilley once said:

"I love Hawthorne; I admire him; but I do not know him. He lives in a
mysterious world of thought and imagination which he never permits me
to enter." [Footnote: Packard's "Bowdoin College," 306.]

Long-continued thinking is sure to take effect at last, either in words
or in action, and Hawthorne's mind had to disburden itself in some
manner. So, after the failure of "Fanshawe," he returned to his
original plan of writing short stories, and this time with success. In
January, 1830, the well-known tale of "The Gentle Boy" was accepted by
S. G. Goodrich, the editor of a Boston publication called the
_Token_, who was himself better known in those days under the
_nom de plume_ of "Peter Parley." "The Wives of the Dead," "Roger
Malvin's Burial," and "Major Molineaux" soon followed. In 1833 he
published the "Seven Vagabonds," and some others. The New York
_Knickerbocker_ published the "Fountain of Youth" and "Edward
Fayne's Rosebud." After 1833 the _Token_ and the _New England
Magazine_ [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 175.] stood ready to accept
all the short pieces that Hawthorne could give them, but they did not
encourage him to write serial stories. However, it was not the custom
then for writers to sign their names to magazine articles, so that
Hawthorne gained nothing in reputation by this. Some of his earliest
pieces were printed over the signature of "Oberon."

An autumn expedition to the White Mountains, Lake Champlain and Lake
Ontario, and Niagara Falls, in 1832, raised Hawthorne's spirits and
stimulated his ambition. He wrote to his mother from Burlington,
Vermont, September 16:

"I have arrived in safety, having passed through the White Hills,
stopping at Ethan Crawford's house, and climbing Mt. Washington. I have
not decided as to my future course. I have no intention of going into
Canada. I have heard that cholera is prevalent in Boston."

It was something to have stood on the highest summit east of the Rocky
Mountains, and to have seen all New England lying at his feet. A hard
wind in the Crawford Notch, which he describes in his story of "The
Ambitious Guest," must have been in his own experience, and as he
passed the monument of the ill-fated Willey family he may have thought
that he too might become celebrated after his death, even as they were
from their poetic catastrophe. This expedition provided him with the
materials for a number of small plots.

The ice was now broken; but a new class of difficulties arose before
him. American literature was then in the bud and promised a beautiful
blossoming, but the public was not prepared for it. Monthly magazines
had a precarious existence, and their uncertainty of remuneration
reacted on the contributors. Hawthorne was poorly paid, often obliged
to wait a long time for his pay, and occasionally lost it altogether.
For his story of "The Gentle Boy," one of the gems of literature, which
ought to be read aloud every year in the public schools, he received
the paltry sum of thirty-five dollars. Evidently he could not earn even
a modest maintenance on such terms, and his letters to Bridge became
more despondent than ever.

Goodrich, who was a writer of the Andrews Norton class, soon perceived
that Hawthorne could make better sentences than his own, and engaged
him to write historical abstracts for his pitiful Peter Parley books,
paying him a hundred dollars for the whole work, and securing for
himself all the credit that appertained to it. Everybody knew who Peter
Parley was, but it has only recently been discovered that much of the
literature which passed under his name was the work of Nathaniel
Hawthorne.

The editor of a New York magazine to which Hawthorne contributed a
number of sketches repeatedly deferred the payment for them, and
finally confessed his inability to make it,--which he probably knew or
intended beforehand. Then, with true metropolitan assurance, he begged
of Hawthorne the use of certain unpublished manuscripts, which he still
had in his possession. Hawthorne with unlimited contempt told the
fellow that he might keep them, and then wrote to Bridge:

"Thus has this man, who would be considered a Mæcenas, taken from a
penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain
can supply." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 68, 69.]

Whether this New York periodical was the _Knickerbocker_ or some
other, we are not informed; neither do we know what Bridge replied to
Hawthorne, who had closed his letter with a malediction, on the
aforesaid editor, but elsewhere in his memoirs he remarks:

"Hawthorne received but small compensation for any of this literary
work, for he lacked the knowledge of business and the self-assertion
necessary to obtain even the moderate remuneration vouchsafed to
writers fifty years ago." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 77.]

If Horatio Bridge had been an author himself, he would not have written
this statement concerning his friend. Magazine editors are like men in
other professions: some of them are honorable and others are less so;
but an author who offers a manuscript to the editor of a magazine is
wholly at his mercy, so far as that small piece of property is
concerned. The author cannot make a bargain with the editor as he can
with the publisher of his book, and is obliged to accept whatever the
latter chooses to give him. Instances have been known where an editor
has destroyed a valuable manuscript, without compensation or
explanation of any kind. Hawthorne was doing the best that a human
being could under the conditions that were given him. Above all things,
he was true to himself; no man could be more so.

Yet Bridge wrote to him on Christmas Day, 1836:

"The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back
for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would long
ago have given you what you must now wait a long time for. It may be
for the best, but I doubt it."

Nothing is more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of
well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect
Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop
the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone
broker, was unreasonable. In the phraseology of Sir William Hamilton,
the two vocations are "non-compossible." Bridge himself was undertaking
a grandly unpractical project about this time: nothing less than an
attempt to dam the Androscoggin, a river liable to devastating floods;
and in this enterprise he was obliged to trust to a class of men who
were much more uncertain in their ways and methods than those with whom
Hawthorne dealt. Horatio Bridge had not studied civil engineering, and
the result was that before two years had elapsed the floods on the
Androscoggin swept the dam away, and his fortune with it.

In the same letter we also notice this paragraph concerning another
Bowdoin friend:

"And so Frank Pierce is elected Senator. There is an instance of what a
man can do by trying. With no very remarkable talents, he at the age of
thirty-four fills one of the highest stations in the nation. He is a
good fellow, and I rejoice at his success." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i.
148.]

Pierce certainly possessed the cap of Fortunatus, and it seems as if
there must have been some magic faculty in the man, which enabled him
to win high positions so easily; and he continued to do this, although
he had not distinguished himself particularly as a member of Congress,
and he appeared to still less advantage among the great party leaders
in the United States Senate. He illustrated the faculty for "getting
elected."

In October, 1836, the time arrived for settling the matrimonial wager
between Hawthorne and Jonathan Cilley, which they had made at college
twelve years before. Bridge accordingly examined the documents which
they had deposited with him, and notified Cilley that he was under
obligation to provide Hawthorne with an octavo of Madeira.

Cilley's letter to Hawthorne on this occasion does not impress one
favorably. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 144.] It is familiar and jocose,
without being either witty or friendly, and he gives no intimation in
it of an intention to fulfil his promise. Hawthorne appears to have
sent the letter to Bridge, who replied:

"I doubt whether you ever get your wine from Cilley. His inquiring of
you whether he had really lost the bet is suspicious; and he has
written me in a manner inconsistent with an intention of paying
promptly; and if a bet grows old it grows cold. He wished me to propose
to you to have it paid at Brunswick next Commencement, and to have as
many of our classmates as could be mustered to drink it. It may be
Cilley's idea to pay over the balance after taking a strong pull at it;
if so, it is well enough. But still it should be tendered within the
month."

In short, Cilley behaved in this matter much in the style of a tricky
Van Buren politician, making a great bluster of words, and privately
intending to do nothing. He was running for Congress at the time on the
Van Buren ticket, and it is quite likely that the expenses of the
campaign had exhausted his funds. That he should never have paid the
bet was less to Hawthorne's disadvantage than his own.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.