XXVI

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

MANY of the makers of literature in the first half of the nineteenth century had searched diligently for fresh material in the new country. Some had found it in the Indian, and others in the war for independence, or in life and adventures on the frontier. At last a New Englander appeared who found in the bleak and dreary existence of the first settlers the germ of the greatest romances that have been written on American soil.

It was fit that he should be born in Salem, the next town to be settled after Plymouth. Believers in heredity will think that one in whose veins the bluest blood of the Puritans ran was best able to understand their bigoted righteousness on the one hand and on the other their strict conscientiousness.

Early Years and Writings.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in 1804, a year later than Emerson, was the descendant of six generations of seafaring men, who had their homes in the old town. A remote ancestor had been a judge who had sentenced unhappy victims of the witchcraft delusion to be hanged. A gloom as of remorse seems to have descended with the race. It was not dissipated by the seclusion in which the mother of Hawthorne kept herself after his father's death on a South American voyage. The boy's free life for a few years in the Maine lake and woods country, where the family had an estate, was good for his

physique and his reflective faculties, but not for companionable qualities. If these were developed by four years at Bowdoin College, they certainly were not by ten subsequent years of seclusion in the Salem home. But the three periods together prepared him for the highest achievement in the single direction in which he chose to work for over thirty years.

He began writing in the retirement of the Salem house after his graduation. For ten years in the privacy of his room he wrote stories and burned most of them. Occasionally one would get into the " Salem Gazette," the " Knickerbocker Magazine," the "Token," or the "Era" over an anonymous signature, but more of them went up the chimney, leaving behind, however, the strength which practice gives. After three years of working and waiting the youthful author tested his accumulations of power by publishing "Fanshawe," a story of college days. The limited demand for it showed him that his time for recognition had not yet come. So he continued to labor for nine more years of apprenticeship to his profession at that time an unpromising one. At the end of this period, in 1837, the first volume of "Twice-Told Tales" appeared, and the world knew, if Hawthorne did not, that patience had done its perfect work. Not that he had attained the preeminence of a later achievement, but that in the domain of the sketch he had surpassed the efforts of his predecessor, Irving. Many of these short stories had been printed in various publications without attracting attention, but when gathered in a volume they seemed suddenly to acquire an importance previously undiscovered.

No one can say how long the author would have had to wait for recognition had not his friend Bridge confidentially

assured a hesitating publisher that he would assume the risk of a first edition. It was he who, as a classmate in college, had constantly insisted that HawDelay of Recognition. thorne should be a writer of romance, and upon him Hawthorne playfully charges the responsibility of his choice of literature as a vocation. But his immediate success was doubtful to the author himself. In the preface to a later edition of his first book he wrote: "The author has a claim to one distinction which none of his literary brethren will care about disputing with him. He was for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in America. Throughout the time above specified he had no incitement to literary effort in a reasonable prospect of reputation or profit, nothing but the pleasure itself of composition, which in the long run will hardly keep the chill out of a writer's heart or the numbness out of his fingers. To this total lack of sympathy the public owe it that the author can show nothing for the thought and industry of that portion of his life save the forty sketches included in these volumes."

There have been many young writers since his day who would have been repaid for a dozen years of labor by such a product, but there are few who would have persevered under the same depressing conditions. Despite his genuine modesty he had an assuring confidence in his own gifts which carried him on through the laborious years until recognition came. He could say of them long after in a letter dedicatory to his friend Bridge:

"But was there ever such a weary delay in obtaining the slightest recognition from the public as in my case? I sat down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment. . . . And there, perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment if it had not been for you." This

was written fourteen years after the first volume of the "Tales" was published, when others were added under the title of the "Snow Image." Some of them were among the earliest that he wrote and some of later composition. With some he is disposed to quarrel because of their early faults and with others because they approach so nearly to the best he can now achieve. To many writers it is gratifying that such an artist as Hawthorne could say: "The ripened autumnal fruit tastes but little better than the early windfalls." Those who in 1837 read the first collection of the stories might have predicted what would be the output of a writer who must have seemed to appear suddenly and full-fledged among them. Old New England is portrayed in the first sketch and introduced in its first sentence. "The Gray Champion " links the province with the mother country, and the administration of Sir Edmund Andros with the spirit of resistance to tyranny which resulted in eventual independence. It was the commonwealth against the Stuarts on American territory, with an Ironside patriarch, or the ghost of him, as leader of the independents.

"Stand!' cried he.

"At the old man's word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still. That stately form combining the leader and the saint, so gray, so dimly seen, in such an ancient garb, could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause, whom the oppressor's drum had summoned from his grave. They raised a shout of awe and exultation, and looked for the deliverance of New England... .One would have thought that the dark old man was chief ruler there, and that the Governor and Council, with soldiers at their back, representing the whole power and authority of the Crown had no alternative but obedience.

"What does this old fellow here?' cried Edward Randolph, fiercely. 'On, Sir Edmund! Bid the soldiers forward, and give the dotard the same choice that you gave all his countrymen - to stand aside or be trampled on!'

"Nay, nay, let us show respect to the good grandsire,' said Bullivant, laughing. See you not, he is some old roundhead dignitary who hath lain asleep these thirty years, and knows nothing of the change of times? Doubtless, he thinks to put us down with a proclamation in old Noll's name.'

"Are you mad, old man?' demanded Sir Edmund Andros. 'How dare you stay the march of King James's Governor?' "I have stayed the march of a King himself, ere now,' replied the gray figure, with stern composure. 'I am here, Sir Governor, because the cry of an oppressed people hath disturbed me in my secret place; and, beseeching this favor earnestly of the Lord, it was vouchsafed me to appear once again on earth, in the good old cause of his saints. . . . Back, thou that wast a Governor, back! With this night thy power is ended- -to-morrow, the prison ! - back, lest I foretell the scaffold!'

Sir

"The people had been drawing nearer and nearer. They confronted the soldiers, not wholly without arms, and ready to convert the very stones of the street into deadly weapons. Edmund Andros looked at the old man; then he cast his hard and cruel eye over the multitude, and beheld them burning with that lurid wrath, so difficult to kindle or to quench; but whether the oppressor were overawed by the Gray Champion's look, or perceived his peril in the threatening attitude of the people, it is certain that he gave back, and ordered his soldiers to commence a slow and guarded retreat. Before another sunset, the Governor, and all that rode so proudly with him, were prisoners, and long ere it was known that James had abdicated, King William was proclaimed throughout New England."

But political features of colonial life do not so much concern its romancer as the social, religious, and mental states and conditions which prevailed in the early period.