CHAPTER III.

BOYHOOD AND BACHELORHOOD.

A CERTAIN mystery invests the early life of Na thaniel Hawthorne. There is a difficulty in reconciling the outward calm and uneventfulness of his young manhood with the presence of those qualities which are known to have been in him. It is not his literary or imaginative qualities that are now referred to; he found sufficient outlet for them. But here was a young man, brimming over with physical health and strength; endowed (by nature, at all events) with a strong social instinct; with a mind daring, penetrating, and independent; possessing a face and figure of striking beauty and manly grace; gifted with a stubborn will, and prone, upon occasion, to outbursts of appalling wrath; - in a word, a man fitted in every way to win and use the world, to have his own way, to live throughout the full extent of his keen senses and great faculties; — and yet we find this young engine of all possibilities and energies content (so far as appears) to sit quietly down in a meditative solitude, and spend all those years when a man's blood runs warmest in his veins in musing over the theories and symbols of life, and

in writing cool and subtle little parables apposite to his meditations. Had he been a fanatic or an enthusiast; had he been snatched into the current of some narrow and overpowering preoccupation, whose interests filled each day, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and interests; had he been a meagre and pallid anatomy of overwrought brain and nerves, — such behavior would have been more intelligible. But he was many-sided, unimpulsive, clear-headed; he had the deliberation and leisureliness of a wellbalanced intellect; he was the slave of no theory and of no emotion; he always knew, so to speak, where he was and what he was about. His forefathers, whatever their less obvious qualities may have been, were at all events enterprising, active, practical men, stern and courageous, accustomed to deal with and control lawless and rugged characters; they were sea-captains, farmers, soldiers, magistrates; and, in whatever capacity, they were used to see their own will prevail, and to be answerable to no man. True, they were Puritans, and doubtless were more or less under dominion to the terrible Puritan conscience; but it is hardly reasonable to suppose that this was the only one of their traits which they bequeathed to their successor. On the contrary, one would incline to think that this legacy, in its transmission to a legatee of such enlightened and unprejudiced understanding, would have been relieved of its peculiarly virulent and tyrannical character, and become an object rather of intellectual or imaginative curiosity than of moral

awe. The fact that it figures largely in Hawthorne's stories certainly can scarcely be said to weaken this hypothesis; the pleasurable exercise of the imagination lies in its relieving us from the pressure of our realities, not in repeating and dallying with them. Upon the whole, therefore, there is no ground for assuming that, leaving out of the question the personal or original genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was not in all other respects quite as much of a human being, in the widest sense of the term, as old Major William himself, or Bold Daniel either. How, then, is his extraordinary undemonstrativeness to be accounted for?

This problem has perplexed all who have had anything to say about the great New England romancer. The most common escape has lain in the direction of constructing an imaginary Hawthorne from what was assumed to be the internal evidence of his writings, a sort of morbid, timid, milk-and-water Frankenstein, who was drawn on by a grisly fascination to discuss fearful conceptions, and was in a chronic state of being frightened almost into hysterics by the chimeras of his own fancy. His aversion from bores and ignorant or uncongenial intrusion was magnified into a superhuman and monstrous shyness; in the earlier part of his literary career, opinion was divided as to whether he were a young lady of a sentimental and moralizing turn of mind, or a venerable and bloodless sage, with dim eyes, thin white hair, and an excess of spirituality. Some of these sagacious guesses came to

the ears of the broad-shouldered and ruddy-cheeked young man, and he smiles over them in the preface to the "Twice-Told Tales," and was tempted, as he intimates, to "fill up so amiable an outline, and to act in consonance with the character assigned to him; nor, even now, could he forfeit it without a few tears of tender sensibility." Later, he was suspected of being identical with the ineffective, inquisitive, and cynical poet, Miles Coverdale, in “The Blithedale Romance;" and, for aught I know, of being Arthur Dimmesdale, or Roger Chillingworth, or Clifford, or the Spectre of the Catacombs itself. But this is not the way to get at the individuality of a truly imaginative writer; and, latterly, the concoctions of the deductive philosophers have begun to have less weight.

Meanwhile, however, another school of Hawthorne analysts has sprung up, with great hopes of success. These are persons, some of whom were acquaintances of Hawthorne during his bachelor days and for a time afterwards, and who maintain that he not only possessed broad and even low human sympathies and tendencies, but that he was by no means proof against temptation, and that it was only by the kind precaution and charitable silence of his friends that his dissolute excesses have remained so long concealed. Singularly enough, it is as a tippler that the author of "The Scarlet Letter" most frequently makes his appearance in the narratives of these expositors; he was the victim of an insatiable appetite for gin, brandy, and rum, and if a bottle of wine

were put on the table, he could hardly maintain a decent self-restraint. So probable in themselves and so industriously circulated were these stories, that, when the present writer was in London, three or four years ago, Mr. Francis Bennoch, the gentleman to whom the "English Note-Books" were dedicated by Mrs. Hawthorne, related to him the following anecdote: At a dinner at which Mr. Bennoch had been present, some time before, a gentleman had got up to make some remarks, in the course of which he referred to Nathaniel Hawthorne. He spoke of him as having been, during his residence in England, a confirmed inebriate, mentioned a special occasion on which he had publicly disgraced himself at an English table, and wound up with the information that his death had been brought about by a drunken spree on which he and Franklin Pierce had gone off together. When this historian had resumed his seat, Mr. Bennoch rose and spoke nearly as follows: "I was the friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne during many years; I knew him intimately: no man knew him better. I was his constant companion on his English excursions and during his visits to London. I have seen him in all kinds of circumstances, in all sorts of moods, in all sorts of company; and I wish to say, to the gentleman who has just sat down, and to you all, that, often as I have seen Nathaniel Hawthorne drink wine, and though he had a head of iron, I have never known him to take more than the two or three glasses which every Englishman drinks with his