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THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


By Frank Preston Stearns

Author Of "The Real And Ideal In Literature," "Life Of Tintoretto,"
"Life Of Bismarck," "True Republicanism," "Cambridge Sketches," Etc.



[Illustration: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Frances Osborne Portrait: by
permission of the Essex Institute.]


INSCRIBED

TO

EMILIA MACIEL STEARNS

                       "In the elder days of art
                        Builders wrought with greatest care
                        Each minute and unseen part,--
                        For the gods see everywhere."
                                           --_Longfellow_

               "Oh, happy dreams of such a soul have I,
                And softly to myself of him I sing,
                Whose seraph pride all pride doth overwing;
                Who stoops to greatness, matches low with high,
                And as in grand equalities of sky,
                Stands level with the beggar and the king."
                                           --_Wasson_




PREFACE


The simple events of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life have long been before
the public. From 1835 onward they may easily be traced in the various
Note-books, which have been edited from his diary, and previous to that
time we are indebted for them chiefly to the recollections of his two
faithful friends, Horatio Bridge and Elizabeth Peabody. These were first
systematised and published by George P. Lathrop in 1872, but a more
complete and authoritative biography was issued by Julian Hawthorne
twelve years later, in which, however, the writer has modestly refrained
from expressing an opinion as to the quality of his father's genius, or
from attempting any critical examination of his father's literary work.
It is in order to supply in some measure this deficiency, that the
present volume has been written. At the same time, I trust to have given
credit where it was due to my predecessors, in the good work of making
known the true character of so rare a genius and so exceptional a
personality.

The publication of Horatio Bridge's memoirs and of Elizabeth Manning's
account of the boyhood of Hawthorne have placed before the world much
that is new and valuable concerning the earlier portion of Hawthorne's
life, of which previous biographers could not very well reap the
advantage. I have made thorough researches in regard to Hawthorne's
American ancestry, but have been able to find no ground for the
statements of Conway and Lathrop, that William Hathorne, their first
ancestor on this side of the ocean, was directly connected with the
Quaker persecution. Some other mistakes, like Hawthorne's supposed
connection with the duel between Cilley and Graves, have also been
corrected.

F. P. S.




CONTENTS


   CHAPTER

      I. SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800
     II. BOYHOOD OF HAWTHORNE: 1804-1821
    III. BOWDOIN COLLEGE: 1821-1825
     IV. LITTLE MISERY: 1825-1835
      V. EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839
     VI. PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841
    VII. HAWTHORNE AS A SOCIALIST: 1841-1842
   VIII. CONCORD AND THE OLD MANSE: 1842-1845
     IX. "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE": 1845
      X. FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849
     XI. PEGASUS IS FREE: 1850-1852
    XII. THE LIVERPOOL CONSULATE: 1852-1854
   XIII. HAWTHORNE IN ENGLAND: 1854-1858
    XIV. ITALY
     XV. HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858
    XVI. "THE MARBLE FAUN": 1859-1860
   XVII. HOMEWARD BOUND: 1860-1862
  XVIII. IMMORTALITY

         PORTRAITS OF HAWTHORNE
         EDITIONS OF HAWTHORNE'S BOOKS PUBLISHED UNDER HIS OWN DIRECTION.
         MRS. EMERSON AND MRS. HAWTHORNE
         APPENDICES


List of Illustrations

  PORTRAIT OF HAWTHORNE, BY FRANCES OSBORNE IN 1893
  HAWTHORNE'S BIRTHPLACE
  HORATIO BRIDGE, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY EASTMAN JOHNSON
  HAWTHORNE, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY CHARLES OSGOOD IN 1840
  THE OLD MANSE, RESIDENCE OF DR. RIPLEY
  THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM, MASS
  THE WAYSIDE
  GUIDO RENI'S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI
  STATUE OF PRAXITELES' RESTING FAUN
  TORRE MEDIAVALLE DELLA SCIMMIA (HILDA'S TOWER) IN ROME





THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE




CHAPTER I

SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800


The three earliest settlements on the New England coast were Plymouth,
Boston, and Salem; but Boston soon proved its superior advantages to the
two others, not only from its more capacious harbor, but also from the
convenient waterway which the Charles River afforded to the interior of
the Colony. We find that a number of English families, and among them
the ancestors of Gen. Joseph Warren and Wendell Phillips, who crossed
the ocean in 1640 in the "good ship Arbella," soon afterward migrated to
Watertown on Charles River for the sake of the excellent farming lands
which they found there. Salem, however, maintained its ascendency over
Plymouth and other neighboring harbors on the coast, and soon grew to
be the second city of importance in the Colony during the eighteenth
century, when the only sources of wealth were fishing, shipbuilding,
and commerce. Salem nourished remarkably. Its leading citizens became
wealthy and developed a social aristocracy as cultivated, as well
educated, and, it may also be added, as fastidious as that of Boston
itself. In this respect it differed widely from the other small cities
of New England, and the exclusiveness of its first families was more
strongly marked on account of the limited size of the place. Thus it
continued down to the middle of the last century, when railroads and the
tendency to centralization began to draw away its financial
prosperity, and left the city to small manufactures and its traditional
respectability.

The finest examples of American eighteenth century architecture are
supposed to exist in and about the city of Salem, and they have the
advantage, which American architecture lacks so painfully at the present
time, of possessing a definite style and character--edifices which
are not of a single type, like most of the houses in Fifth Avenue,
but which, while differing in many respects, have a certain general
resemblance, that places them all in the same category. The small old
country churches of Essex County are not distinguished for fine carving
or other ornamentation, and still less by the costliness of their
material, for they are mostly built of white pine, but they have an
indefinable air of pleasantness about them, as if they graced the ground
they stand on, and their steeples seem to float in the air above us.
If we enter them on a Sunday forenoon--for on week-days they are like
a sheepfold without its occupants--we meet with much the same kind of
pleasantness in the assemblage there. We do not find the deep religious
twilight of past ages, or the noonday glare of a fashionable synagogue,
but a neatly attired congregation of weather-beaten farmers and
mariners, and their sensible looking wives, with something of the
original Puritan hardness in their faces, much ameliorated by the
liberalism and free thinking of the past fifty years. Among them too you
will see some remarkably pretty young women; and young men like those
who dug the trenches on Breed's Hill in the afternoon of June 16,
1775. There may be veterans in the audience who helped Grant to go to
Richmond. Withal there is much of the spirit of the early Christians
among them, and virtue enough to save their country in any emergency.

These old churches have mostly disappeared from Salem city and have been
replaced by more aristocratic edifices, whose square or octagonal
towers are typical of their leading parishioners,--a dignified class,
if somewhat haughty and reserved; but they too will soon belong to the
past, drawn off to the great social centres in and about Boston. In the
midst of Salem there is a triangular common, "with its never-failing
elms," where the boys large and small formerly played cricket--married
men too--as they do still on the village greens of good old England,
and around this enclosure the successful merchants and navigators of
the city built their mansion houses; not half houses like those in the
larger cities, but with spacious halls and rooms on either side going
up three stories. It is in the gracefully ornamented doorways and the
delicate interior wood-work, the carving of wainscots, mantels and
cornices, the skilful adaptations of classic forms to a soft and
delicate material that the charm of this architecture chiefly
consists,--especially in the staircases, with their carved spiral posts
and slender railings, rising upward in the centre of the front hall,
and turning right and left on the story above. It is said that after the
year eighteen hundred the quality of this decoration sensibly declined;
it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools no longer
exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones would
have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the false
rococo taste of the eighteenth century.

The Salem sea-captains of old times were among the boldest of our early
navigators; sailing among the pirates of the Persian Gulf and trading
with the cannibals of Polynesia, and the trophies which they brought
home from those strange regions, savage implements of war and domestic
use, clubs, spears, boomerangs, various cooking utensils, all carved
with infinite pains from stone, ebony and iron-wood, cloth from the bark
of the tapa tree, are now deposited in the Peabody Academy, where
they form one of the largest collections of the kind extant. Even
more interesting is the sword of a sword-fish, pierced through the oak
planking of a Salem vessel for six inches or more. No human force could
do that even with a spear of the sharpest steel. Was the sword-fish
roused to anger when the ship came upon him sleeping in the water; or
did he mistake it for a strange species of whale?

There is a court-house on Federal Street, built in Webster's time, of
hard cold granite in the Grecian fashion of the day, not of the white
translucent marble with which the Greeks would have built it. Is it
the court-house where Webster made his celebrated argument in the White
murder case, or was that court-house torn down and a plough run through
the ground where it stood, as Webster affirmed that it ought to be?
Salem people were curiously reticent in regard to that trial, and
fashionable society there did not like Webster the better for having the
two Knapps convicted.

Much more valuable than such associations is William Hunt's full-length
portrait of Chief Justice Shaw, which hangs over the judge's bench in
the front court-room. "When I look at your honor I see that you are
homely, but when I think of you I know that you are great." it is
this combination of an unprepossessing physique with rare dignity of
character which Hunt has represented in what many consider the best
of American portraits. It is perhaps too much in the sketchy style of
Velasquez, but admirable for all that.

Time has dealt kindly with Salem, in effacing all memorials of the
witchcraft persecution, except a picturesque old house at the corner of
North and Essex Streets, where there are said to have been preliminary
examinations for witchcraft,--a matter which concerns us now but
slightly. The youthful associations of a genius are valuable to us on
account of the influence which they may be supposed to have had on his
early life, but associations which have no determining consequences may
as well be neglected. The hill where those poor martyrs to superstition
were executed may be easily seen on the left of the city, as you roll in
on the train from Boston. It is part of a ridge which rises between the
Concord and Charles Rivers and extends to Cape Ann, where it dives into
the ocean, to reappear again like a school of krakens, or other marine
monsters, in the Isles of Shoals.

New England has not the fertile soil of many sections of the United
States, and its racking climate is proverbial, but it is blessed with
the two decided advantages of pure water and fine scenery. There is no
more beautiful section of its coast than that between Salem Harbor and
Salisbury Beach, long stretches of smooth sand alternating with bold
rocky promontories. A summer drive from Swampscott to Marblehead reminds
one even of the Bay of Naples (without Vesuvius), and the wilder coast
of Cape Ann, with its dark pines, red-roofed cottages, and sparkling
surf, is quite as delightful. William Hunt went there in the last sad
years of his life to paint "sunshine," as he said; and Whittier has
given us poetic touches of the inland scenery in elevated verse:

                "Fleecy clouds casting their shadows
                 Over uplands and meadows;
                 And country roads winding as roads will,
                 Here to a ferry, there to a mill."

Poets arise where there is poetic nourishment, internal and external,
for them to feed on; and it is not surprising that a Whittier and a
Hawthorne should have been evolved from the environment in which they
grew to manhood.

It is a common saying with old Boston families that their ancestors came
to America in the "Arbella" with Governor Winthrop, but as a matter
of fact there were at least fifteen vessels that brought colonists to
Massachusetts in 1630, and I cannot discover that any lists of their
passengers have been preserved. The statement that certain persons
came over at the same time with Governor Winthrop might soon become a
tradition that they came in the same ship with him; but all that we know
certainly is that Governor Winthrop landed about the middle of June,
1630, and that his son arrived two weeks later in the "Talbot," and
was drowned July 2, while attempting to cross one of the tide rivers at
Salem. Who arrived in the thirteen other vessels that year we know not.
Ten years later Sir Richard Saltonstall emigrated to Boston with the
Phillips and Warren families in the "Arbella" (or "Arabella"), and there
is no telling how much longer she sailed the ocean.

Hawthorne himself states that his ancestors came from Wig Castle in
Wigton in Warwickshire, [Footnote: Diary, August 22, 1837.] but no such
castle has been discovered, and the only Wigton in England appears to be
located in Cumberland. [Footnote: Lathrop's "Study of Hawthorne," 46.]
He does not tell us where he obtained this information, and it certainly
could not have been from authentic documents,--more likely from
conversation with an English traveller. Hawthorne never troubled himself
much concerning his ancestry, English or American; while he was consul
at Liverpool, he had exceptional advantages for investigating the
subject, but whatever attempt he made there resulted in nothing. It
is only recently that Mr. Henry F. Waters, who spent fifteen years in
England searching out the records of old New England families, succeeded
in discovering the connecting link between the first American Hawthornes
and their relatives in the old country. It was a bill of exchange for
one hundred pounds drawn by William Hathorne, of Salem, payable to
Robert Hathorne in London, and dated October 19, 1651, which first
gave Mr. Waters the clue to his discovery. Robert not only accepted his
brother's draft, but wrote him this simple and business-like but truly
affectionate epistle in return:


"GOOD BROTHER: Remember my love to my sister, my brother John and
sister, my brother Davenport and sister and the rest of our friends.

"In haste I rest

"Your loving brother,

"From Bray this 1 April, 1653.

"ROBERT HATHORNE."


From this it appears that Major William Hathorne not only had a brother
John, who established himself in Lynn, but a sister Elizabeth, who
married Richard Davenport, of Salem. Concerning Robert Hathorne we
only know further that he died in 1689; but in the probate records
of Berkshire, England, there is a will proved May 2, 1651, of William
Hathorne, of Binfield, who left all his lands, buildings and tenements
in that county to his son Robert, on condition that Robert should pay
to his father's eldest son, William, one hundred pounds, and to his son
John twenty pounds sterling. He also left to another son, Edmund, thirty
acres of land in Bray, and there are other legacies; but it cannot be
doubted that the hundred pounds mentioned in this will is the same that
Major William Hathorne drew for five months later, and that we have
identified here the last English ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His
wife's given name was Sarah, but her maiden name still remains unknown.
The family resided chiefly at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Park,
and evidently were in comfortable circumstances at that time. From
William Hathorne, senior, their genealogy has been traced back to John
Hathorne (spelled at that time Hothorne), who died in 1520, but little
is known of their affairs, or how they sustained themselves during
the strenuous vicissitudes of the Reformation. [Foot