Text: George P. Lathrop, “Poe, Irving, Hawthorne,” Scribner's Monthly (New York, NY), vol. XI, no. 6, April 1876, pp. 799-808

[page 799, continued:]

BESIDES Cooper, the names oftenest mentioned in allusions to the imaginative prose writers of America are those of Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne. I separate them from his, because these three men naturally, and for several reasons, group themselves together and apart from the first-named. Cooper — though really beginning his career later than Irving, and although contemporaneous with Poe and Hawthorne — belongs to a school which today seems to set him back farther from us than the triad I am to discuss. By one of those curious illusions of distance which rapid changes of opinion and practice bring about, he, with Scott, falls into comparative remoteness, while the lenses of a recurring curiosity or sympathy bring two, at least, of the others into our very midst. Moreover, Cooper was a novelist, as we now make the distinction; neither of the others was such. Irving is essentially an essayist and a writer of polished but not too profound history; Poe, upon declared policy, preferred the short story, and his tales curiously evade [column 2:] the province of the novel; Hawthorne, finally, though adopting the form of the novel, so shaped this that we have to treat the result as a new species. There is still another, though less tangible link between them. We often hear Poe and Hawthorne classed together as “weird” or “grotesque;” and, on the other hand, Irving and Hawthorne are joined by a supposed bond of similar style. Yet, in bringing them together now, I do not mean to contribute further to this want of discrimination. On the contrary, my object will be to bring out the more strongly, by close contrast, their ineradicable and important unlikeness to each other.

It is noticeable that all the most brilliant figures in our literature thus far have been men of English stock: Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, not to speak of our chief historians, are all British seedlings in a fresh soil; their works are — as men said of the first settlements here — a “New Plantation,” [page 800:] but still a part of English literature. This obvious fact is what we must look to for explanation (if any is needed) of the resemblances to the older growth so easily traced in the younger. But this parentage cannot excuse any excess of likeness in the results; for American thought and American genius are not such by virtue of a different blood in the veins of American men, but by virtue of new and independent action nourished by old and inherited sources of strength. The New England settlements from the beginning, and all the colonies from the time of the Revolution, claimed separate standards of judgment in government, based on truths of which they had a clearer view than the mother country. In like manner, independence of view is the root from which all distinctively national literature among us must spring. This, of course, implies no arbitrary connection between it and any attitude of hostility which may exist between two governments. On the contrary, the best American writing has, I think, proceeded from minds the most imbued with a love for England deeper than the seas and much stronger than time. This is because the mood of the American revolutionists was not one of hatred, but of a great and injured affection toward the mother land. It was this affection that gave to their resolve for freedom a pathos and a nobleness beyond all. They fought for truth, and so were forced, in a measure, to fight against their own hearts. So that it is the attitude of remembered love and reverence, combined with an absolute reserve of individuality, which makes a chief part of what we call the American quality as opposed to the English. The English quality in literature is something compounded of various historic elements, but it is perfectly welded, entirely unified, a thing by itself, and absolute. The American quality is relative. I make no attempt to impose this theory upon what may be done hereafter, except as such future work may come within the conditions stated. Undoubtedly there must arrive a time when the diverse materials now concentrating in this country shall find a common unit of character in which the precise and intrinsic nature of Americanness can be given with more exactness. But, thus far, when American creative genius in the arts has lost this relativeness, disorganization has ensued, giving its productions a singular formlessness. Or else they have gravitated toward some foreign literature. This statement need hardly [column 2:] be amplified; we see the process going on around us every day. To resist such attraction, then — not in any bigoted sense, but merely in the sense of asserting a separate and unique entity — becomes a sign of the greater depth of originality in American writers. This integrity demands a sane and masculine self-sufficiency, and a capacity for solid faith in local possibilities, which make up a very high standard. If one accepts a lower standard it is by no means a gross offense; it may be the only condition on which he can secure the particular charm for his work which he wants to give to it; but let us recognize at the same time that the standard is lower. I take it that nationality, in the best sense, is the strongest fiber of strong genius. This being marred, the whole organism suffers.

Under this light, Irving would seem to fall into place below Hawthorne. The enthusiast for Irving will of course point us at once to his legendary researches, to the “Sketch Book,” and “Wolfert's Roost,” and “Knickerbocker's History of New York.” We must admit at once that here he recalls a considerable debt, which the gratitude of many readers for many years has duly acknowledged. At the time when these works were produced, a good deal of self- reliance was needed in the man who should look for romantic material mainly along the shores of the Hudson, not then illumined by the light of old tales and the grace of modern dreaming that rests upon them now. But exactly what are the results of Irving's American associations? How far do they extend? To me it seems that the con- quest over something hitherto unsubjected to literature, and the substantial gain to America of handiwork containing the germ of a new order of thought or feeling, is in Irving's books almost nil. What is his view- point? Almost entirely that which leads to a search for the mere picturesque. The lightness and vagueness of theme with which he is content is very manifest in “Wolfert's Roost,” in the “Tales of a Traveler,” and the introduced narrative of “Bracebridge Hall;” and at times the minute atom of real emotion or definite incident at the bottom of these, is almost stifled by his insatiable desire of words. But the most remarkable example is his treatment of the Rip Van Winkle legend. There is hardly a suspicion here of the real depth of pathos which has since been revealed to us in the same story on the stage. As elsewhere, Irving shows in his sketch of this tradition an excellent [page 801:] sense of what constitutes elegant entertainment; his perception of the gentlemanly in literature is admirable; he contrives good conventional contrasts, and rounds in the whole with a sonorous and well-derived style. It is the most completely “polite” writing. But the absence is as complete of anything like profound insight, deep imaginative sympathy, or genuinely dramatic rendering of character and circumstance. As for any new distillation of truth from his New World subjects, we must forego that entirely. All this finds parallel, too, in his style, which the systematic and loyal puffing of half a century has not been able to make into anything else than a patent-leather Addisonian one. For simple surface execution, it may be agreed, he has been equaled by few in his time; and “Bracebridge Hall” is a most remarkable revival of an obsolete and very acceptable style; but from this sort of imitation the same unconscious insincerity is as inseparable as it is from the recent French reproductions of Japanese porcelains. They are even better, one may say, than the originals, and yet the more refined and enduring value of the first product is entirely absent from the imitations. Thackeray's “Henry Esmond” is the only English fiction of this century, I suppose, which in point of antiquated style comes upon the same ground with “Bracebridge Hall;” but there, instead of being an anachronism, the style is a part of the dramatic unity, and again it is penetrated at every point and nobly uplifted by the atmosphere of powerful human passions. Thus, Irving's superficial treatment of theme and acquired style operate against the originality of his few American fictions. In his Knickerbocker history he has furbished up the conventional Dutch type with some ingenuity; but, as in the Dutch traditions he elaborated only an imported interest, so here he merely treated in his own light and playful way a kind of character already well established in English books, and as old at least as the time of Andrew Marvell's lines on Holland.

This brings us to his humor, which Mr. Bryant has declared to be not that of “The Spectator.” There is, indeed, a discoverable difference; but it is in the lighter caliber of Irving's. There is a smack of college wit about it, especially in the excess to which he carries pretended derivations of local and personal names. There is always in Irving's writing the mild, sweet radiance of a graceful, uncontaminated spirit which comes forth here and there in a sort [column 2:] of subdued and gentle smile; and this is something to be prized. But his humor never develops into the full, rich laugh that belongs to Scott and Dickens. It is always a smile, as his drawing is sketching. There is something full of meaning in that oddly logical title of his most popular work, “The Sketch Book.” He was, in strict analysis, an amateur. But it will not do to play the amateur, when one is laying the foundation of a national literature. I do not wish to detract. Irving was detract. Irving was an exquisite writer, justly popular; he was an attractive historian, and his charming compilation on Goldsmith, with his “Mahomet” and “Columbus” will always be read for their smooth language, at least. One would not ask, either, for a more flowing and inspiriting narrative than his “Life of Washington; and I may add that he has treated this subject in a tone that accords most happily with the tone and time of the noble Virginia gentleman who did with such simple dignity that which has given to our brief national history a lasting splendor. But how can we conceal the attitude which this same exquisite writer always held toward England, which shows not only in his biography but throughout his sketches and essays, in the most subtle and fascinating way perhaps, but none the less conclusively limiting his magnitude? It comes out almost ludicrously in his correspondence with that rabid miso-Briton, Paulding, whom Drake laughingly hails as “the pride of the backwood, the poet of cabbages, log-huts, and gin.” Irving, enjoying his English fame, was vexedly concerned by the irrepressible outbreaks of his friend, which, however, had real pluck in them. “The Edinburgh Review,” which was unusually amiable toward Irving, took offense at his excessive complaisance, at last, and thus scouted him: “He gasped for British popularity, — he came, and found it. He was received, caressed, applauded, and made giddy: natural politeness owed him some return, for he imitated, admired, deferred to us * * * it was plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice everything to obtain. a smile or a look of approbation.’ It is not needful to read the “Edinburgh,” to assure ourselves of this; but at least let us be careful not to forget how the public, whose favor Irving so fondly sought, could sneer at his devotion. In its savage fashion, it recognized his inferior position; we must admit it, also, though more kindly.

Let us turn to Poe. Here is a man to make [page 802:] mischief with theories. How will his nervous, explosive, insane personality restrain itself to the principle of American-ness as we have tried to settle it? Do we not encounter in him a sort of genius which scorns the condition of relativeness? And is there not therefore something more primitively distinct and valuable about Poe, than about Hawthorne? In a certain sense, this is, perhaps, the case. Mr. Fairfield's ingenious article on the unhappy poet,* by raising distinctly the medical question which, in a vague form, has doubtless occurred to many readers — that of Poe's madness — tries to prove too much.† There is a morbid and shattering susceptibility connected with some genius; but in the other there is a tremulous, constantly re-adjusted, and infinitely delicate sensitiveness which is simply the perfect period of health. Such must be the condition in men like Shakespeare and Hawthorne, however dissimilar their temperaments, who grasp the two hemispheres of the human mind, the sane and the insane, and hold them perfectly reconciled in their gentle yet unsparing and almost divine insight. These men, therefore, are eminently of the first order. We should place Dickens with them, for his variety of outlook, except that it is only the superficial distortions of mind. which his genius chiefly concerns itself with; and we fancy in him at times a slightly fevered sensitiveness which leads to contamination [column 2:] from the phases he is describing. Now, a case like Poe's, where actual mental decay exists, and gives to his productions a sharper and more dazzling effect, is certainly more unique, though less admirable, than instances of the higher orders. But putting aside the question of malady, we may weigh merely the degree of intensity of the genius.

Poe's gift flourished upon him like a destructive flame; and the ashes that it left are like a deadly poison which some one has learned to powder out of a plant-root. As a mere potency, dissociated from qualities of beauty or truth, Poe must be rated almost highest among American poets; and high among prosaists; no one else offers so much pungency, such impetuous and frightful energy crowded into such small space. Yet it would be difficult to conceive a poetic fury — if we may so call the motive power of his prose-tales, which is much the same as that of his more impressive poems — a poetic fury less allied to human life in general. There is absolutely no definition of character worth mentioning in his fiction. The nearest thing to it is his lurid painting of half-maniacal moods. He looks always for fixed and inert quantities with which he may juggle at will; hence, the best of his stories are to the best of Hawthorne's short tales what the most delicate mechanism of metal springs is to an organism filled with the true breath of life. We owe to Poe the first agile and determined movement of criticism in this country, and, though it was a startling dexterity, with but little depth, which winged his censorial shafts, he was excellently fitted for the critic's office in one way, because he knew positively what standards he meant to judge by, and kept up an inflexible hostility to any offense against them. He had an acute instinct in matters of literary form; it amounted, indeed, to a passion, as all his instincts and perceptions did; he had also the knack of finding reasons, good or bad, for his opinións, and of stating them well. All this is essential to the equipment of a critic, and it was well to have them exemplified; though, of course, Poe's criticism was constantly vitiated by ill-balanced impulse, by incredible jealousies, and by various undermining tendencies of his thoroughly unsound mind. And here we reach the gist of the whole Poe problem again. The same imperfection runs through all his performances, except, perhaps, three poems, “The Raven,” “Ligeia,” and the earlier one of two addressed “To Helen;” his work is honeycombed with error and falsity, bad [page 803:] taste, undue outlay of language for small returns; and he seems sooner or later to have run his own pen full against all his rigid criteria for measuring others. It is extremely suggestive that the holder of such positive doctrine about beauty, the man also of whom pre-eminently it may be said as Baudelaire wrote of him, “Chance and the incomprehensible were his two great enemies,” should so completely fail to reach even an abstract, unmoral perfection within the confined and inelastic spaces of thought which he fixed as sufficient, and should so constantly force upon us hideousness and horror, while gasping in the gross atmosphere of earth, and professing himself the special apostle of beauty in art. This passionate This passionate search for the beautiful, unhelmed, erring, guided by no North Star of faith set in a dome of mystery, is the very thing which drove him into such whirlpools of physical horror and ignoble wallowings in decay; because it issued from interior discord, and was not a normal, deep-seated desire. Whatever the cause, his brain had a rift of ruin in it at the start. For him, there was always a “demon in the sky;” and, though he kept the delicate touch that stole a new grace from classic antiquity, it was the frangibility, the quick decay, the fall of beautiful things, that excited him. In one of his tales he says: “I * * * have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.” That is it. Always beauty and grace overthrown seem to him the most characteristic and the most poetic, and it is the shadow of such ruined beauty that he imbibes, rather than the still living beauty of light upon them or of green growth around them.

The life and the writings stand intimately connected, almost inseparable, in Poe, just as Irving's life — his early experience of Europe, and the conditions of provincial New York society — will account for his limitations and his slight American substance. But in Poe there is no special conformity to English models; there is rather a leaning to the French feeling for form, and to a delicate-pointed, varied and fervent accuracy of expression which resembles that of the mod- ern Parisian school, but probably proceeds as much from the innate necessities of his genius. The foreign marking, however, is very faint; scarcely shows, in fact, against the glaring ground of his own qualities. On the other hand, he has no traits that we can call American. We even fancy in him a kind of shrinking from any identification with his native land, instinctive, if not conscious. His genius was a detonating agent, which could have been convulsed into its meet activity anywhere, and had nothing to do with a soil. It was shaken by that discord which, I have said, is apt to overtake the American writer out of sympathy with America. Does this absence of roots make it more universal? Merely, I think, as the wind is more transferable than a tree. There is something unmatched and enviable in the wrath of the wind; but it is certainly less near to man than a tree, which, like man, has growth. To change our adjective, let us call Poe a positive genius. He would have flourished anywhere in much the same way that he did in America. Irving, then, is comparative; given the condition of a certain gentlemanly leisure, he might have done something pleasant in letters elsewhere, but it would probably have been much less noticeable than what he has left us. Also, he ranks higher than Poe for human sympathy and incipient humor, whereas Poe is barren of even a smile. Neither of them, however, possessed insight. ‘Irving had that sort of insight which a connoisseur's magnifying glass can give, and Poe had an extraordinary keenness in speculation and calculation. But Hawthorne has insight in the profoundest sense, — a consciousness of visible and invisible life, and of sound and unsound character, a gift of real analysis, a deeper and tenderer humor than Irving's, although hardly broader in its effect; and, finally, he could not have flourished in any earth but that of Salem. That is, if he had been rooted elsewhere, he would have missed some of his richest, purest, and most original traits.

This flavor of nativity, is it not inevitably one of the higher attributes of genius? Whether or not the greater range of insight and vigor of dramatic feeling get any of their strength from this quality is, of course, a debatable point. There is obviously an original texture in Hawthorne's genius which puts him at once in advance of the other two writers; but this texture might never have been worked into literature with its present power and subtlety had the circumstances of his development been materially other than they were. In fine, the national quality and the personal ones so subtend and overlap each other in him that their relation is clearly a vital and meaning relation. The more I study his life, the more I feel the singular value of this union. [page 804:] That life I shall here try to sketch at the risk of seeming to digress too widely. The connection of the man and his works is in this case more subtle, various, and extended than in either of the two we have already glanced at. Hawthorne's ancestors came from a place in Wiltshire called, according to an early entry in the “American Note-Books,” Wigcastle, Wiston, and which in a letter from a relative, dated 1860, I have seen alluded to as Wilton Castlewig. The sirname was variously spelled, and different members of the family developed some eight distinct ways of writing it. A younger son, William Hathorne, who came over with Winthrop in the “Arbella,” 1630, was the American progenitor. He went first to Dorchester, where he was made a Freeman (a name that meant a great deal, just there and then), and in 1635-6 he was representative for that town in the General Court. This ancestor distinguished himself in the colony. He was thought so desirable a citizen that the town of Salem offered him large grants of land if he would remove thither. This he did in 1636 or 1637. From that time he became prominent in New England history, as deputy to the General Court, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Commissioner of Customs, military commander, a member of committees at critical junctures, — notably that of 1661 to deliberate on the “patent, laws, privileges” of the colonists, and their “duty to His Majesty,” when he opposed all appeals to the Crown, and maintained the right of the colonists to defend their govern- ment against all attempts at overthrow. He is about the only man of that time whose reputation for eloquence has come down to posterity. The apostle Eliot wrote of him as the most eloquent man of the Assembly often opposed to Endicott, who glided with the popular stream;” and Johnson, in the “Wonder-Working Providence,” spake of him as “the Godly Captaine William Hathorn, whom the Lord hath indued with a quick apprehension, strong memory, and Rhetorick.” His son John was a sturdy successor, of severe temper, inherited his civil and military honors, and was a magistrate at the time of the Witchcraft trials. The land grant to William assigned him an estate in the then choicest part of the town, along the South River, and a street in Salem on that very spot bears the name of Hathorn to this day. It is worth while to give these details, as showing how substantial were the links | that bound Hawthorne to the past of his country, and knitted him more firmly to its present. The Hathornes remained uninterruptedly at Salem from 1637, and Nathaniel, when a young man, went on Sundays to the First Church (a second edifice built on the site of the first place of worship in Salem), where his forefathers and family had held their pew from about 1640. Joseph was the next in descent from John, and his retired farm-life preluded a change in the activity of the Hathornes from the land to the sea. The name began to appear in the shipping lists in the eighteenth century, and Joseph's son, Daniel, the author's grand- father, commanded a privateer in the Revolution;* and one Benjamin Hathorne was one of the company of another privateer captured by the British in 1782.† It was Daniel's son, Nathaniel, who married a Miss Manning, and became the father of that genius who has come to be generally esteemed as in many ways the most notable of imaginative American authors. This son, also Nathaniel, was born in Union street, which, curiously enough, faced the old ship-yard of the town in 1760; and the date of his birth was July 4, 1804, one year before the Custom-House of that time was removed to “opposite the long brick building owned by W. S. Gray and Benjamin H. Hathorne;” so that his later association with shipping and with revenues might seem to have already hung [page 805:] over him. His father, pursuing the sea-cap- tain life that had now become traditional in the family, died at Surinam in 1808, and the shadow of that loss lay upon the whole of Hawthorne's youth. For his mother was an extremely sensitive woman, whose strong character deepened the sway of grief at her husband's death, and she became a complete recluse. In the house to which they now moved* a part of his boyhood and some of the weightiest years of youth were passed. His father's strange failure to return from that last voyage, working, perhaps, with some spell of the sea inherited in his blood, affected the little boy very soon; and when quite young-perhaps not more than five or six-he would sometimes burst out of a reverie with, “There, mother!” and then announce that when he grew up he too should go away to sea “and never come back again;” little knowing the meaning of his declaration, or the dread and yearning sorrow it must have waked in the widow's heart. But this threat soon passed. They left Salem in 1818 to go to Raymond, Maine, for Nathaniel's health, he having fallen ill; but not before he had listened to the thunder of that desperate battle off Mar- blehead, in the war of 1812-13, between the American frigate “Chesapeake” and the British frigate “Shannon.” The “Chesapeake” was captained by young Lawrence of Tripolitan and other fame, who got his death-wound in this disastrous duel of ships. After a year Hawthorne came back to Salem and studied, entered Bowdoin College in 1821, and again returned to the ancestral town on graduation. Indeed, it is strange to see how, in later life, with all the distaste for Salem that lurked always in his mind, he kept drifting thither at intervals till 1850 (only fourteen years before his death), when Concord became his home and resting- place. A youth of twenty-one, he had now fixed his thought on a very different career from that of a sea-captain. In a letter written while he was a boy,† probably from [column 2:] Salem, to his mother, in Maine, he had discussed the choice of occupations in these terms: “I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister, to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left for me but to be an author. How would you like, some day, to see a whole shelf full of books written by your son, with ‘Hawthorne's Works’ printed on their backs?” In another, dated 1820, which I have seen, he says: “Shall you want me to be a minister, doctor, or lawyer? A minister I will not be.” It is clear from these utterances that he found little difficulty in narrowing the prospect for himself to that which he afterward chose. His college friend, Horatio Bridge,‡ too, had brought to bear upon him the influence of a confident and prophetic sympathy. In fine, this latest scion of that vigorous Puritan stock entered upon the destiny opening before him with the mysterious certainty which seems to guide the steps of all great writers. And it is now that we begin to see how his antecedents played into the hands of his inborn tendency. As I have hinted, his mother's solitude was complete. When she and her son and two daughters were again living together in Herbert street, they remained frequently in separate rooms, sometimes scarcely seeing each other for weeks, nor even eating in company. Hawthorne himself stayed all day in his study under the eaves, his meals being brought up and left at the door. He read in the morning and wrote in the afternoon; at night he walked abroad, and thus gradually rambled over the whole neighboring coast, from Gloucester to Lynn, sometimes also, without doubt, haunting the old scenes of the witchcraft outbreak in Salem Village (Danvers), or musing under the trees of Endicott's ancient Orchard Farm. (By this it is not to be understood that he “never saw the sun,” as has been reported: he commonly saw it rise, every day in summer, when going down to the sea to bathe, and he of course walked by day- light when so minded.) This seclusion arose on his part, largely from the silent but trying conflict between his own bent and the sternly practical life around him. His relatives urged him to go into business; his genius forbade it. He was made to feel that he was a [page 806:] useless dreamer, and this drove him in upon himself; but he persisted. There was nothing gloomy in his character; a secluded youth in the shadow of his mother's sacred widowhood, however, combined with extraordinary fineness of organization in himself, had made him shy and reticent; and the clashing of his ideal aims with the more sordid ones of most men that he saw, increased his hesitation to mix with the cur- rents of life until he should have gained a foot-hold of his own. I urge this here, to mitigate prevalent notions about his peculiarity, which perhaps tend to attach him by another unreal association to Poe again. Hawthorne believed himself to have a strongly social nature, which was permanently restrained by the long and sad retirement of his youth; speaking of this mode of life to a friend who did much to break up its austerity, he said: “We do not even live at our house!” And, at another time, telling of the period in which the “Twice- Told Tales” were written: “I was like a person talking to himself in a dark room.” He knew the dreariness and in one sense the mistakenness of these years — too well! But they were not of his making. We, however, his readers, who represent that outside world which gave Hawthorne so little encouragement, have, through no merit of our own, reaped a rich profit from his providential privacy. It was in this silence and darkness that he was able to revive the past of New England, and fill a few imagined hearts with a breath that shall keep them beating long beyond our own. I have it as a fact without doubt, that his exquisite story of “The Gentle Boy” was suggested to him by reading Sewall's “History of the Quakers,” and the knowledge that one of his own ancestors had been instrumental in their persecution. And I need not point out to those who know his works the traces of meditation on New England annals to be found throughout the “American Note-Book,” and its aesthetic results in various famed ones of the “Twice-Told Tales,” two or three among the “Mosses,” “Main Street,” and other essays in the “Snow Image” group of stories and sketches, and of course most eminently and marvelously in “The Scarlet Letter,” and “The House of Seven Gables.” He recurred to it again more directly in “True Stories,” written for children; in short, old New England was as necessary and vital a thing to him as it was to the entire New England of his day. One could not be, without the other. In pointing this out, I [column 2:] mean to command attention to the fact that this belongs to the trait of growth in him which is so distinctive of all high genius. He begins in the past and comes down to the present; his later writings centered rather upon his own time than upon a previous period. Moreover, as in “The House of the Seven Gables,” it is one of his favorite themes to trace the genesis of the present out of the past. At the same time, I may enlarge upon the method and scope of his own growth. In the “Twice-Told Tales” we see the reflection of his youth as in a darkened glass. There is a prevalent somberness about the picture; but how calm, thoughtful, and beautiful the dim image of his face when seen there! Then, behind his own form, we catch the flitting shapes of half-real beings in strange variety of action,-smiling and frowning, passionate, or polished, and splendid in their perished grandeur, mysterious shadows trembling over them all; but there are also gleams of the healthiest sunshine striking through, which gives us re-assurance in the subdued, grave atmosphere. There are a few cases among these tales of a nearly unendurable sadness, as in “The White Old Maid,” and “The Ambitious Guest;” others in which the horror or the pathos hangs with too dread a weight upon the mind; but these are only such extremes as might excusably proceed from the long and oppressive isolation in which the stories were all written. The wonder should be that Hawthorne's mind could soar above the shadows as often as it did at this time, and, above all, that he should give us always a taste of a complete, a wholesome, unselfish, pure, and profound philosophy amidst even the bitterest distillations of his dreams. Nor is there ever any- thing disordered about the sadness that appears. There is no protest against life and fate, no gloomy or weak self-pity. The ter- ror and the tragedy came as legitimate deductions from deep imaginings about human nature and searching glances at it. But even this sad, questioning twilight, at no time threatening, clears into a steady and gentle gray luminousness, in succeeding works, as Hawthorne's mind matures. The proof and multifarious example of this I must leave to my reader, merely hinting that he should look through the early Note-Books to assist him in seeing how the development proceeded. I only urge here that there was a constant development and a wholesome mellowing; there was consistent, calm growth, fed by the giant sap of strong and fine-strung passions coursing in even flow. Compare [page 807:] this with Irving's gentle unprogressiveness. Irving never went beyond the “Sketch Book;” his histories, though a higher order of writing, do not index any larger development. Again, compare it with the spectacle that Poe presents-mad rotations and fitful shocks of ecstatic power, a blinding whirlwind that dizzies and bewilders at first; but when we look again, at ease, and contemplate the entire outline left by the man and his works, we find only a ruined arch. In some sense, Poe had an intellectual struggle, a confused, half-maniacal brawl, with himself and with the world. This argues, at least, more momentum, whatever its effect, than the mild quiescence of the amiable Irving. Hawthorne, on the other hand, experienced a deep and enduring struggle worthy of his powers. But it was the peril and the pain of organic unfolding, not the anguish of an ill-governed egotism, and his exquisite character and genius met both bravely, grew stronger for the obstacles opposed to their advance, and finally triumphed.

It is hard for persons of less acute power of feeling than his to conceive of the suffer- ing which he drew from his long and lonely youth in Salem. In vain to discuss the point whether, had he modified his temperament and been less impressionable, he would not have come off more easily. In that case, he would not have been Hawthorne. At this day, one hears little else than satisfaction, in Salem, at the honor which his genius has added to the place; but, half a century ago, at an epoch when prejudice was everywhere more rife than now, it must have been different enough. Salem was secluded and stationary, and arrested thought is soon slimed with gossip, as stagnant water gets covered with scum. There are two things which are offensive to the average mind: that success which outshines everybody, and that other successful development which withdraws you from the prying eye of neighbors, and lets you make of yourself something possibly better than they. And it was this latter kind which made Hawthorne troublesome to the “practical” community around him. Nothing in his books betrays the prolonged exasperation which he felt at the relations between himself and his townsfolk; but there are glimpses of it in some of his letters, which make one marvel at his self-restraint in not letting more of it appear in print. At last, when a little gentle satire escaped him in “The Custom-House,” it awoke hot scandal in the little city. “As to the Salem people,” he wrote to a friend in 1850, “I really [column 2:] thought I had been exceedingly good-natured in my treatment of them.” And so it appeared to most of his readers. But the general public would have been as startled as would the Salem citizens, if they could have known how deep was his disgust at the lack of sympathy there had always been between himself and his fellow-townsmen. Yet, patiently absorbing this bitter experience, he wrote late in life: “I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone.” This want of sympathy had a practical side, also, as when various Salem people combined to get Hawthorne ousted from the surveyor ship, and made representations for that end which he thought untrue. But, in practical affairs, his experiences were often rasping. Most of his earlier tales were written for little or no compensation. In 1836 he went to Boston to edit a magazine, and seems to have been cheated out of the most of his salary. It was at about this time that he was engaged by Mr. S. G. Goodrich to write either the whole or a large part of the famous “Universal History” of Peter Parley, which brought him a hundred dollars and sold by millions of copies for the benefit of his employer. Later, when married and living at the Old Manse, he advanced money to the “Democratic Review,” and delayed collecting the price of sundry contributions until the concern failed, and carried off both the loan and the value of his articles, irrecoverably. It is usually thought that the Liverpool Consulate made a delightful and vastly lucrative episode in his life. A shameful misinterpretation of his acceptance of it, however, was inflicted on him; the emoluments of the office were shortly cut down by Congress; large drains were made on his private purse by unfortunate fellow-countrymen; and his diligence in office was sometimes questioned, — with the greatest injustice, however, for he was a most conscientious public servant, and went beyond the necessities of his position, to make sure. At no time, unless in Italy, was he wholly free from the embarrassments of a small income. In addition to these more sordid annoyances, there were many grievances that cannot be touched upon here. In short, he lived the checkered life of most men who had their own way to make in the world, and had to suffer misconstruction which more politic men might have avoided, and less sensitive men would not have felt. But, with perfect supremacy, he saw [page 808:] that these things were not worthy to affect him in any visible way. He was rational, self-possessed, and simply manful. Not the less, to a person of his disposition and genius, such things made a constant warfare. It was a silent battle; all the more admirable the victory, then. He did not crudely call upon the world to be miserable because he suffered or was taken advantage of. But this silent battle speaks most powerfully throughout his works; this drama of interior development has issued in the visible action of creatures who take their places among the most dramatically conceived in fictitious writing. This is not the place for a complete survey of Hawthorne's genius, but we may draw some conclusions from our premises. So that, to So that, to sum up, we find Hawthorne taking the highest rank by virtue of his relation to the country, the largeness of his powerful individual development, his insight, and his dramatic feeling. If we pursue him through the delicate ramifications of literary art also, we find him unsurpassed among prosaists; and though there may be modes of expression, and more volatile movements of style, that we prefer, on occasion, to his, we must admit that no one outdoes him in perfection of deep texture. “I think we have no romancer but yourself, nor have had any for this long time,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes to him in 1851. “The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a seedling in the natural soil.”* This is a generous statement of a large fact. But, now that we have before us the entire works of Hawthorne, we may add to this the opinion- hardly a hazardous one-that he is as fresh and significant to the world at large as to America. As he asserted his own personality quietly, so does his influence spread in silence; but it is potent as it is subtle. Such purity and such profundity must work many revolutions, though noiseless ones. To us, Hawthorne seems perhaps the most eminently and deeply Christian of great fictionists, for he goes below all forms and shows, and bathes his mind in the clear and undivided current of the most humane of religions.

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