HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY. BY HELEN ARCHIBALD CLARKE Author of "Browning's Italy," "Browning's England,'* "Ancient Myths in Modern Poets," "Longfellow s Country," etc., etc. TORONTO THE MUSSON BOOK Co. LIMITED 1910 eu Copyright, 1910, 6y THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY Published November, 1910 William O. Hewitt, Brooklyn, Tf. T. INTRODUCTORY NOTE SO considerable a biographical and critical litera- ture has grown up around Hawthorne that it may be wondered whether there is room for still another book about him. Biography has to do mainly with the facts of his life; criticism takes for granted complete knowledge of Hawthorne's works on the part of the reader. Therefore it seemed to the writer that there was a place for a book on Hawthorne, the aim of which should be to show more explicitly than has heretofore been shown the relation between his life experiences and his work, and to illustrate as completely as possible in the space of one volume the general trend of his genius and the culmination of its various phases. In these days, when the mass of current literature is so enormous that the classics of American literature are in danger of being forgotten, the writer hopes the book may fill the pleasant office of recalling to those who knew Hawthorne well in their youth the spell he then cast over them; that it may have a stimulus to those who have read him not at all or only in part to go to the fountain head and drink to the full of his fancy and wisdom; that to a third class, too busy to read anything but books about books, it may give 253662 INTRODUCTORY NOTE many glimpses of the genius who has inspired this work of appreciation. The writer desires to express her thanks to Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co. for their kind permission to make quotations from their definitive edition of Haw- thorne's works. BOSTON, August, 1910. CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Far Afield in New England - - 1 II. Historical Miniatures 71 III. Puritan Tragedies - 123 IV. "The Artist of the Beautiful" - - 161 V. The Roxbury Utopia - 201 VI. In Wonderland - 237 VII. English Episodes - - 263 VIII. Italy as Hawthorne Saw It - 293 IX. The Elixir of Life - - - - 323 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A New England Landscape Frontispiece FACING PAGE Nathaniel Hawthorne 8 Bowdoin College, As It Was in Hawthorne's Day . . 18 Egg Rock, Nahant 38 Crawford Notch, White Mountains 50 The Great Stone Face, White Mountains .... 54 Franconia Notch, White Mountains 58 Front and Rear View of No. 12 Herbert Street, Salem Where Hawthorne Wrote 68 Main Street, Salem 86 Witch House, Danvers . 92 "Gallows Hill," Salem, Children Standing on Gallows' Sockets 96 A View of the Harbor, Old Boston 100 The Old Province House 104 The Gentle Boy 126 Old Custom House, Salem 130 Old Court House, Boston, Where City Hall Now Stands 134 Beacon Hill, Boston, in 1809 136 Old State House, Boston 140 The House of Seven Gables 148 Garret, House of Seven Gables 150 The Window of the Little Shop, House of Seven Gables 154 Walden Pond 172 The Old Manse . 176 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Concord River 180 Pulpit Rock, Brook Farm 216 Tremont Street, Boston, As It Looked in the Days of "The Blithedale Romance" 224 Margaret Fuller's Cottage, Brook Farm .... 230 Tremont House, Boston, in 1840, As It Was When Miles Coverdale Went There 234 West Street, Boston, As It Looked When Sophia Pea- body Lived There 240 Stockbridge Bowl, Berkshire Hills, Mass 244 The Road to Lenox 248 Graylock From the Lake 252 Lenox From Prospect Hill 256 Clarence Dock, Liverpool 272 On the Mersey 276 Chester Cathedral 280 The Catacombs, Rome 308 Hilda's Tower 312 Pincian Hill, Rome 314 Hill Behind Wayside, Where Septimius Felton Walked 336 The Wayside, Concord 342 FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND "Sober and weighty the penumbrous atmosphere m which the young creator sits; but how calm, thoughtful and beau- tiful the dim vision of his face, lit by the sheltered radiance of ethereal fancies! Behind his own form we catch the movement of mysterious shapes men and women wearing aspects of joy or anger, calm or passionate, gentle and pitiable, or stern, splendid and forbidding." GEORGE PAESONS LATHEOP. charm-environed spots most closely asso- ciated in the popular mind with the life and work of Hawthorne are, first of all, Salem, then Concord, the Berkshires, and, at the other ex- tremity of the scale, "Imperial" Rome. Yet Boston and Liverpool were for considerable lengths of time his dwelling place, and for an experimental while the quiet, unobstrusive township of Roxbury knew him for its own, not to mention boyhood days on the shores of Lake Sebago, or college days in Brunswick. Though Liverpool has not, in any work of Haw- thorne's, been surrounded with the halo of romance, Boston may certainly lay claim to a conspicuous place in the regard of the worshiper at literary shrines : for was it not here that the most remarkable of all his heroines, Hester Prynne, lived her sin-shadowed yet brave and pathetic life? Roxbury, too, should surely be remembered because of that early and very fasci- nating specimen in literature of the new woman, Zenobia. The popular mind may be forgiven, however, upon the score that there is positively nothing left of the infant Boston in which Hester Prynne lived two hun- dred and fifty and more years ago, except the grave- yards. The "beetle-browed" prison made way long ago for that antechamber of judgment, the Court ; 4T HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY House, less terrible because it might lead to freedom instead of punishment. Where the scaffold and the pillory stood in the ancient market-place now stands the old State House, itself for many decades given over to other uses than those of the State, while its place has been filled by the State House building on Beacon Hill, famed for its golden dome, which, if it does not symbolize as great a growth in enlighten- ment as might be in the two hundred and fifty years of lawmaking from Hester's day to ours, at least throws a glamor of golden glory about the law- makers. Lastly, Hester's lonely hut on the shores of the Back Bay, then far on the outskirts of the town, is blotted from memory's map by the substantial man- sions of Boston's solidest citizens. The region in which Zenobia was wont to rule as queen, though not completely obliterated, has degen- erated from Utopia, with its simple blisses, to a chari- table institution for German orphans. Quite the contrary is true of the four places first mentioned, where are still to be found sites and scenes over which has been thrown the spell of Hawthorne's genius ; hence, no doubt, their prominence in the popu- lar mind. Though Hawthorne was, as everybody knows, born in Salem, in an unpretentious and now woefully shabby house on Union Street, so much of his boy- hood was spent away from it that only later in life does the atmosphere of this historic old town fully work itself into the warp and woof of his artistic consciousness. The story of his father's early death and his moth- er's subsequent seclusion for forty years has been told FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 5 so often that there is no need to go into the details here. His biographers are not by any means of one mind as to the exact extent of time spent by Haw- thorne at the home in Raymond, Maine, whither the widow, with her two daughters and her son, repaired when little "Nat" was, as he himself vaguely states, nine or ten years old. Mr. Samuel T. Pickard has given especial attention to this point in his forewords to Hawthorne's early diary.* In his opinion, so little has been said about this part of Hawthorne's life that few readers realize how large a proportion of it practically the whole of his 'teens "his home was in a little hamlet in a peculiarly isolated region sur- rounded by primeval forests and in the midst of a lake country, then little known to the outside world." During this time there were winters spent in Salem, preparing for college, and then college days at Bow- doin, itself in the same county as Raymond. If Mr. Pickard is fully informed, Hawthorne came every year for his vacations to his home in the wilderness, going back and forth between Salem and Raymond from 1813 to 1825, when he graduated from Bowdoin. According to Hawthorne's recent biographer, George E. Woodberry, the family had returned to Salem three years before Hawthorne's time of gradu- ation. Even should this change of residence have completely interfered with his vacations in Raymond, there would still be nine years during which this life in the wilderness exerted its wild charm upon him. * Since regarded as in part if not wholly spurious, and withdrawn from circulation by Mr. Pickard. 6 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY No experience could well be imagined better adapted for tempering an inheritance from Puritan ancestors, conspicuous among whom was the Judge Hathorne, of witchcraft fame, who was known to have sentenced to death a sorry number of wjtches, and to whom hearsay attributed a zeal for the truth marked by unusual inhumanity. A return to outdoor nature is a good antidote to any exaggerated strain, either of fanaticism or bohemianism, that may be lurking in the blood. It limbers the starch of the one, and purifies of dregs the other. What a wonder and delight nature is among the hills and woods and lakes of Maine, vast summer crowds bear witness to to-day. The Hawthorne home, now become a church, stands near the outlet into Sebago Lake of Dingley Brook, which, issuing from a little lake called Thomas Pond, a mile or so away, here made a plunge of fifteen feet before losing itself in the generous waters of Sebago Lake. Though thirty-pound salmon are said to disport themselves in the lake to the great delight of the summer angler, Hawthorne better liked to fish from a large flat rock at the head of the brook, which still goes by the name of "Nat's Rock." The tricksy trout were not, however, so altogether fasci- nating as to take his attention from the view, and it was of this he spoke years after when, in Liverpool, he met one day an old chum on the street. It is a pleasant jaunt from Portland to Sebago Lake. Four or five little steamers ply upon the lake, and by careful calculations their combined trips may be arranged so that a tour of the whole lake may be made on the way to and from Raymond. The lake FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 7 itself is charming in outline, and its scenery of low- lying hills stretching back toward the northwest to the peaks of the White Mountains is full of a quiet beauty. To get the impression of wildness, one has to plunge into the woods along its shores, and even much of that in the neighborhood of the Hawthorne house, at least, has disappeared before the tread of the up-to- date angler, who builds his camps where once the shot of Hawthorne's old fowling piece must often have been heard. We had pictured to ourselves "Nat's Rock" as a bold and lonely crag at the head of Ding- ley Brook, amid a tangle of impenetrable woods. It is, however, a small bowlder, quite smooth, lying on a low and level bit of shore, where fishing must take on its most peaceful and lazy aspects. Dingley Brook is not a riotous stream. Concord River is hardly more peaceful, but perhaps that is because the fifteen foot fall has been dammed. A mill stands at this point, and through a sluice, logs from the shores of the lakes farther up are sent down to Sebago. The lake itself is capable of many and frequent changes of mood. When we set sail it smiled upon us with a perfectly placid countenance, but before we had gone half its length a fierce thunderstorm, in which the sky seemed literally to rain lightning, had turned its smiles to awesome frowns. By the time we landed at South Casco the passing rage had subsided, its only trace being the dripping trees on shore and the sodden road along which we had to tramp to reach our destination, an unpretentious little inn, named for Hawthorne, opposite the church which was once his home. Like most of the houses occupied by Hawthorne 8 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY during his life, there is not the remotest suggestion of beauty in this edifice. It is a big, barn-like looking structure with a gable roof and not even adorned with the artistic doorway so characteristic of old farm- houses in Maine. Its big chimneys were taken down when the transformation into a church was made and one measly little chimney substituted to accommodate the two stoves that warm the church, with an outlet for their unsightly and interminable stovepipes which seem to ramble two or three times around the church in their effort to find it. A kind word may, however, be said for the interior of the church, which though so archi- tecturally void is cheery and comfortable, with red- cushioned seats arranged in amphitheater rows, a plat- form with red plush armchairs and a cabinet organ. We were told by our host of the inn that every de- nomination (except the Catholic) , including the Mor- mons, had held services in this church. We were more interested in trying to imagine the interior arrange- ment of the rooms that once filled the church in two stories, and, truth to say, it needed not a very brilliant imagination to see that there must have been a central hall with square rooms, two or three on either side of it. Quite a little settlement of summer cottages clusters about the church and the inn, and across the brook can be seen the prettier house of Uncle Manning, showing a grateful irregularity of structure and a doorway of some beauty. It was Uncle Manning who, having built a house for himself here, built one also for his sister, Mrs. Hawthorne. The scenery is not so remarkable as some of NATHANIEL, HAWTHORNE FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 9 Maine's great nature-shows, yet it has sufficient in- herent beauty to fire the fancy of an imaginative boy. Somber, primeval forests, stretching away from the lake to Rattlesnake Mountain, through which he might roam at will with his old fowling piece, a pulpit rock to arouse wonder at nature's prophetic mimicry of human devices, or, stranger still, "The Images" (remarkable paintings on the cliffs said to have been done by Indians) at the end of his own little jutting cape, while far, far away on the northwestern horizon, like the never attainable mountains of fairy-tales, the silent, pervading slopes and peaks of the White Mountains. But it was the freedom and the solitude which im- pressed the boy quite as much if not more than the beauty of the surroundings. In his own mentions of the place, these are ever the feelings uppermost. "Here," he writes in 1853, "I ran quite wild, and would, I doubt not, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long or shooting with an old fowling piece, but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pil- grim's Progress,' and any poetry or light books within my reach. Those were delightful days ; for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine-tenths of it primeval woods." And again he tells how he would skate all alone on Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. "When I found myself far from home, and weary with the exhaustion of skating, I would some- times take refuge in a log cabin where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. I would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through 10 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. Ah, how well I recall the summer days, also, when, with my gun, I roamed at will through the woods of Maine." So delightful to him was this savageizing, as he called it, that when away from Raymond he suffered real pangs of homesickness, and when this chapter of his life was at last closed, he writes: "I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be so happy as when I did." From all this one might be led to think that there was more of the primeval savage than the genius in the young Hawthorne. But it must not be forgotten that while the savageizing was going on, Shake- speare and Bunyan were having their share in fash- ioning the brains of the young savage pouring into it imagination and morals, life and thought. If any doubt could exist on the subject it would be set at rest at once by a delicate little touch of Julian Haw- thorne's, who, in recounting his father's experiences on Sebago Lake, says: "He was a good deal of a sportsman, and had all the fishing and hunting he wanted ; but he was more fond of the idea or sentiment of the thing than of the actuality of it, and often forebore to pull the trigger, and threw back the fish that he drew from the river or lake." Here is the true artistic temperament, taking more joy in the imaginative picture of a thing than in its reality a dangerous quality if not held well under control, since it may lead to playing with the serious things of life, in order that the imagination may be fed. Puritan self-restraint kept Hawthorne's nature FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 11 in check, yet how often does he seem to have the feel- ing that all life is merely a dream! Closely allied with his Puritanized, or, better, puri- fied imaginative faculty, were the two tendencies of his nature emphasized by this Raymond existence the wander-lust which never left him throughout his life, and the opposite one, which he himself called in a letter to his friend, Franklin Pierce, after many years of chequered existence, his "cursed habits of solitude." N Even as a very small schoolboy in Salem, he was fond of solitary rambles and used to haunt a place miles from his home called Legg's Hill. Lathrop relates how when still smaller a mere child he would break out from the midst of childish broodings and exclaim: "There, mother, I am going away to sea, some time"; then, with an ominous shaking of the head, "and I'll never come back again." His childish fancy worked upon this theme so frequently that he used to terrify his sisters with tales about long journeys which he should take in future, in the course of * which he would fly at will through the air; and always he ended with the same hopeless prophecy of his failing to return. With a grandfather who was a sea-rover, and a father, not only a sea-rover, but a man of melancholy disposition and preternaturally reticent, it will be seen that the seeds of these two tendencies were already implanted in the boy's nature, Raymond merely hav- ing strengthened them. How these two tendencies evolved and worked themselves out in his art, what he derived from his wander-lust, what from his habits 12 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY of solitude, we shall see more clearly as we go on with our subject. The life in Raymond belonged to too early a period to bring forth any direct literary fruit, unless the problematical journal be counted as such. This was reserved for the next chapter in his experience, his college days at Bowdoin, where, according to his own account, he was an "idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans." This modest, not to say uncomplimentary, account of himself may be offset by that of one of his pro- fessors, who not only remembers him as a great reader, giving indications of the facility and felicity so marked in subsequent years, but declares that his Latin and English exercises were especially com- mended by his teachers, among whom was Professor Newman, certainly to be counted a competent judge. To this same professor we are indebted for a life- like glimpse of Hawthorne as he sat in his class- room :* "If the writer had the gift of the pencil he could portray Hawthorne as he looked in the recitation room of those days, eastern side Maine Hall, with the same shy, gentle bearing, black, drooping, full, inquisitive eye, and low, musical voice that he ever had. Little did the teacher imagine what work he might be doing for the budding genius near the end *Alpheus S. Packard, in "The History of Bowdoin College." FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 13 of the front bench, or for the other genius even then bursting into bloom, two seats back Longfellow." Very primitive was the Bowdoin College of those days, still in its early youth for a college, having been in existence less than twenty-five years and few were the attractions in Brunswick, now as charming a town as there is to be found in New England, invariably calling forth a chorus of admiration from summer tourists on the Boston and Maine, when the train draws up at the station. Our same professor who knew Hawthorne remem- bers how Brunswick used to look way back at the beginning of the century, when, a very small boy, he attended its second commencement. In those days this primitive settlement had already a Main Street, upon which the college faced, but which boasted be- sides only a few scattered buildings. In front of the college there were three. Blaisdell's blacksmith shop, whence issued from dawn till late in the evening the ring of the anvil. On one side of this was a one-story unpainted house, and on the other a two-storied house, plastered, but begrimed by the dust of the plain. This domicile was occupied by an Irish family, by the name of Mullen, whose services were in request for washing up the college floors. The only dwelling on the eastern side of the street, from the church to Mere Brook, was the president's, and a two-story building on the bank of the brook. An unnamed street, since called Cleveland Street, had exactly five houses, four on one side and one, unpainted, on the other, where another of the college-cleaning brigade, Aunt Nelly, the sweep, lived. With the exception of another one-story dwelling, the abiding place of the 14 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY church sexton and undertaker, an open common em- braced the whole area to the residence of Professor Cleveland and the woods below. If the dwellings were few, still fewer were the trees to soften the general bareness of the scene. One old maple or elm, the reminiscent mind is uncertain which, seems to have been all, except an oak grove off to one end. An unsightly bog filled the space where the mall now is. The postmaster's house appears to have been the most elegant residence in the village, at the corner of Main and Hill streets. The name of this government official was Mr. Jotham Stone, a gentle- man said to have possessed great taste in gardening, but otherwise illiterate. Shrubbery adorned the beds in his garden; but hanging upon the shelves in the diminutive post-office that stood in one corner of the garden, were such astounding announcements of the books contained thereon that it is doubtful whether a State examination would have found this govern- ment official eligible to-day for the vote. For ex- ample, Hannah More's "Coelebs in Search of a Wife" appeared as "Slabs in Scratch of a Wife." Fortunately for the honor of the village, the church building was a "respectable structure in the best style of the day." Such was the village in the earliest days of the col- lege, not more than ten years before Hawthorne matriculated. To get a near view of the college itself we may follow in the footsteps of a traveler thither from Boston in the earlier days, who, after more ado of preparation than would be given to a voyage of these days by ocean steamer to Liverpool, would set FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 15 forth upon his long and toilsome journey in his private carriage. The passage of the impetuous, at times perilous, Piscataqua in a scow introduces him to the endless forests, the hills, rocks and gridiron bridges of Maine, evil report of which has reached his ear. He makes his slow progress over the long, rugged, toilsome miles of Cape Neddick and Wells relieved, indeed, by bewitching views of the broad Atlantic, which burst, as by enchantment, on the eye at York, and then of the magnificent beaches and inrolling waves break- ing in long sheets of foam; he passes the fine falls of the Saco, and the dense gloom of Saco woods; ad- mires the charming site of Portland, its thrift and promise; then on this hand catching pleasant views of Casco Bay, of which the eye cannot tire; at length, wearied and dusty, after the last long ten miles, slowly emerging half a mile or more on the plain south of Brunswick, he gets sight of a single three- story edifice of brick, a plain, unpainted chapel of wood, a church and spire yet unfinished, a president's house of most modest pretensions, and a few humble, scattering dwellings.* By 1822, when Hawthorne took this journey by stage coach, the college yard had a little more to show for itself, another large hall having been built, and the year after he entered a new dormitory was put up. The college grounds were almost as treeless as the village and about a quarter as large as they are now, a row of balm-of-Gilead trees and a single elm along the borders being all there were to relieve the sandy *See Packard. 16 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY waste of the campus. But it must be remembered that, sandy and boggy and treeless as the little clear- ing was which comprised all there was of Brunswick and Bowdoin during the first quarter of the century, it was surrounded upon every side, except that where the river flowed, by miles of pine forest. Some of this, probably still uncleared, was on college land, for Hawthorne speaks in one place of the "academic pines" in his introduction to "The Snow Image," ad- dressed to one of his old college classmates, Horatio Bridge. This bit of writing has some interest because, out- side of his simple boyish letters to his family, it gives one of the few personal glimpses of his college life and its promise of literary attainment: "If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but, while we were lads together at a country college gathering blueberries, in study hours, under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin ; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods ; or bat- fowling in the summer twilights; or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest- though you and I will never cast a line in it again two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowl- edge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction." To this picture of the possibilities for enjoyment FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 17 after the boy's own heart among wood and wild may be added the account of an ancient student: "The earlier graduates must have many recollec- tions of social and solitary walks. Their memories have sadly failed if they do not recall the chief fea- tures of the scene the level earth, through whose slippery carpet of scanty herbage and withered pine leaves shot up, in their season, the frequent blueberry and winter green ; the air charged with resinous odors ; the blackened tree trunks which told of forest fires; the subdued and somber light; the tinkling cowbells; and the gentle rustle of the breeze in the branches above. The river is another Brunswick image which none of us can forget. We remember our walks upon its banks, both above and below the falls : our frolics in its waters and on its floating logs; the awe with which we gazed on its might and fury, when, swollen by the spring flood, it rushed down and by, some- times carrying with it bridges, mill and dam; and that low, continuous roar which always pervaded the still night air." The first engraving made of Bowdoin College shows it in 1821, the year Hawthorne entered. The picture has an interest beyond the fact of its giving a good idea of the college at this time, because of the diminutive portrait included of Uncle Trench, a personage dear to the hearts of the students at that day. There he goes, trundling a wheelbarrow on the open common south of Maine Hall. In his wheel- barrow delectable thought are gingerbread, plain and sugared, and root beer. He has come from his home, a mile or so down the Maquoit Road, to tempt the students with the products of his bakery and home 18 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY brewing. As one man they doubtless succumbed to the temptation, for as he rests his barrow in the shade of the Hall, he is soon relieved of his whole stock. "We liked the quiet, painstaking old man," says the ancient student, "for his sweets and for his own sake." Out of his college experience grew the setting of Hawthorne's first novel, "Fanshawe," a fact first pointed out by Longfellow, and later enlarged upon by George Parsons Lathrop in his sympathetic "Study of Hawthorne." The story, though exceed- ingly crude, still has something of the fascination of dime novels, a species of literature which might be described as the degenerate American descendant of the romanticism of Scott or Victor Hugo. In the handling of the material, there is indeed much that is directly imitative of Scott's manner, even to a touch of his humor. There is promise, however, of future distinction in the delineation of the characters, espe- cially those of the melancholy consumptive, Fan- shawe, and the good old-fashioned villain, Butler, while the style has often a nicety of diction which does much toward rounding off the corners of the imma- ture conception of the story. The book opens with the description of the ancient college town in which the story is laid. The resem- blance to the Brunswick of the writer's college days is self-evident: "In an ancient though not very populous settle- ment, in a retired corner of one of the New England States, arise the walls of a seminary of learning, which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled 'Harley College.' This institution, though the num- ber of its years is inconsiderable, compared with the . CALIFORNIA O 3 O u O "i* .VIViU V , FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 19 hoar antiquity of its European sisters, is not without some claims to reverence on the score of age; for an almost countless multitude of rivals, by many of which its reputation has been eclipsed, have sprung up since its foundation. At no time, indeed, during an exist- ence of nearly a century, has it acquired a very ex- tensive fame; and circumstances which need not be particularized have, of late years, involved it in a deeper obscurity." The following description of the surroundings of the college are, according to Longfellow, strongly suggestive of Bowdoin : "The local situation of the college, so far secluded from the sight and sound of the busy world, is pecu- liarly favorable to the moral, if not to the literary habits of its students; and this advantage probably caused the founders to overlook the inconveniences that were inseparably connected with it. The humble edifices rear themselves almost at the farthest ex- tremity of a narrow vale which, winding through a long extent of hill country, is well nigh as inaccessible, except at one point, as the Happy Valley of Abys- sinia. A stream, that farther on becomes a consid- erable river, takes its rise at a short distance above the college, and affords, along its wood-fringed banks, many shady retreats, where even study is pleasant, and idleness delicious. The neighborhood of the in- stitution is not quite a solitude, though the few habi- tations scarcely constitute a village. These consist principally of farmhouses of rather an ancient date (for the settlement is much older than the college), and of a little inn, which even in that secluded spot does not fail of a moderate support. Other dwellings 20 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY are scattered up and down the valley; but the diffi- culties of the soil will long avert the evils of a too dense population. The character of the inhabitants does not seem as there was, perhaps, room to antici- pate to be in any degree influenced by the atmos- phere of Harley College. They are a set of rough and hardy yeomen, much inferior, as respects refine- ment, to the corresponding classes in most other parts of our country. This is the more remarkable, as there is scarcely a family in the vicinity that has not provided for at least one of its sons the advantages of a 'liberal education.' ' Hawthorne has invested the college with an an- tiquity which, of course, it did not possess in his day, having been founded as late as 1796. It is probable, therefore, that his account of the collegians as they were "about eighty years since" presents only a slightly imaginative picture of them as he actually knew them: "Having thus described the present state of Harley College, we must proceed to speak of it as it existed about eighty years since, when its foundation was recent and its prospects flattering. At the head of the institution at this period was a learned and ortho- dox divine, whose fame was in all the churches. He was the author of several works which evinced much erudition and depth of research; and the public, per- haps, thought more highly of his abilities from a sin- gularity in the purposes to which he applied them, that added much to the curiosity of his labors, though little to their usefulness. But, however fanciful might be his private pursuits, Dr. M elmoth, it was universally allowed, was diligent and successful in FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 21 the arts of instruction. The young men of his charge prospered beneath his eye, and regarded him with an affection that was strengthened by the little foibles which occasionally excited their ridicule. The presi- dent was assisted in the discharge of his duties by two inferior officers, chosen from the alumni of the college, who, while they imparted to others the knowledge they had already imbibed, pursued the study of divinity, under the direction of their principal. Under such auspices the institution grew and flourished. Having at that time but two rivals in the country (neither of them within a considerable distance), it became the general resort of the youth of the province in which it was situated. For several years in succession, its students amounted to nearly fifty a number which, relatively to the circumstances of the country, was very considerable. "From the exterior of the collegians, an accurate observer might pretty safely judge how long they had been inmates of those classic walls. The brown cheeks and the rustic dress of some would inform him that they had but recently left the plough to labor in a not less toilsome field ; the grave look and the inter- mingling of garments of a more classic cut would distinguish those who had begun to acquire the polish of their new residence; and the air of superiority, the paler cheek, the less robust form, the spectacles of green, and the dress, in general of threadbare black, would designate the highest class, who were under- stood to have acquired nearly all the science their alma mater could bestow, and to be on the point of assum- ing their stations in the world. There were, it is true, exceptions to this general description. A few young 22 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY men had found their way hither from the distant sea- ports; and these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom they exerted a supe- riority in exterior accomplishments, which the fresh though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them in their literary competitions. A third class, differing widely from both the former, con- sisted of a few young descendants of the aborigines, to whom an impracticable philanthropy was endeav- oring to impart the benefits of civilization. "If this institution did not offer all the advantages of elder and prouder seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to its students by the inculcation of regular habits, and of a deep and awful sense of re- ligion, which seldom deserted them in their course through life." In some of his home letters Hawthorne talks a good deal about the clothes he must have. For ex- ample, he writes his sister, giving arguments for a speedy return home: "Firstly, I have no clothes in which I can make a decent appearance, as the weather in this part of the world is much too cold for me to wear my thin clothes often, and I shall therefore be compelled to stay at home from meeting all the rest of the term, and perhaps to lie in bed the whole of the time." From this we may conclude that Haw- thorne himself was, in relation to the local students, "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," and one wonders if he actually appeared at commence- ment in the garb described as that of the students in the first quarter of the century, when the "aristocracy " of knee breeches and silk hose had not given place to rt;he "democracy of pantaloons," and the "graduating FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 23 class appeared in this dress of the nether limbs and in silk robes borrowed from the neighboring clergy; president and professors in like array, with the addi- tion of the Oxford cap." Imagination, as always in Hawthorne, plays a larger part in "Fanshawe" than reality, though in the hero, himself, there are traces, as Lathrop points out, of the "pure heart and high resolves, that constant as- piration toward lofty moral truth which marked Haw- thorne's own mind." Hawthorne had already taken up his post-graduate course in solitude in the "haunted chamber" in his Salem home on Herbert Street when this novel ap- peared in 1828, so it is probable that the solitary Fanshawe owed much of his characterization to its author's own lessons in solitude. Here is a descrip- tion which has the ring of a personal experience : "Fanshawe returned to his chamber that night, and lighted his lamp as he had been wont to do. The books were around him which had hitherto been to him like those fabled volumes of magic, from which the reader could not turn away his eyes till death were the consequence of his studies. . . . "He called up in review the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in solitary study, in conversa- tion with the dead, while he had scorned to mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives. He asked himself to what purpose was all this destructive labor, and where was the happiness of superior knowledge. He had climbed but a few steps of a ladder that reached to infinity; he had thrown away his life in discovering that, after a thou- sand such lives, he should still know comparatively 24 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY nothing. He even looked forward with dread though once the thought had been dear to him to the eternity of improvement that lay before him. It seemed now a weary way, without a resting place and without a termination; and at that moment he would have preferred the dreamless sleep of the brutes that perish to man's proudest attribute of immor- tality. "Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself uncon- nected with the world, unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his pursuits. In this re- spect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost heart could have been laid open there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which; dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand reali- ties. But, at any rate, he had seemed, to others and to himself, a solitary being, upon whom the hopes and fears of ordinary men were ineffectual." For twelve years, with hardly a break, Hawthorne lived in Salem such a recluse as is here described, but the wander-lust was not by any means stilled. He wrote: "I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared pos- sible through the entangling depths of my obscurity," which was literally true of his mornings given to study and his afternoons given to writing; but after dark he habitually wandered forth to take long walks. And what walks they must have been along the beau- tiful North Shore of Massachusetts! It is said that he explored the coast from Gloucester to Marblehead and Lynn in these evening rambles. As he had wan- FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 25 dered alone with his old fowling piece in the woods of Maine, now he wandered alone surrounded by the vastnesses of space, dark reaches of ocean and endless depths of sky above. His way must have lain, now along the jagged ledges of the rocks which crop out at frequent intervals along this coast, now over level stretches of sandy beach, now in paths through shad- owy woods. From time to time an island light would send its cheerful ray landward toward the lonely walker in dark places. The writer has explored much of this coast by daylight, when the difficulties in clam- bering over the uneven rocks are not small. Nigh upon eighty-five years ago, when the trails along- shore must have been fewer and more obscure, eve- ning walks including the many rugged miles between Gloucester and Marblehead must have been attended with considerable danger of a broken neck. Indeed, if the truth must be confessed, the feat of walking after supper from Salem to Gloucester and back seems hardly possible of accomplishment to any one but the Wandering Jew. Probably there is some error in the record. It is pleasant to know that Hawthorne sometimes took his rambles along the shore by day, when he might behold the sea in its radiancy of many colors such as illumine it upon the days when drifting clouds, catching the sunlight first, then sprinkle it over the sea in such diffracted confusion that transitory pinks and greens and purples mingle their tints with the universal blue; and when he might see "the great, gigantic smile o' the brown old earth," as he "thrusts out knees and feet for the ripple to run over in its mirth." 26 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY How deeply he felt the cheer of such days comes out in his little sketch, "Footprints by the Seashore," when he exclaims: "Grudge me not the day that has been spent in seclusion, which yet was not solitude, since the great sea has been my companion, and the little sea birds my friends, and the wind has told me his secrets, and airy shapes have flitted around my hermitage." The daytime, too, as well as the night, had its rambles in Salem or Salem village among the antique houses and grassy cellars, reminiscent of witchcraft tragedies. Besides all this he took little journeys for a few weeks every year, which finally culminated in his "grand tour" through Massachusetts to the Berk- shires in 1838. Thus it was that the two tendencies so deeply im- planted within his nature were simultaneously given expression during all the years of his young manhood. In the solitude of his chamber he read hundreds of books, brought from the Salem Athenaeum. Here he fed his mind with the knowledge that books alone can give, especially delving in the historical lore of his own soil. Here he wrestled with the problems of ex- istence, here was evolved that spiritual and imagina- tive perception which was to form the underlying content of all the work to come. On the other hand, in his wanderings he wrought from nature or from scenes of human life garments with which to clothe the naked spirit "so majestical." In the stories written during this period may be traced both the spiritual and external influences at work upon Hawthorne's imagination. Some seem to have grown almost entirely out of the soil of his own FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 27 inner consciousness. In others he looks forth from the shadowy caves of his own mind upon a world made more or less phantasmal by means of his own tinted spectacles. Again he sallies forth into the sun- light and jostles up against real men and women. In the stories of the first order we obtain glimpses of the sort of psychological problems which were to form an integral part of most of his work, and which, if they had not been lit up by brilliancy of imagina- tion, might have overweighted it with a moralizing tendency almost didactic in its proportions. Before tracing the outcome in his work of the wan- der-lust , it will be interesting to examine the stories in which the solitary tendencies were most prominent. "The Haunted Mind" is a striking example. A midnight reverie, after awakening from the first sleep, an hour snatched from time, "an intermediate space where the business of life does not intrude; when the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the, present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the way- side to take breath." The reverie passes from the first waking moments, when the illusions of sleep still cling about the consciousness, to a wide-awake obser- vation of the surroundings; the glass through the win- dow curtain ornamented with fanciful devices in frost work, and, as further beautifully described, "through the clean portion of the glass, where the silvery moun- tain peaks of the frost scenery do not ascend, the most conspicuous object is the steeple; the white spire of which directs you to the wintry luster of the firma- ment. You may almost distinguish the figures on the clock that has just told the hour. Such a frosty sky, 28 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY and the snow-covered roofs, and the long vista of the frozen street, all white, and the distant water har- dened into rock, might make you shiver, even under four blankets and a woolen comforter. Yet look at that one glorious star! Its beams are distinguished from all the rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed, with a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an outline." After this instinctive poetic perception of beauty there is the chilly reaction into the depths of the bed- clothes, thought instead of mere sensuous perception of beauty seizes hold upon the imagination, and what results? From the enjoyment of the warmth arises speculation upon the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed like an oyster in its shell, out of this grows the hideous thought of the dead lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, and from that thought is collected a gloomy multitude to throw its complexion over the wakeful hour. By this time the author's mind is buried not only in the bedclothes, but in the most melancholy depths of a Puritanic, New England conscience, and his imagination takes a plunge into the nethermost re- gions of the soul: "In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide." Following quickly upon this thought : "A funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling assume bodily shape, and things of the mind become dim specters to the eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wearing a sister's like- FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 29 ness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness in her melancholy features, and grace in the flow of her sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her golden hair, and her bright garments all faded and defaced, steal- ing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she was your fondest Hope, but a de- lusive one ; so call her Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him, unless it be Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom you sub- jected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were bound his slave forever by once obeying him. See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame. "Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable, a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty heart, that holds its hell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the features of an injured friend? What if the fiend should come in woman's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's foot in the likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient without such guilt is this night- mare of the soul; this heavy, heavy sinking of the spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this indis- 30 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY tinct horror of the mind, blending itself with the dark- ness of the chamber." Fortunately for the "Haunted Mind," having at- tained this climax of gloom, a vision of peaceful, bliss- ful domestic love saves him from further ruminations upon evil, and brings to his inward eye a series of lovely though disconnected pictures as he drops off again into the land of dreams. Another story illustrative of the purely subjective side of Hawthorne's art is the little morality, "Fancy's Show Box." Although the dramatic personages of this piece are an old gentleman over his old Madeira who is visited by three figures, Fancy, Memory and Conscience, the whole is a little drama within the writer's own consciousness in which the point at issue is to decide whether guilt may exist in the soul, though it may never have reached the point of action. "Must the fleshly hand and visible frame of man set its seal to the evil designs of the soul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner? Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly tribunal, will guilty thoughts of which guilty deeds are no more than shadows will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence in the supreme court of eternity?" Fancy appears before the good old gentleman, against whom there has never been a breath of scandal, "in the garb and aspect of an itinerant showman, with a box of pictures on her back"; Memory in the "like- ness of a clerk with a pen behind her ear, an inkhorn at her buttonhole, and a huge manuscript volume be- neath her arm"; while Conscience is shrouded in a "dusky mantle concealing both face and form." FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 31 Fancy shows him various pictures of the crimes he might have committed, Memory reminds him they were in his thought, though thought had not grown to action, whereupon Conscience strikes remorseful dag- gers into his heart: "The exhibition proceeded. One after another, Fancy displayed her pictures, all of which appeared to have been painted by some malicious artist on pur- pose to vex Mr. Smith. Not a shadow of proof could have been adduced, in any earthly court, that he was guilty of the slightest of those sins which were thus made to stare him in the face. In one scene there was a table set out with several bottles and glasses half filled with wine, which threw back the dull ray of an expiring lamp. There had been mirth and revelry until the hand of the clock stood just at midnight, when murder stepped between the boon companions. A young man had fallen on the floor and lay stone dead, with a ghastly wound crushed into his temples, while over him, with a delirium of mingled rage and horror in his countenance, stood the youthful likeness of Mr. Smith. The murdered youth wore the fea- tures of Edward Spencer! 'What does this rascal of a painter mean?' cries Mr. Smith, provoked beyond all patience. 'Edward Spencer was my earliest and dearest friend, true to me as I to him through more than half a century. Neither I nor any other mur- dered him. Was he not alive within five years, and did he not, in token of our long friendship, bequeath me his gold-headed cane and a mourning ring?' Again had Memory been turning over her volume, and fixed at length upon so confused a page that she surely must have scribbled it when she was tipsy. The 32 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY purport was, however, that while Mr. Smith and Edward Spencer were heating their young blood with wine, a quarrel had flashed up between them, and Mr. Smith in deadly wrath had flung a bottle at Spencer's head. True, it missed its aim, and merely smashed a looking-glass; and the next morning, when the incident was imperfectly remembered, they had shaken hands with a hearty laugh. Yet, again, while Memory was reading, Conscience unveiled her face, struck a dagger to the heart of Mr. Smith, and quelled his remonstrance with her iron frown. The pain was quite excruciating." However, the author comes to the rescue of the tormented old man, with the conclusion that "It is not until the crime is accomplished that guilt clenches its gripe upon the guilty heart, and claims it for his own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousandfold more virulent by its self- consciousness." Thus, as in the foregoing story, a way is found out into the open. Even when his imagination has no food except that derived from his own ponderings, a final light always succeeds upon the darkness, how- ever somber it may have been. This story, we are told, was the outcome of a per- sonal experience in which Hawthorne was nearly drawn into a duel with an intimate friend through the mischievous representations of a third person. The mistake was found out in time, but another friend, feeling his honor at stake in a political quarrel, emu- lated Hawthorne's example, actually fought a duel and was killed. FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 33 One looks in vain for a wholly joyous mood in these essays of solitude. In "Snowflakes," for ex- ample, his reveries, though tinged with gladness, are for the most part in quite a sophomoric vein of lu- gubriousness : "Now, throughout New England, each hearth becomes an altar, sending up the smoke of a continued sacrifice to the immitigable deity who tyrannizes over forest, countryside and town; wrapt in his white mantle, his staff a huge icicle, his beard and hair a wind-tossed snowdrift, he travels over the land, in the midst of the northern blast, and woe to the homeless wanderer whom he finds upon his path! There he lies, stark and stiff, a human shape of ice, on the spot where Winter overtook him. On strides the tyrant over the rushing rivers and broad lakes, which turn to rock beneath his footsteps. His dreary empire is established ; all around stretches the desola- tion of the Pole. Yet not ungrateful be his New Eng- land children (for Winter is our sire, though a stern and rough one) not ungrateful even for the sever- ities which have nourished our unyielding strength of character. And let us thank him, too, for the sleigh rides, cheered by the music of merry bells for the crackling and rustling hearth, when the ruddy fire- light gleams on hardy Manhood, and the blooming cheek of Woman for all her home enjoyments, and the kindred virtues, which flourish in a frozen soil." Among the cheeriest of the essays in this class is "Sunday at Home," which, if not exactly joyous, is pervaded by a sort of Sabbath calm, not unmixed with a spice of humor the reflection of a religious frame of mine. He enjoys seeing other people go to church, but, like Emerson, would not, for all his 34 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY faith can see, that church-going person be. He loves to spend the Sabbath from morning till night, behind the curtain of his open window. His observations upon the church begin with the sunrise, stealing down the steeple: "First, the weather cock begins to flash; then a fainter luster gives the spire an airy aspect; next it encroaches on the tower, and causes the index of the dial to glisten like gold, as it points to the gilded figure of the hour. Now the loftiest window gleams, and now the lower. The carved frame-work of the portal is marked strongly out. At length the morn- ing glory, in its descent from heaven, comes down the steps, one by one; and there stands the steeple, glowing with fresh radiance, while the shades of twilight still hide themselves among the nooks of the adjacent buildings. Methinks, though the same sun brightens it every fair morning, yet the steeple has a peculiar robe of brightness for the Sabbath." Later he delights in the sound of the bells : "All the steeples in town are talking together, aloft in the sunny air, and rejoicing among themselves, while their spires point heavenward." After this the people who go and come to church awaken his chief interest. Often has he been gladdened by the sight of "a score of little girls and boys, in pink, blue, yellow and crimson frocks, bursting suddenly forth into the sunshine, like a swarm of gay butterflies that had been shut up in the solemn gloom" or, "cherubs haunting that holy place." His most winsome flight is, however, about the girls. "Those pretty girls! Why will they disturb my pious meditations? Of all days in the week they should strive to look least fascinating upon the Sab- FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 35 bath, instead of heightening their mortal loveliness, as if to rival the blessed angels, and keep our thoughts from heaven. Were I the minister himself, I must needs look. One girl is white muslin from the waist upwards, and bla'ck silk downwards to her slippers; a second blushes from top-knot to shoe-tie, one uni- versal scarlet ; another shines of a pervading yellow, as if she had made a garment of the sunshine. The greater part, however, have adopted a milder cheerful- ness of hue. Their veils, especially when the wind raises them, give a lightness to the general effect, and make them appear like airy phantoms, as they flit up the steps and vanish into the sombre doorway. Nearly all though it is very strange that I should know it wear white stockings, white as snow, and neat slippers, laced crosswise with black ribbon, pretty high above the ankles. A white stocking is infinitely more effective than a black one." The day ends with the dismissal of the congrega- tion in the afternoon, in the account of which are further humorous touches : "A commotion is heard. The seats are slammed down, and the pew-doors thrown back a multitude of feet are tramping along the unseen aisles and the congregation bursts suddenly through the portal. Foremost scampers a rabble of boys, behind whom moves a dense and dark phalanx of grown men, and lastly, a crowd of females, with young children, and a few scattered husbands. This instantaneous out- break of life into loneliness is one of the pleasantest scenes of the day. Some of the good people are rub- bing their eyes, thereby intimating that they have been wrapt, as it were, in a sort of holy trance by the 36 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY fervor of their devotion. There is a young man, a third-rate coxcomb, whose first care is always to flourish a white handkerchief and brush the seat of a tight pair of black silk pantaloons, which shine as if varnished. They must have been made of the stuff called 'everlasting,' or perhaps of the same piece as Christian's garments in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' for he put them on two summers ago and has not yet worn the gloss off. I have taken a great liking to those black silk pantaloons." A step out into the open is taken in this essay, at least in imagination, a further exemplification of which is to be found in "Lights from a Steeple," wherein the solitude of the study has given place to a perch at the very top of the church steeple. His ob- servations upon the outside world are thus much en- larged. He can see a wide stretch of ocean, bounded only by the horizon on the one hand, and on the other, fields and villages, while at his feet lay the streets of the city. But let him describe the scene himself, a picture of Salem as he then saw it: "In three parts of the visible circle, whose center is this spire, I discern cultivated fields, villages, white country seats, the waving lines of rivulets, little placid lakes, and here and there a rising ground that would fain be termed a hill. On the fourth side is the sea, stretching away towards a viewless boundary, blue and calm, except where the passing anger of a shadow flits Across its surface, and is gone. Hitherward, a broad inlet penetrates far into the land; on the verge of the harbor, formed by its extremity, is a town; and over it am I, a watchman, all-heeding and unheeded." From this vantage ground he sees various episodes FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 37 which take place in the streets, but the artist's long- ing for a nearer view of life than can be obtained by spying upon it from steeple-tops finds eloquent expression: "O that the multitude of chimneys could speak, like those of Madrid, and betray in smoky whispers the secrets of all who, since their first foundation, have assembled at the hearths within! O that the limping Devil of Le Sage would perch beside me here, extend his wand over this contiguity of roofs, uncover every chamber, and make me familiar with their inhabitants ! The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself. But none of these things are possible! and if I would know the interior of brick walls, or the mystery of human bosoms, I can but guess." It is interesting to learn that even this church, which could be seen from the window of the Herbert Street house, was decked out in Hawthorne's imagi- nation with its steeple, bell and organ none of which it really possessed. Very frequently he takes, in this way, an actual object as a mere starting point to which he adds all sorts of fanciful descriptions. At the same time that Hawthorne was writing these and other stories out of the fabric of his inner con- sciousness, his walks after dark, his rambles along- shore, and his yearly journeys to neighboring regions, were bringing him more or less into touch with actual life. He plunges out upon a rainy night and the re- 38 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY suit is "Night Sketches under an Umbrella/' He talks to no one, but he observes them at slightly closer range. Instead of gazing from his study window or down from the dizzy heights of the steeple, he meets face to face the individuals who are to be the medal- lions in his fabric and about whom he will trace his intermingled arabesques of moralizing and fancy. Many entries in the volume of American Notes, dating from June, 1835, show how constant were his jaunts to the sea. In one of these to Swampscott he not only saw but evidently became acquainted with the fascinating Susan who figures in his "Village Uncle." Elizabeth Hawthorne relates the circum- stance to Julian Hawthorne, pointing out at the same time how her brother's artistic sensibilities were apt to be captivated by charming specimens of girlhood, while his heart remained always untouched. It was about the year 1833 that Hawthorne, "after a sojourn of two or three weeks at Swampscott, came home cap- tivated in his fanciful way with a mermaid, as he called her. He would not tell us her name, but said she was of the aristocracy of the village, the keeper of a little shop. She gave him a sugar heart, a pink one, which he kept a great while, and then (how boyish and how like him!) he ate it. You will find her, I sus- pect, in the 'Village Uncle.' She is Susan. He said she had a great deal of what the French call espie- glerie. At that time he had fancies like this whenever he went from home." The portrait drawn in the story of the Mermaid is lifelike, in spite of the fact that she is doubly removed from the reader by being placed in a dream reverie of the old Village Uncle, who is himself but a dream rt o FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 39 reverie of the author's. Likewise, the description of sea scenery in the vicinity of Salem, and of seashore scenes such as still occur in the enchanted regions of the North Shore, are delightfully true, even minute, but the artistic setting of the story is so tinged by Hawthorne's customary imaginative solitude that mists of unreality seem half to hide the whole from view. Taken from her dream-setting, Susan appears al- most as real as she actually was: "You stood on the little bridge, over the brook, that runs across King's Beach into the sea. It was twilight; the waves rolling in, the wind sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the west, and the silver moon brightening above the hill; and on the bridge were you, fluttering in the breeze like a sea bird that might skim away at your pleasure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a creature of the ocean foam and the crimson light, whose merry life was spent in dancing on the crests of the billows, that threw up their spray to sup- port your footsteps. As I drew nearer I fancied you akin to the race of mermaids, and thought how pleas- ant it would be to dwell with you among the quiet coves, in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roam along secluded beaches of the purest sand, and when our northern shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lovely, far amid summer seas. And yet it glad- dened me, after all this nonsense, to find you nothing but a pretty young girl, sadly perplexed with the rude behavior of the wind about your petticoats." We may even track the Mermaid into her special haunt in the village, the shop whence came the pink sugar heart: 40 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY "At a certain window near the center of the village, appeared a pretty display of gingerbread men and horses, picture books and ballads, small fish-hooks, pins, needles, sugar plums and brass thimbles, articles on which the young fishermen used to expend their money from pure gallantry. What a picture was Susan behind the counter ! A slender maiden, though the child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest of all waists, brown hair curling on her neck, and a complex- ion rather pale, except when the sea breeze flushed it. A few freckles became beauty spots beneath her eye- lids. How was it, Susan, that you talked and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was right in your own eyes, and never once doing what was wrong in mine, nor shocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence had you that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsought gaiety, quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt your sunshine, and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. She made you a frank, simple, kind-hearted, sensible and mirthful girl. Obeying nature, you did free things without indelicacy, displayed a maiden's thought to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent as naked Eve." Here is a scene, too, which will strike a sympathetic chord in the breast of every city-bred person, who re- members his first walk along a New England beach: "I can spend a pleasant hour in the sun, watching the sports of the village children, on the edge of the surf: now they chase the retreating wave far down over the wet sand; now it steals softly up to kiss their naked feet; now it comes onward with threatening front, and roars after the laughing crew, as they FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 41 scamper beyond its reach. Why should not an old man be merry, too, when the great sea is at play with those little children? I delight, also, to follow in the wake of a pleasure party of young men and girls, strolling along the beach after an early supper at the Point. Here, with handkerchief at nose, they bend over a heap of eel grass, entangled in which is a dead skate, so oddly accoutred with two legs and a long tail, that they mistake him for a drowned animal. A few steps further the ladies scream, and the gentlemen make ready to protect them against a young shark of the dog-fish kind, rolling with a lifelike motion in the tide that has thrown him up. Next they are smit with wonder at the black shells of a wagon-load of live lobsters, packed in rock-weed for the country market. And when they reach the fleet of dories just hauled ashore after the day's fishing, how do I laugh in my sleeve, and sometimes roar outright, at the sim- plicity of these young folks and the sly humor of the fishermen!" Then the dream mists which have been afloat throughout the story blot out the picture. "Here I sit among my descendants," exclaims the imaginary Village Uncle, "in my old arm-chair and immemorial corner, while the firelight throws an appropriate glory round my venerable frame. Susan! My children! Something whispers me, that this happiest hour must be the final one, and that nothing remains but to bless you all, and depart with a treasure of recollected joys to Heaven. Will you meet me there? Alas! Your figures grow indistinct, fading into pictures on the air, and now to fainter outlines, while the fire is glimmering on the walls of a familiar room, and shows 42 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY the book that I flung down, and the sheet that I left half written, some fifty years ago. I lift my eyes to the looking-glass and perceive myself alone, unless those be the Mermaid's features, retiring into the depths of the mirror, with a tender and melancholy smile." We may imagine Hawthorne at this juncture eat- ing the sugar heart, having exhausted all the artistic possibilities of the Mermaid. He has luxuriated to the top of his bent by putting himself in the place of the patriarchal uncle who, if he had ever existed, might have married Susan. He has ruminated upon past possible events like an untutored but exceptionally wise old fisherman. At the same time he has revealed that he is not quite what he seems, but "a scribbler of wearier trash than what I read ; a man who had wan- dered out of the real world and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived, or only dreamed of living." Finally the story closes by the appearance of the deus ex machina Hawthorne in his own proper person of moralizer; and, exemplary as the moral is, one cannot help feeling that Susan, the Village Uncle, Swampscott and all its pretty sea scenes, and the mysterious dream-setting, have been too surely gulped down by a strange sort of dragon with didactic propensities. How genuine Hawthorne's love of the sea was comes out nowhere more delightfully than in "Foot- prints on the Seashore." He goes forth with the de- termination to spend a solitary day by the sea, but the joyousness of the sea at play in the sunshine, with FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 43 stern old rocks and placid beach, with gay little birds and rollicking children and fair young maids, who dabble their snowy feet in the rock-pools, quite takes away the loneliness of the occasion and causes at the end of the story an outburst in favor of human society. His sociable feelings go out toward a fishing party which is picnicking on the beach; he longs to be one of them. They see him. One of them sends up a hospitable shout: "Halloo, Sir Solitary! Come down and sup with us! The ladies wave their handker- chiefs." He bids farewell to solitude and exclaims, "Can I decline? No; and be it owned, after all my solitary joys, that this is the sweetest moment of a day by the seashore." The pathos of lives by the sea is touched upon in the little story called "Wives of the Dead," the scene of which might be Gloucester or Marblehead. Unlike most sea tragedies, it has a happy ending, for the "dead" are still living, not having, as the report was, suffered shipwreck. The beauty of this story lies in the tender thoughtfulness of each wife in refraining from letting the other know of her joy by not disturb- ing her sleep, for at separate times in the night had come to each a messenger bearing the good tidings of her husband's safety. Still farther abroad is the scene of "Chippings from a Chisel," which takes us to "Martha's Vineyard." So by degrees, in these early stories, the wander-lust gains the ascendancy over the tendency to solitude, until the latter comes to show itself principally in the vein of personal moralizing running more or less through most of Hawthorne's stories. In "The Seven Vagabonds" we have the wander- 44 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY lust in full swing. This tale, somewhat reminiscent of Dickens' stories in "Doctor Marigold's Prescrip- tions," was the outcome of one of those spring jour- neys Hawthorne was inthe habit of taking. It was five years before the entries in the American Note-book be- gan, but a letter quoted by Mr. Lathrop tells some incidents of the journey, the most interesting of which in connection with the story in question is that of his having gone to a Bible class in Farmington on Sunday evening "with a very polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling tailor of very questionable habits." These journeys were all made by stage coach, and came easily within Hawthorne's reach, because of the connection of his uncles, the Mannings, with stage coach lines. His letter showed that he went at least as far as Deerfield, Massachusetts, upon this occasion, and may have crossed the border into Canada. The narrator of the encounter with the "vagabonds" in the showman's wagon, all on their way to a camp meeting at Stamford, is not far removed from Haw- thorne himself, and the episode might well have been altogether real. Very likely, however, it is only based upon a reality from which, after the fashion of Hawthorne, a wide departure has been made in the working up of the story, but what impresses the reader in it is the reflec- tion of a growing need on the part of Hawthorne to come into closer touch with all sorts and conditions of men, as well as his increasing power to depict creatures of flesh and blood rather than manikins maids who make their impression by means of their white musline waists, and youths in pantaloons of FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 45 black everlasting. To the question he asks himself, "How came I among these wanderers?" he replies, "The free mind, that preferred its own folly to an- other's wisdom; the open spirit, that found compan- ions everywhere; above all, the restless impulse, that had so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoy- ments these were my claims to be of their society." One can hardly doubt that the merry maid of this company was a reality that captivated him almost as strongly as Susan, provided he had really desired to live a vagabond life. What he shows is merely an artistic sympathy with the idea of such a life as he had long before shown with the idea of sport. His tribute to the mirthful damsel finds expres- sion in an emotional outburst: "Then in my happy youth, and while her pleasant voice yet sounded in my ears, I sighed; for none but myself, I thought, should have been her companion in a life which seemed to realize my own wild fancies, cherished all through visionary boyhood to that hour. To these two strangers the world was in its golden age, not that indeed it was less dark and sad than ever, but because its weariness and sorrow had no commu- nity with their ethereal nature. Wherever they might appear in their pilgrimage of bliss, Youth would echo back their gladness, care-stricken Maturity would rest a moment from its toil, and Age, tottering among the graves, would smile in withered joy for their sakes. The lonely cot, the narrow and gloomy street, the somber shade, would catch a passing gleam like that now shining on ourselves, as these bright spirits wan- dered by. Blessed pair, whose happy home was throughout all the earth! I looked at my shoulders, 46 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY and thought them broad enough to sustain those pic- tured towns and mountains; mine, too, was an elastic foot, as tireless as the wing of the Bird of Paradise; mine was then an untroubled heart, that would have gone singing on its delightful way. " 'Oh, maiden!' said I aloud, 'why did you not come hither alone?' ' The vagabond idea took such hold upon Hawthorne that he projected a work in which he would appear himself as the same itinerant story-teller he proposed to his fellow vagabonds in the wagon to become if they allowed him to join their party. It was to be called "The Story Teller," and appears now as a fragment, "Passages from a Relinquished Work." He, no doubt, thought that in this way he could give rein on the one side to his faculty for romancing, and upon the other to his necessity for introspection and moral- izing. At the same time the roving side of his nature would find outlet, not only through the form, but in the actual journeying about for material. Upon some of his journeys, Hawthorne visited the Shakers and found them sufficiently interesting to be made the subjects of two of his stories. In both of these, "The Shaker Bridal" and "The Canterbury Pilgrims," the idea revolves about Shaker religious doctrines relating to marriage, or, rather, non-mar- riage. Hawthorne showed no sympathy with the tenets of Mother Ann, the spiritual mother of the Shakers. She was, nevertheless, a remarkable woman, with ideals so ascetic, it is a marvel she should have been able to gather about her as great a following as she did. It is sometimes said that any one with a lofty ideal can gain a following if he will but be true FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 47 to it himself. Ann was of the true stuff. She seems to have been born with aspirations toward asceticism, which were crushed by her family's forcing marriage upon her. Her children all died. She returned to her original ideal. Later she joined the Shakers, at that time (1758) led by James and Jane Wardley, of Bolton, near Manchester. She suffered imprison- ment in England for alleged breaking of the Sabbath, ecstatic dancing forming the chief ceremonial in every primitive Shaker ritual. Nothing daunted, she came to America, gained followers, was, as a matter of course, accused of witchcraft, and with other Shakers, because of their objections to war, was imprisoned as a traitor. Then, through their prison bars, they taught the multitudes which flocked to learn of them. They were, however, released, and from the one set- tlement near Albany there came to be many in various parts of the country. At the opening of "The Shaker Bridal," Hawthorne describes how "One day, in the sick chamber of Father Ephraim, who had been forty years the presiding elder over the Shaker settlement at Goshen, there was an as- semblage of several of the chief men of the sect. In- dividuals had come from the rich establishment at Lebanon, from Canterbury, Harvard, and Alfred, and from all other localities where this strange people have fertilized the rugged hills of New England by their systematic industry. An elder was likewise there, who had made a pilgrimage of a thousand miles from a village of the faithful in Kentucky, to visit his spiritual kindred, the children of the sainted Mother Ann." The cardinal principles in the religion of these peo- 48 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY pie were four virgin purity, Christian communism,, confession of sin, separation from the world. "The Shaker Bridal" presents a pathetic picture of the suf- fering of a woman who has been chosen along with her former lover to be the spiritual mother and father of the settlement. Circumstances of poverty had pre- vented their marriage. They had both found refuge and a peaceful life among the Shakers, working side by side as friends. But when it comes to a bridal with the man she has always loved, under Shaker condi- tions, the poor woman breaks down. "Paler and paler grew Martha by his side, till, like a corpse in its burial, clothes, she sank down at the feet of her early lover; for, after many trials firmly borne, her heart could endure the weight of its desolate agony no longer." In "The Canterbury Pilgrims," the author intro- duces us to a number of people at odds with life, who are on their way to find peace in the Shaker com- munity. Also to two young Shakers, who have fallen in love with each other and who are leaving the community with the idea of marrying as the people in the world marry. A sharp contrast is drawn be- tween these two young people, so full of hope, and a disillusioned husband and wife among the pilgrims. But even the wife's dismal account of her matrimonial experiences cannot discourage these young Shakers once they have allowed love to enter their hearts : "The Shaker youth and maiden looked mournfully into each other's eyes. They had but stepped across the threshold of their homes, when, lo! the dark array of cares and sorrows that rose up to warn them back. The varied narratives of the strangers had arranged FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 49 themselves into a parable; they seemed not merely instances of woeful fate that had befallen others, but shadowy omens of disappointed hope, and unavailing toil, domestic grief and estranged affection, that would cloud the onward path of these poor fugitives. But after one instant's hesitation they opened their arms, and sealed their resolve with as pure and fond an embrace as ever youthful love had hallowed. " 'We will not go back,' said they. 'The world never can be dark to us, for we will always love one another.' "Then the Canterbury pilgrims went up the hill, while the poet chanted a drear and desperate stanza of the Farewell to his Harp, fitting music for that melancholy band. They sought a home where all former ties of nature or society would be sundered, all old distinctions leveled, and a cold passionless security be substituted for mortal hope and fear, as in that other refuge of the world's weary outcasts, the grave. The lovers drank at the Shaker spring, and then, with chastened hopes, but more confiding affec- tions, went on to mingle in an untried life." The germ of beauty in the Shaker ideals seems to have escaped Hawthorne, perhaps because he read into their life the peculiar isolation of his own life in a family of strangely recluse habits. Is not such a bond, wholly of the spirit, which the two were called upon to enter in "The Shaker Bridal," a realization in untutored natures of what Emerson calls "celestial love," and might it not exist along with a tenderness, helpfulness, aspiration and intel- lectual sympathy, possibly more satisfying than what is usually called love? Be that as it may, Hawthorne 50 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY had had such a dose of solitude that his inner longing for the intenser experiences of life becomes an ever increasing influence in his work, showing itself in the sympathy with which he treats any episode of "true" love upon which he touches. At the end of this phase of his life he wrote: "I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!" and, again: "In- deed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream till the heart be touched. That touch creates us then we begin to be thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity." The White Mountains were, as we have already seen, one of the pervading influences of Hawthorne's boyhood at Raymond. These beautiful white-crowned hills loomed far off on his early horizon, and finally in one of his journeys into New Hampshire he must have made the trip through the "Great Notch," which he describes in "Sketches from Memory." His in- terest is divided, as it always was, between the rugged grandeur of the scenery and the travelers he met in the evening at Ethan Crawford's hostelry. His fine description of the Crawford Notch may well supple- ment the tale he afterward told, in "The Ambitious Guest," of an incident of the region. Of the approach to the Notch he writes : "Height after height had risen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang below the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, those avalanches of earth, stones and trees which descend into the hollows, leaving vestiges of FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 51 their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side and a group of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco right toward the center of that group, as if to climb above the clouds in its passage to the farther region." Then of the Notch itself he gives this graphic description: "A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was traveling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rend- ing it asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of those sym- bolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not the conception, of Omnipotence." The incident Hawthorne makes use of in "The Ambitious Guest," as the climax of his story, is that of the great landslide which occurred in this region in 1825. He does not describe this catastrophe just as it occurred, for he leaves out the rainstorm and the floods which accompanied it. The true story goes that Mr. Willey and his wife, who kept a small inn in the Notch for the accommo- dation of stage-coach travelers and wagons, were first alarmed late in June by seeing, one misty day, a large mass of the mountain above them sliding through the fog toward their meadows, and almost in 52 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY a line with the house itself rocks and earth came plun- ging down, sweeping whole trees before them, that would stand erect for rods before they fell. It moved to the foot of the mountain, burying the road. At first terrified, they thought they would leave the Notch, but Mr. Willey decided that the same thing was not likely to occur again, and contented himself with building a strong cave a little below the Notch, whither they could fly for safety should another ava- lanche threaten them. A long hot drought later in the summer parched the earth on the mountain to a great depth. Upon this, beginning the 27th of August, there followed a great rainstorm. Then came floods and prodigious landslides. As described by one who remembered it, the scene must have been terrific. Thousands of tons of earth, rocks and forest were loosened from the overhanging hills. The roar of the slides was far more fearful than the thunder, and the trails of fire from the rushing bowlders more awful than the light- ning. As soon as the storm had subsided it was dis- covered that the whole Willey household had perished, though their little house was standing. As Haw- thorne imagined the situation, the household heard the deep and terrible roar of the approaching avalanche, and the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their lips : "'The slide! the slide!' "The simplest words must intimate, but not por- tray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe. The victims rushed from their cottage and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot where, in contem- plation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 53 been reared. Alas! they had quitted their security, and fled right into the pathway of destruction. Down came the whole side of the mountain in a cataract of ruin. Just before it reached the house, the stream broke into two branches, shivering not a window there, but overwhelming the whole vicinity, blocked up the road and annihilated everything in its dreadful course. Long ere the thunder of that great slide had ceased to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured, and the victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found." This last statement is incorrect, for the bodies of most of the family were found. The story connected with the catastrophe by Hawthorne is that of an am- bitious youth who stops at the house for the night, and regales the kindly family around the fireside with the confession of his desires to become famous. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. " 'As yet,' cried the stranger, his cheek glowing and his eye flashing with enthusiasm, 'as yet I have done nothing.' ' He is sure, however, that he cannot die until he has achieved his destiny. With the others he perished. Here again, in the moral, perhaps there is a touch of Hawthorne's own feeling in regard to the tardiness with which recognition came to him: / "Woe for the high-souled youth with his dream of Earthly Immortality! His name and person utterly unknown; his history, his way of life, his plans a mystery never to be solved; his death and his exist- ence equally a doubt! Whose was the agony of that death moment?" To return a moment to Hawthorne's description of 54 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY his own visit to the Notch, the guests around the fire- side at Ethan Crawford's fell to relating Indian tra- ditions, among which Hawthorne refers to one, aft- erward used by him in his story of the "Great Car- buncle." The legend is told in Sullivan's "History of Maine," where Hawthorne found it along with an- other, mentioned by him in this story, of the three hills of silver sold by a sachem to an Englishman "two hundred years ago." According to Sullivan, the savages in North America discovered by their natural sagacity that the leading passion of the Europeans was to obtain wealth by fortuitous events. Accord- ingly, they encouraged much fruitless pursuit of treasure by informing them of mountains of ore which never existed, and of riches in the interior part of the country which have never yet been found. In the White Mountains, with their tops looking white like snow, it was expected that a gem of immense size would be found, a carbuncle suspended from a rock over a pond of water. While many in the early day of the country's settlement believed this report, each one was afraid that his neighbor might become the fortunate possessor of the prize. To prevent this the tale of the natives was credited to the effect that the place was guarded by an evil spirit, who troubled the waters and raised a dark mist on the approach of human footsteps. Hawthorne represents one of his characteristic groups of people setting forth on the search for the gem, and is daring enough to make a simple little bride and groom actually find it. Its blaze is blind- ing in its intensity and they come to the sensible con- clusion that it would not be so pleasant a thing, after THE GREAT STONE FACE, WHITE MOUNTAINS FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 55 all, to carry home with them, for how could they live by day or sleep by night in this awful blaze of the Great Carbuncle? Whether upon this same journey Hawthorne visited the Franconia Notch of the White Mountains, is not recorded, but his tale of "The Great Stone Face" is written around the famous profile which is seen there in the cliffs. Those who have made the ac- quaintance of this strange freak of nature will remem- ber that it is formed of three separate masses of rock, one of which is the forehead, another the nose and up- per lip, and the third the chin. Hawthorne's fancy has played about this stone face in such a way as greatly to enhance its mystery and beauty, though as actually described by a penetrating observer, the face has its own wonder. The description of Starr King may be set over against Hawthorne's : "The expression is really noble, with a suggestion partly of fatigue and melancholy. He seems to be waiting for some visitor or message. The upper por- tion of the mouth looks a little weak, as though the front teeth had decayed and the granite lip had con- sequently fallen in. Those who can see it with a thundercloud behind, and the slaty scud driving thin across it, will carry away the grandest impression which it ever makes on the beholder's mind. But when after an August shower, late in the afternoon, the mists that rise from the forest below congregate around it and, smitten with sunshine, break as they drift against its nervous outline, and hiding the mass of the mountain which it overhangs, isolate it with a thin halo, the countenance, awful but benignant, is * as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills.' J> 56 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Hawthorne introduces us to the Great Stone Face with a vagueness as to its whereabouts quite fitting a fanciful "morality" such as the story is. It was em- bosomed amongst a family of lofty mountains, where was a valley so spacious that it contained many thou- sand inhabitants, some of whom dwelt in log huts, with the black forest all around them, on the steep and difficult hillsides. "Others had their homes in com- fortable farmhouses and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle slopes or level surfaces of the valley. Others, again, were congregated into populous vil- lages, where some wild, highland rivulet, tumbling down from its birthplace in the upper mountain region, had been caught and tamed by human cun- ning, and compelled to turn the machinery of cotton factories." According to Hawthorne, some pos- sessed the gift of distinguishing the grand natural phenomenon of the Great Stone Face more perfectly than others, so we may suppose he saw it without the defects mentioned by King, and with a forehead some twenty feet higher than it actually is. This is the way his imagination pictured it : "The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some im- mense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, pre- cisely to resemble the features of the human counte- nance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 57 have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gi- gantic visage, and could discern only a heap of pon- derous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the far- ther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact, did they appear; until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains clus- tering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed posi- tively to be alive. "It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with the Great Stone Face before their eyes, for all the features were noble, and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were the glow of a vast warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its affections and had time for more. It was an education only to look at it. According to the belief of many people, the valley owed much of its fertility to this benign aspect that was continually beaming over it, illuminating the clouds and infusing its tenderness into the sunshine." It was not until 1840 that the idea of this story presented itself to the mind of Hawthorne, as we learn from the "American Note-books," in which, among the various hints for stories jotted down, occurs this : "The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturce. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and by and by a boy 58 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY is born, whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait. At some critical juncture the like- ness is found to be perfect." Some years later this idea was worked up in con- nection with the profile in Franconia Notch. There is the prophecy of the child to be born in the neigh- borhood who was destined to become the greatest and noblest person of his time, and whose features should in manhood be an exact resemblance to the Great Stone Face. Of course, several mistakes are made before the true person is recognized. The man of wealth, Mr. Gathergold, first returns to his native village, and is received with acclaim as the great man of the prophecy ; then comes the military man, General Blood and Thunder; then the statesman, "Old Stony Phiz," and finally a great poet. In the meantime, a humble dweller in the valley, Ernest, had grown from boyhood to manhood, and toward old age; becoming wiser as time went on. When the poet comes, he sees that after all it is the wise, simple Ernest, beloved by all the people, who is the likeness of the Great Stone Face. Hawthorne is supposed to have sketched the character of Daniel Webster in the statesman. De- spite its charm, the story has more the atmosphere of a children's tale than of a grown-up essay. We come now to the last of Hawthorne's journeys before his marriage, and the close, therefore, of his years of solitary living. Copious notes of this trip through Massachusetts to North Adams are given in his "American Note-books." These, as already mentioned, begin in 1835 and end in 1852. The jour- ney to North Adams occupied the time from July to September, 1838. From 1835 to 1838, the Notes tell H 3 s: FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 59 of many interesting walks through woods and fields and along the shore in the neighborhood of Salem, such as he had been taking from his earliest boy- hood, and reflections of which occur in the stories written during this period. Now we come upon a bit of nature description as minute and care-taking as if such descriptions were his sole stock in trade, as it is of some other New England writers : "A walk in Northfields in the afternoon. Bright sunshine and autumnal warmth, giving a sensation quite unlike the same degree of warmth in summer. Oaks some brown, some reddish, some still green; walnuts, yellow fallen leaves and acorns lying be- neath; the footsteps crumple them in walking. In sunny spots beneath the trees, where green grass is overstrewn by the dry, fallen foliage, as I passed I disturbed multitudes of grasshoppers basking in the warm sunshine, and they began to hop, hop, hop, pat- tering on the dry leaves like big and heavy drops of a thunder-shower." Again, it will be a short, sharply outlined sketch of some individual he has seen: "At the tavern was an old, fat, country major, and another old fellow, laughing and playing off jokes on each other one tying a ribbon upon the other's hat." One of the most beautiful of the sea scenes de- scribed is that of sunrise over the ocean. Being be- calmed in a sailboat off Marblehead Light, he has watched the glory of the stars all night from the boat, as many of us have done for at least part of the night from our own seaside verandas, and have been re- 60 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY warded by just such wonderful sights as he here describes : "At about two o'clock, up rose the morning star, a round, red, fiery ball, very comparable to the moon at its rising, and, getting upward, it shone marvelously bright, and threw its long reflections into the sea, like the moon and the two lighthouses. It was Venus, and the brightest star I ever beheld; it was in the north- east. The moon made but a very small circuit in the sky, though it shone all night. The aurora borealis shot upward to the zenith, and between two and three o'clock the first streak of dawn appeared, stretching far along the edge of the eastern horizon a faint streak of light ; then it gradually broadened and deep- ened, and became a rich saffron tint, with violet above, and then an ethereal and transparent blue. The saf- fron became intermixed with splendor, kindling and kindling; Baker's Island lights being in the center of the brightness, so that they were extinguished by it, or at least grew invisible. On the other side of the boat, the Marblehead lighthouse still threw out its silvery gleam, and the moon shone brightly, too; and its light looked very singular, mingling with the growing daylight. It was not like the moonshine, brightening as the evening twilight deepens ; for now it threw its radiance over the landscape, the green and other tints of which were displayed by the day- light, whereas at evening all those tints are obscured. It looked like a milder sunshine a dreamy sunshine the sunshine of a world not quite so real and ma- terial as this." These charming glimpses of man and nature are intermingled with hints giving imaginative motifs for FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 61 stories, only some of which ever grew up, and with occasional dabs at history. In 1837 he paid a visit to his old classmate and lifelong friend, Horatio Bridge, who was then living in his paternal mansion at Augusta. Scenery and people come in for his usual share of attention, but especially a Frenchman, who was at the time living with Bridge, attracted his interest, and of this somewhat eccentric individual he gives a really lifelike portrait. He seems to have been drawn out of his accustomed silence of manners dur- ing this trip, if we may believe his own account. "I talk with everybody: to Mrs. T , good sense; to Mary, good sense, with a mixture of fun; to Mrs. G , sentiment, romance and nonsense." Not unfrequently a trip to Boston is recorded be- fore he first took up his residence there, when he be- came weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House. In this manner the solitary "sea-flower" gradually extended his tentacles until 1838, when they suddenly touched, in Sophia Peabody, the being who was not, indeed, to banish his inborn isolation of na- ture, but who was to dwell beside him in that isolation, to lighten all its gloomy shadows and brighten all its joys. In her he seemed to meet for the first and only time in his life that complete comprehension and sym- pathy for which he craved, and which is so necessary to a nature like his. For be it always remembered that the wander-lust tendency was not of a kind to bring him into personal heart sympathy with his fel- low men. It was the fever of the artist to see life, to discover types, to test human emotion, by means of which he could throw reality around the moral query or problem crystallized in some imaginative 62 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY and symbolic fancy which always forms the burning heart of his stories. He probably had the faculty of putting himself into sympathy with whatever person he desired to digest as material. Then he very likely walked off, as a caterpillar does after gorging itself on the green pulp of one leaf, to the next, regardless of it henceforth ; in other words, eating "sugar hearts," metaphorically speaking, all along the way. When people had nothing for him as art they did not in- terest him, and he was silent. No matter how much he went "up and down amid men," he was still soli- tary and alone. There are people in Salem to-day who can remem- ber as children seeing Hawthorne walk through its streets, a magnificent-looking figure, in slouch hat and with a cloak drawn tightly about him, turning neither to the left nor the right, always with his eyes cast down, and never speaking a word to any one, even if he knew them. All life was a dream to him, until he touched upon a supreme reality in his whole-souled devotion to Sophia Peabody, who, as I heard a Salem woman say recently, was the making of him. After becoming acquainted with Miss Peabody, and before his en- gagement, he took his farewell journey to his old life. His feelings upon the proposed trip are characteristic. He wanted to cut himself wholly away from every one, so that even his mother should not know his whereabouts. Hawthorne gives very copious notes of his impres- sions upon this journey, both of scenery and people. Mr. Wolfe, that enthusiastic pilgrim to literary shrines, has followed in his footsteps, adding his own FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 63 descriptions of the interesting scenery found in the Berkshire Hills region, noting also the changes which have come about in the transition from the days of the stage coach to those of the locomotive. He de- scribes how, at North Adams, he had lodgings near the place on Main Street where Hawthorne stayed, in the house of a man who was a lad of fourteen when Hawthorne made his visit. At the time of this pil- grimage in 1897, recollections of the great man were still fresh. He is evidently the same Hawthorne that Salem knew, for Mr. Wolfe records that "as remem- bered here, his expression was often abstracted, some- times despondent. He would sit for hours at a time on the broad porch of the old 'North Adams House,' or in a corner of the barroom, silently smoking and apparently oblivious to his surroundings." It is also related that there were a few persons not the model men of the community to whom he unbent, admitting them to a sort of comradeship. He held prolonged converse with them upon the tavern porch, though his part in the conversation was mainly suggestive and calculated to elicit the "whimsical conceits or experi- ences of his companions." Bliss Perry has also written a thoughtful study of Hawthorne at North Adams. He takes the view that this journey was an important turning point in Hawthorne's life the breaking away from his ha- bitual solitude and the coming in contact for the first time with the actual. Such a view appears upon con- sideration to be an exaggerated estimate of the im- portance of this particular journey, for the whole record of his life, as it can be gathered from notes and stories, as well as from the salient glimpses we have 64 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY caught in our present survey, go to show that his contact with the actual had been a gradually increas- ing force urging him more and more out into the world. There is an octogenarian in Salem now who remembers how Hawthorne used to spend hours with his cousin, Miss Ingersoll, and with her adopted son and other choice companions, in the kitchen of the so- called House of the Seven Gables, having a jolly, not to say convivial, time. Trips to Boston were not in- frequent, with sojourns at the old Tremont House, and conversations with the guests in the smoking- room or at the bar. There were dinners, too, on board of vessels in the harbor at the invitation of Bridge, and when he was in Maine with Bridge, visits to Irish shanties. He did not need to go to a little town in the utmost corner of Massachusetts to see life. One sometimes wonders why he should harp so much upon the solitude of these years, when his time was increasingly enlivened by this process of knock- ing up against humanity. The solution has already been suggested. He was a man alone in the crowd. He had never taken an active part in all this life. Like a hermit crab, though he came out of his shell to look about, he always had it handy to retire into upon the approach of danger in the form of people he did not want to talk to. It is true that upon his return from this trip to North Adams he actually, for the first time in his life, took an active part in it, through his position in the Boston Custom House, with what success as far as the reality of his being is concerned will later be discussed. This change in the direction of his wander-lust, for that is all his mood of desire to take his part as a man in the world FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 65 amounted to, was the result of the fact that his heart had been touched. As he wrote to Miss Peabody later: "I never till now had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine." His ambition now was to provide for a wife. This journey, then, is to be regarded rather as the culmination of one phase of his development than as a distinctly new departure. Mr. Perry declares he is for the first time a professional artist on the lookout for material. His notes of this journey, tabulating material, are no more professional than they had al- ways been. From the first visit he made to Swamp- scott, he had just as surely been the artist in search of material. Interesting material he certainly found in North Adams, which was, however, not to bear fruit until some half dozen or more years later in his story of "Ethan Brand," justly called one of the most pow- erful things he ever- wrote. The various figures whom he sketched from the life in his notebooks, he transferred into his story. The old fellow whose daughter had joined a circus; the maimed and miserable being who had degenerated from a lawyer to a soap-boiler; Joe, of whose charac- teristics only the name is preserved; the doctor who "gets drunk daily"; the Jew with his wretched diorama, who is made mysterious by being trans- formed into the Wandering Jew, and who calls every- body "Captain." Even the old dog who whirled round after his own tail, is selected from a number of these canine animals with whom Hawthorne made acquaintance, to grace the story. The setting of the 66 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY story is one of the lime kilns which are placed upon Graylock or Saddleback Mountain, where the marble of the region is converted into lime. Hawthorne made a visit to one described in the Notes, and upon a moonlight night, which also takes its place in the story: "Mr. Leach and I took a walk by moonlight last evening on the road that leads over the mountain. Remote from houses, far up on the hillside, we found a lime kiln burning near the road; and, approaching it, a watcher started from the ground, where he had been lying at his length. There are several of these lime kilns in this vicinity. They are circular, built with stories, like a round tower, eighteen or twenty feet high, having a hillock heaped around in a great portion of their circumference, so that the marble may be brought and thrown in by cart-loads at the top. At the bottom there is a large doorway, large enough to admit a man in a stooping posture. "In the one we saw last night a hardwood fire was burning merrily, beneath the superincumbent marble the kiln being heaped full; and shortly after we came, the man (a dark, black-bearded figure in shirt- sleeves) opened the iron door, through the chinks of which the fire was gleaming, and thrust in huge logs of wood and stirred the immense coals with a long pole, and showed us the glowing limestone. We as- cended the hillock to the top of the kiln, and the marble was red hot and burning with a bluish, lam- bent flame, quivering up, sometimes nearly a yard high, and resembling the flame of anthracite coal, only, the marble being in large fragments, the flame was higher. The kiln was perhaps six or eight feet FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 67 across. Four hundred bushels of marble were then in a state of combustion." The characters from life, and the actual locality where the scene of the story is laid, furnish merely the atmosphere and the background. The story itself is about a particular, imaginary lime-burner, who for eighteen years had been searching for the one unpardonable sin, only to find it in his own breast. Then he returned to his old lime kiln, threw himself into the cauldron of red-hot marble and himself was converted into lime. The unpardonable sin was "the sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims. The only sin that deserves a recompense of immortal agony." Among his victims had been the daughter of the old white-haired father, who is always seeking for news of her since she had gone off to the circus. This girl, "with cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological ex- periment, and wasted, absorbed and perhaps anni- hilated her soul in the process." Mr. Perry thinks that Hawthorne looked into his own heart and saw there the possibility of such sin. While it is always a little bit dangerous to attribute to an author the sentiments of any of his characters, yet the whole trend of Hawthorne's life up to this time was in the direction of just such a sin. The transition from be- ing an observer of men and women, holding oneself aloof from any tenderness for them, to being an ex- perimenter upon them, is only too easy a one, and one, moreover, to which the artistic temperament is espe- 68 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY daily prone. If a mania for discovering the secret workings of the hearts and souls of humanity seizes an artist, he soon cares not to what length he goes, so that he can inveigle hearts into giving up their treasures, and souls into laying themselves bare. In his desire to be Paul Pry, when gazing upon the world from the steeple-top, this mood is touched upon. From committing such a sin, however, Hawthorne was saved not only by his New England conscience, but by his belief in love. He had an ideal, rare among men, of an eternal love, of a being between whom and himself should exist an everlasting bond of complete sympathy, sealed in this life, and to continue in the life to come an ideal which not long ago his own son, Julian, elaborated most exquisitely in a story called "Love in Heaven.'* If he had not found just at this time the woman of whom "enamored was his soul," he might, indeed, have been guilty of the unpardonable sin of experimenting with human souls and hearts. In the foregoing pages, I have made no attempt to follow Hawthorne's early work in exact chronological order. My aim has been to call attention to such stor- ies as would most forcibly illustrate the play and inter- play of the solitary and wander-lust tendencies in his nature, which during these years were the chief forma- tive influences of his genius. Most of the stories were written between 1830 and 1838, while the settings for all were the result of experiences prior to the last date. Two, however, were not actually written until about 1847, when he was again living in Salem: "The Great Stone Face" and "Ethan Brand." It would hardly be possible to find a more dismal- FRONT AND REAR VIEW OF No. 12 HERBERT STREET, SALEM WHERE HAWTHORNE WROTE FAR AFIELD IN NEW ENGLAND 69 looking house than the one No. 12 Herbert Street, where Hawthorne spent these earlier years of his literary life. It has none of the charm which belongs to many of the older houses, even when somewhat humble. It is a tall, high-shouldered, wooden struc- ture, with not a line to commend it nor a grace to dis- tinguish it. One cannot even conjure up any senti- ment over the "window under the eaves," from which he looked forth upon the church steeple, watching the sun climb down it till the whole church was glorified by the blessing of the fiery god. The window is miserably small and jambed up so close to the eaves as to make one think of the interior only as the most unprepossessing of attic rooms. This environment alone was enough to bring melancholia upon a deli- cate, sensitive soul, alive with an intense perception of beauty. It is now a tenement house, into which one does not care to intrude farther than the yard, so untidy that no amount of enthusiasm for shrines can blind one to it. When asking the way to the house, one is apt to be met by the reply: "I cannot speak English." It is a comfort to remember that in Hawthorne's day the district was not so closely built up, and was at least quiet and clean, and that however unlovely the lines of the house, the beach and the boundless ocean were not far off. Thither he could walk the moment the spirit moved him, and by the shore watch the clouds, the billows and the sea-birds "flitting over the water, only visible at moments when they turned their white breasts toward" him, . . . "as if they were then first created." HISTORICAL MINIATURES 71 "His mgenuity grew alert and impressible. It made, in short, and cherished for fancy's sake, a mystery and a glamor where there were otherwise none very ready to its hand; so that it ended by living in a world of things sym- bolic and allegoric, a presentation of objects casting in every case far behind them a shadow more curious and more amus- ing than the apparent figure. Any figure, therefore, easily became with him an emblem, any story a parable, any appear- ance a cover; things with which his concern is gently, in- dulgently, skilfully, with the lightest hand in the world to pivot them round and show the odd little stamp or sign that gives them their value for the collector." HENRY JAMES. 72 II DURING the period when Hawthorne was strengthening the two sides of his genius namely, the subjective, by solitary musings in his chamber, and the objective, by jaunts abroad in search of vital material, he was from time to time bringing into play his powers of synthesis and his- torical criticism in tales whose basis was historical. That old New England in which his own ancestors had played a not unimportant part had a deep fascina- tion for him. He burrowed diligently into its archives and found there much to inspire him. It must be ad- mitted, however, that his attitude toward history was certainly not that of one with a mania for getting at the exact facts of historic action. He looked at his- tory with the eye of a connoisseur of picturesque in- cidents, though not without a keen perception of the human tendencies which lie at the roots of historical development. The result is that his stories based upon history give one a vivid sense of the mental and moral atmosphere of early New England, in spite of an imaginative effervescence which modifies the som- niferous wine of truth into a sparkling champagne. How he vizualizes, for example, the famous inci- dent in which Endicott cut the red cross from the King's colors! History tells us of the excitement of the colony when they heard that two archbishops 73 74 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY joined with a council of ten had been appointed to regulate the affairs of the colony and to establish and maintain the Episcopal Church in this country. And not only this, but a new governor was to be conveyed secretly to Massachusetts who had received instruc- tions to trample upon all its civil and ecclesiastical rights. In the memoir of his famous ancestor by Charles M. Endicott, we may read an account of the episode as it presented itself to the mind of the con- scientious historian: "Such was the universal anxiety this news awak- ened, that the idea of resistance appears immediately to have possessed the minds of the inhabitants, and the fortifications were hastened forward, and an as- sessment laid of an additional rate of five hundred pounds for defense. These tidings were received with indignant feelings by Mr. Endicott. He saw by this step that all their dear-bought privileges, purchased at such immense sacrifices, which none could better appreciate than himself, were about to be violently, as with a ruthless despotism, wrested from them. His independent spirit could not quietly brook such high- handed infringements upon their chartered rights, and he resolved, in all the affairs of the colony in which he had any share or influence, to pursue that course which he deemed most for her interests, whether it led him over plains or mountains, through flowers or thorns. Probably under the influence of the feelings produced by this intelligence, and excited by that ardent zeal which marked his character through life, he shortly after cut the red cross from the King's colors, deeming it a relic of Popish idolatry. It has generally been conceded that he was instigated to this HISTORICAL MINIATURES 75 deed by his minister, Mr. Williams; but if we under- stand his character aright, he needed not the aid of such prompting in any matters of duty or of con- science." Roger Williams was of an equally independent and sturdy spirit, and, becoming involved in difficul- ties on this account with his Plymouth congregation, decided to take up his abode once more in Salem, where he had originally settled. Salem accepted him in spite of the representations made against him, the worst of which was his contention that "to punish a man for any matters of conscience is persecution." It is needless to say that such an attitude toward re- ligious toleration later brought him into conflict with the Salem religious authorities, and he was obliged to leave for other fields of usefulness. He was also considered dangerous in his attitude toward the King, and his influence upon Endicott, always his friend, was not considered salutary. Civic authorities as well as religious authorities joined in the determination to banish him. Now, what does Hawthorne make out of this dull stuff? He draws a living picture of the red-cross in- cident as it might have occurred in those early Salem days. There is foreground and background to set off the principal figures in the action. The religious affairs of the mother country, wherein Charles I and Archbishop Laud made themselves so obnoxious to the Puritan element, are sketched vividly in a few sentences, and the relations between this far-off fer- ment, so soon to lead to disaster, and the feelings of the New England Puritans, ready like their brethren at home to resist the tyranny of King and archbishop 76 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY to the death if need be, are painted in. Then in the foreground we see the trainband mustered in the primitive little town for martial exercise under the leadership of Endicott himself. Aloft flies the Eng- lish banner, held by the standard-bearer. The ap- pearance of Endicott is described, "a man of stern and resolute countenance, the effect of which was height- ened by a grizzled beard that swept the upper por- tion of his breastplate." The only portrait the writer knows of Endicott represents him with a dapper lit- tle goatee. He might indeed have developed the grizzled beard after a few years of pioneer struggling in New England, but unfortunately, his biogra- pher tells us the only portrait extant of the governor was taken the year of his death. Still, there is no way of proving that he did not have such a beard, when he landed at Salem. One may as well accept this very appropriate bit of imaginative portraiture. The moral and religious atmosphere of the time is then brought before us more vitally in a paragraph or two than it could be in pages of description. The trainband is going through its maneuvers near the church, "an edifice of humble architecture, with neither steeple nor bell to proclaim it what never- theless it was the house of prayer." Around this edifice are grouped the victims of religious and civic displeasure, as doubtless they may frequently have been seen in those days when every sin of however slight a nature was hunted out and the sinner's shame displayed to curious crowds by graphic punishments for the solemn warning of any would-be sinners. All of Puritanical intolerance and cruelty are summed up in the following paragraphs: HISTORICAL MINIATURES 77 "In close vicinity to the sacred edifice appeared that important engine of Puritanic authority, the whipping-post with the soil around it well trodden by the feet of evil doers, who had there been disci- plined. At one corner of the meeting house was the pillory, and at the other the stocks ; and, by a singular good fortune for our sketch, the head of an Episco- palian and suspected Catholic was grotesquely in- cased in the former machine; while a fellow-criminal, who had boisterously quaffed a health to the King, was confined by the legs in the latter. Side by side, on the meeting-house steps, stood a male and a female figure. The man was a tall, lean, haggard personi- fication of fanaticism, bearing on his breast this label A WANTON GOSPELLER which betokened that he had dared to give interpretations of Holy Writ un- sanctioned by the infallible judgment of the civil and religious rulers. His aspect showed no lack of zeal to maintain his heterodoxies, even at the stake. The woman wore a cleft stick on her tongue, in appropriate retribution for having wagged that unruly member against the elders of the church; and her countenance and gestures gave much cause to apprehend that, the moment the stick should be removed, a repetition of the offense would demand new ingenuity in chastis- ing it. "The above-mentioned individuals had been sen- tenced to undergo their various modes of ignominy for the space of one hour at noonday. But among the crowd were several whose punishment would be life- long; some, whose ears had been cropped, like those of puppy dogs ; others, whose cheeks had been branded with the initials of their misdemeanors; one, with his 78 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY nostrils slit and seared; and another, with a halter about his neck, which he was forbidden ever to take off, or to conceal beneath his garments. Methinks he must have been grievously tempted to affix the other end of the rope to some convenient beam or bough. There was likewise a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to w r ear the letter 'A* on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that initial signified. Sport- ing with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread and the nicest art of needlework; so that the capital 'A' might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress." Endicott is about to start the drill when Roger Williams appears. He has just returned from a trip to Boston, and Hawthorne makes him the bearer of a letter from Governor Winthrop, announcing the intentions of Charles and Laud toward the liberties of the colonists. Though Williams entreats as re- quested by Winthrop that the news be not suddenly noised abroad lest the people be stirred up to some outbreak, thus giving the King and the archbishop a handle against them, Endicott will listen to no advice. He works himself and the people up to a tremendous pitch of excitement, finally giving utter- ance to the most rebellious sentiments and ending with his daring mutilation of the royal flag: ' 'If this King and this arch-prelate have their will, we shall briefly behold a cross on the spire of this tabernacle which we have builded, and a high altar within its walls, with wax tapers burning around it at HISTORICAL MINIATURES 79 noonday. We shall hear the sacring bell, and the voices of the Romish priests saying the mass. But think ye, Christian men, that these abominations may be suffered without a sword drawn? without a shot fired? without blood spilt, yea, on the very stairs of the pulpit? No be ye strong of hand and stout of heart ! Here we stand on our own soil, which we have bought with our goods, which we have won with our swords, which we have cleared with our axes, which we have tilled with the sweat of our brows, which we have sanctified with our prayers to the God that brought us hither ! Who shall enslave us here? What have we to do with this mitred prelate, with this crowned King? What have we to do with England?' "Endicott gazed round at the excited countenances of the people, now full of his own spirit, and then turned suddenly to the standard-bearer, who stood close behind him. * 'Officer, lower your banner!' said he. "The officer obeyed; and, brandishing his sword, Endicott thrust it through the cloth, and with his left hand rent the red cross completely out of the ban- ner. He then waved the tattered ensign above his head. ' 'Sacrilegious wretch!' cried the high-churchman in the pillory, unable longer to restrain himself, 'thou hast rejected the symbol of our holy religion!' " 'Treason, treason!' roared the royalist in the stocks. 'He hath defaced the King's banner!' " 'Before God and man, I will avouch the deed,' answered Endicott. 'Beat a flourish, drummer! .shout, soldiers and people! in honor of the ensign 80 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY of New England. Neither Pope nor tyrant hath part in it now!' "With a cry of triumph, the people gave their sanc- tion to one of the boldest exploits which our history records." Hawthorne closes with the philosophical reflection that this deed was the first omen of that deliverance which our fathers consummated after the bones of the stern Puritan had 'lain more than a century in the grave. Its importance in the trend of history was not so evident to all of Endicott's contemporaries. The act was by many considered an insult both to the estab-. lished Church of England and to the King. After several meetings of the court, Endicott was finally censured upon several grounds, but chiefly that by this act he had exposed the colony to the malevolence of England. He was punished by being left out of the board of assistants for one year. That nothing worse happened to him at the hands of the King and priest he had defied is due to the fact that they were soon to be engulfed in the ruin already threatening them. Finally Endicott was vindicated. In 1636 the military commissioners ordered the cross to be left out in the King's colors. Another episode in which Endicott figured has been presented in the same picturesque manner by Haw- thorne in the "Maypole of Merry Mount." It is not surprising that amid all the gloom and suppression incident to the Puritanical attitude toward life, there should be some people who had a tendency to go to the opposite extreme. Besides those who came to this country to pray, there were those who came to get HISTORICAL MINIATURES 81 as much fun out of life as possible: hence the merry crew at Mount Wallaston, who actually set up a May- pole and enjoyed life by capering around it according to the fashion of Merry Old England. They even went so far as to affix pieces of satirical composition to the Maypole against those who opposed their wishes and practices. One Thomas Morton was the prime culprit. If their erratical tendencies had been confined to Maypole capers, it would be impossible for us to-day to see how any very serious harm could come of it, but as history declares: "This man, and his associates, had alarmed all the well disposed set- tlers from Piscataqua to Plymouth, by selling arms and ammunition to the Indians, indulging themselves in dissipation, and otherwise imperiling the peace and welfare of New England." Endicott went there in the "purifying spirit of au- thority," caused their Maypole to be cut down, and changed the name of the place to Mount Dagon. As Hawthorne himself explains, he has fashioned a kind of allegory around this episode, in which the ele- ment of softness and beauty latent in these early, un- kempt attempts to put joyousness into life is to modify the harshness of Puritan asceticism. Haw- thorne's own delight in the poetic aroma of the May- day scene which he describes, drawing partly upon his imagination, partly upon English accounts of Mayday sports and partly on Morton's own account of the setting up of the Maypole, is itself an example of the beneficent touch of art upon the hard outlines of Puritan character. Nothing could be lovelier than the opening description of the Maypole with its merry revelers around it: 82 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY "Bright were the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony. They who reared it, should their banner be trium- phant, were to pour sunshine over New England's rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an em- pire. Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep ver- dure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the summer months, and reveling with autumn, and basking in the glow of winter's fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry Mount. "Never had the Maypole been so gayly decked as at sunset on midsummer eve. This venerated emblem was a pine tree, which had preserved the slender grace of youth, while it equaled the loftiest height of the old wood monarchs. From its top streamed a silken banner, colored like the rainbow. Down nearly to the ground the pole was dressed with birchen boughs, and others of the liveliest green, and some with silvery leaves, fastened by ribbons that fluttered in fantastic knots of twenty different colors, but no sad ones. Garden flowers, and blossoms of the wilderness, laughed gladly forth amid the verdure, so fresh and dewy that they must have grown by magic on that happy pine tree. Where this green and flowery splen- dor terminated, the shaft of the Maypole was stained with the seven brilliant hues of the banner at its top. On the lowest green bough hung an abundant wreath HISTORICAL MINIATURES S3 of roses, some that had been gathered in the sunniest spots of the forest, and others of still richer blush, which the colonists had reared from English seed, O people of the Golden Age, the chief of your hus- bandry was to raise flowers." He then describes at length the mummers, in the midst of which stand the Lord and Lady of the May, the "two airiest forms that had ever trodden on any more solid footing than a purple and golden cloud. One was a youth in glistening apparel, with a scarf of the rainbow pattern crosswise on his breast. His right hand held a gilded staff, the ensign of high dignity among the revelers, and his left grasped the slender fingers of a fair maiden, not less gayly deco- rated than himself. Bright roses glowed in contrast with the dark and glossy curls of each, and were scat- tered round their feet, or had sprung up spontane- ously there. Behind this lightsome couple, so close to the Maypole that its boughs shaded his jovial face, stood the figure of an English priest, canonically dressed, yet decked with flowers, in heathen fashion, and wearing a chaplet of the native vine leaves. By the riot of his rolling eye, and the pagan decorations of his holy garb, he seemed the wildest monster there, and the very Comus of the crew." The wedding of the youth and maiden is solemnized with mirth and a lively nuptial song, but a sudden close is put to all the gayety. Endicott and his band of Puritans come upon the scene, which has thus been conjured up, and with historical accuracy he as- saults with his keen sword the hallowed Maypole. The details which follow carry us again into the region of fiction: 84 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY " 'There,' cried John Endicott, looking trium- phantly on the work, 'there lies the only Maypole in New England! The thought is strong within me that, by its fall, is shadowed forth the fate of light and idle mirth-makers amongst us and our pos- terity.' " Punishment of a characteristic Puritan cruelty is meted out to all the crew of wild revelers, except the newly wedded boy and girl. A spark of compassion is lit in the stern Puritan's breast by their sorry plight. Instead of punishing them, he decides to give them an opportunity to redeem themselves. 'The troubles of life have come hastily on this young couple,' observed Endicott. 'We will see how they comport themselves under their present trials ere we burden them with greater. If, among the spoil, there be any more garments of a more decent fashion, let them be put on this May Lord and his Lady, instead of their glistening vanities. Look to it, some of you.' ' 'And shall not the youth's hair be cut?' asked Peter Palfrey, looking with abhorrence at the love- lock and long, glossy curls of the young man. " 'Crop it forthwith, and that in the true pumpkin- shell fashion,' answered the captain. 'Then bring them along with us, but more gently than their fel- lows. There be qualities in the youth which may make him valiant to fight, and sober to toil, and pious to pray; and in the maiden, that may fit her to become a mother in our Israel, bringing up babes in better nurture than her own hath been. Nor think ye, young ones, that they are the happiest, even in our lifetime HISTORICAL MINIATURES 85 of a moment, who misspend it in dancing round a Maypole.' "And Endicott, the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock foundation of New England, lifted the wreath of roses from the ruin of the Maypole, and threw it, with his own gauntleted hand, over the heads of the Lord and Lady of the May. It was a deed of prophecy. As the moral gloom of the world over- powers all systematic gayety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest. They returned to it no more. But as their flowery garland was wreathed of the brightest roses that had grown there, so, in the tie that united them, were inter- twined all the purest and best of their early joys." Among the books given in the list borrowed by Hawthorne from the Salem Athenaeum, one of im- portance to him must have been "The Annals of Salem.'' From this source he doubtless derived many hints which he worked up in perhaps the most fasci- nating of his historical miniatures, "Main Street." The artistic paraphernalia used by our author in this story is, it is true, decidedly artificial. A traveling showman presents his panorama of scenes in the history of Salem to a more or less fault- finding audience, yet the final effect upon the reader is a truly masterful synthesis of the important events in Salem's early history. Around the central thought of a Main Street, Hawthorne builds his pic- tures. Starting with the vague footpath through the forest, along which the Indians trod in the last days of their possession, he introduces his audience to that interesting personage, the Squaw Sachem, who at that time was the ruler over some of the Nipmuk Indians, 86 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY in the neighborhood of what was one day to be Salem,. The squaw's first husband, Nanepashemet, had been killed about 1619, and she is now the wife of Wappa- cowet, or Webcowet, a priest. Her three sons were Montowompah, Sagamore of Lynn and Marblehead ; Winnapurkett and Wonohaquaban, who seems to have ruled in Charlestown. He and his mother were both friendly to the English and desired to serve their God. Montowompah and Wonohaquaban were, however, carried off by the smallpox, and the third Winnapur- kett became sole ruler of his father's domain. He was a friend neither to the English nor their religion, if somewhat vague records can be trusted. Here is the picture Hawthorne gives of the Squaw Sachem: "What footsteps can have worn this half-seen path? Harkl Do we not hear them now rustling softly over the leaves? We discern an Indian woman a majes- tic and queenly woman for this is the great Squaw Sachem, whose rule, with that of her sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red chief who stalks by her side is Wappacowet, her second husband, the priest and magician, whose incantations shall here- after affright the pale-faced settlers with grisly phan- toms, dancing and shrieking in the woods at midnight. But greater would be the affright of the Indian necromancer if, mirrored in the pool of water at his feet, he could catch a prophetic glimpse of the noon- day marvels which the white man is destined to achieve ; if he could see, as in a dream, the stone front of the stately hall which will cast its shadow over this very spot ; if he could be aware that the future edifice will contain a noble museum, where, among countless HISTORICAL MINIATURES 87 curiosities of earth and sea, a few Indian arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a vanished race. "No such forebodings disturb Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet. They pass on beneath the shade, hold- ing high talk on matters of state and religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs will endure forever." From this beginning he shows the street taking upon itself the aspects of civilization when the first set- tlers come among the Indians. Roger Conant builds his humble cottage: "The forest-track, trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these sturdy Eng- lishmen, has now a distinctness which it never could have acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many Indian moccasins. It will be a street anon." He makes the street a symbol of the approaching an- nihilation of the Indians, who with prophetic instinct perceive the meaning of this ever-widening track through their ancestral woods: "The Indians coming from their distant wigwams to view the white man's settlement, marvel at the deep track which he makes, and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment that this heavy tread will find its way over all the land ; and that the wild woods, the wild wolf, and the wild Indian will be alike trampled beneath it. Even so shall it be. The pavements of the Main Street must be laid over the red man's grave." Then Endicott arrives. There is a procession of welcome along the embryo street. According to Haw- thorne, Endicott came over to the new colony with his governor's commission in his pocket. Roger Conant and Peter Palfrey, and others of the first settlers at Naumkeag, went forth to welcome him and conduct 88 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY him in honor to his new habitation. Peter Palfrey nods to Roger Conant. "The worshipful Court of Assistants have done wisely," they are made to say among themselves. "Then they toss up their hats they and all the uncouth figures of their company, most of whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as their old kersey and linsey-woolsey garments have been torn and tattered by many a long month's wear they all toss up their hats and salute their new governor and captain with a hearty English shout of welcome." According to the memoir, it was in 1628 that En- dicott arrived, and not until 1629 was he really in- stalled governor of the colony. In a letter dated the 28th of May, 1629, from London, the company states: "Wee have sithence our last, and according as we there advised, at a full and ample Court assembled, elected and established you, Captain John Endicott, to the place of present Governor of our Plantation there, as also some others to be of the Council with you, as more particularly you will perceive by an Act of Court herewith sent, confirmed by us at a General Court, and sealed with our common seal." A little discrepancy like this does not trouble Haw- thorne; and, as the memoir remarks, upon the arrival of Endicott and his group of Puritans on the 6th of September, 1628, was breathed into the settlement of Naumkeag the breath of life, and it became, as it were, endowed with a living soul. Practically, he was governor from the first. Hawthorne's fertile imagination next takes a flight at the apparition of Endicott's wife: "But have you not observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott? a rose of beauty from HISTORICAL MINIATURES 89 an English garden, now to be transplanted to a fresher soil. It may be that, long years centuries, indeed after this fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the same race will appear in the same soil, and gladden other generations with hereditary beauty. Does not the vision haunt us yet? Has not nature kept the mould unbroken, deeming it a pity that the idea should vanish from mortal sight forever after only once assuming earthly substance? Do we not recognize in that fair woman's face the model of fea- tures which still beam, at happy moments, on what was then the woodland pathway, but has long since grown into a busy street?" Hawthorne's conscience will not allow him to let this statement go unchallenged, and with delightful humor he pokes fun at his own inaccuracies. The critical member of his audience exclaims : "This is too ridiculous! positively insufferable! Here is a pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card with a pair of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it the prototype of hereditary beauty !" A more interested observer mildly suggests that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, who came with him from England, left no posterity. "Consequently," he remarks, "we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us." The central point about which the showman clusters his next remarks is the church which soon appears upon the Main Street. This gives an opportunity for the expression of some penetrating observations upon 90 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY the character of the Puritan religious ideals and their limitations : "With the alternative of kneeling beneath the awful vault of the firmament, it is strange that men should creep into this pent-up nook and expect God's presence there. Such, at least, one would imagine, might be the feeling of these forest-settlers, accus- tomed as they had been to stand under the dim arches of vast cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary worship in the old ivy-covered churches of rural Eng- land, around which lay the bones of many generations of their forefathers. How could they dispense with the carved altar- work? how, with the pictured win- dows, where the light of common day was hallowed by being transmitted through the glorified figures of saints? how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries? how, with the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles, pervading the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of audible religion? They needed nothing of all this. Their house of worship, like their ceremonial, was naked, simple and severe. But the zeal of a recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts, enriching everything around them with its radiance; making of these new walls, and this narrow compass, its own cathedral ; and being, in itself, that spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architecture, pictured windows, and the organ's grand solemnity are remote and imperfect symbols. All was well, so long as their lamps were freshly kindled at the heavenly flame. After a while, however, whether in their time or their children's, these lamps began to burn more HISTORICAL MINIATURES 91 dimly, or with a less genuine luster; and then it might be seen how hard, cold and confined was their system how like an iron cage was that which they called Liberty." Hawthorne, with his intense artistic perception, at once touches the great weakness of Puritanism, its utter banishment of the element of beauty from re- ligion. How could it grow anything but hard and narrow with no perception of the moral beauty of sympathy or mercy, and an absolute lack of com- prehension in regard to the spiritual uplift of art? If its fervor of worship, its lamps, "freshly kindled at the heavenly flame," could have been fed by a deeper consciousness of moral and artistic beauty, it would not so early have sputtered out in superstition and cruelty. Regardless of anachronisms, the showman presents a number of historical personages meeting or grouped upon his Main Street. Here is Sir Richard Salston- stall, once Lord Mayor of London; Nathaniel Ward, the minister of Ipswich; and among the Puritans and Roundheads is to be seen Morton of Merry Mount, "the very model of a Cavalier, with the curling love- lock, the fantastically trimmed beard, the embroidery, the ornamented rapier, the gilded dagger, and all other foppishness that distinguished the wild gallants who rode headlong to their overthrow in the cause of King Charles." He concludes: "Yonder pale, de- caying figure of a white-robed woman, who glides slowly along the street, is the Lady Arabella, looking for her own grave in the virgin soil. That other female form, who seems to be talking we might al- most say preaching or expounding in the center of 92 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY a group of profoundly attentive auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here comes Vane The crit- ical personages in the audience become restive again. "Allow me to observe," remarks the milder of the two, "that these historical personages could not pos- sibly have met together in the Main Street. They might and probably did all visit our old town, at one time or another, but not simultaneously; and you have fallen into anachronisms that I positively shud- der to think of." The showman perceives a sympa- thetic young lady in the audience, and begs the other critic to sit beside her in order to get a better point of view, but he settles himself in his seat with "sullen and self-complacent immovableness." The show moves on: We see before our eyes a spectacle of the cruel punishments imposed upon the least sinner in those good old days. The enormities of the Quaker persecution are brought to our mind in a vivid description of the treatment of Ann Cole- man. She, "naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main Street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable; and each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon his lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of Major Haw- thorne's warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a stroke that has drawn blood! Ten such stripes are to be given in Salem, ten in Boston and ten in Dedham; and, with those thirty stripes of blood HISTORICAL MINIATURES 93 upon her, she is to be driven into the forest. The crimson trail goes wavering along the Main Street; but Heaven grant that, as the rain of so many years has wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all away, so there may have been a dew of mercy to cleanse this cruel bloodstain out of the record of the persecutor's life." Again, the even more cruel scenes of the witch per- secution are paralleled before us by the showman: "Do you see that group of children and half -grown girls, and, among them, an old, hag-like Indian woman, Tituba by name? Those are the Afflicted Ones. Behold, at this very instant, a proof of Satan's power and malice! Mercy Pains, the minister's daughter, has been smitten by a flash of Martha Car- ier's eyes, and falls down in the street, writhing with horrible spasms and foaming at the mouth, like the possessed one spoken of in Scripture. Hurry on the accursed witches to the gallows, ere they do more mischief! ere they fling out their withered arms and scatter pestilence by handf uls among the crowd ! ere, as their parting legacy, they cast a blight over the land, so that henceforth it may bear no fruit nor blade of grass, and be fit for nothing but a sepulcher for their unhallowed carcasses! So on they go. Among the multitude, meanwhile, there is horror, fear and distrust; and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and the wife at him, and eveni the mother at her little child; as if, in every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an accuser. Never, never again, whether in this or any other shape, may Universal Madness riot in the Main Street!" 94 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY The showman continues his show to the great snow of 1717, when, a wire breaking, he is unable to go on with the historical events within memory, or to make prophecies of the future as he had intended doing. The historical panorama is thus brought to an abrupt close, but the main outline and events of Salem his- tory have been impressed upon the mind so strongly as never to be forgotten. The Main street of Salem is to-day called Essex Street, and those who love the remnants of ancient primitiveness may find more than one shabby and antiquated frame building to remind them of the days when Endicott mustered and drilled his trainbands, or exerted his iron force of mind in crushing out heresy and sinfulness. Where the Squaw Sachem once trod, the march of time has brought many things undreamed of even in Hawthorne's imagination, the most conspicuous of which are the ever-present trolleys. One may take one of these trolley cars and be borne in the twinkling of an eye, as compared with Ann Coleman's painful progress at the cart's tail, into the neighborhood of Callow's Hill. In the retaining of this name, Salem still bears a scarlet letter, though it be not an "A," on her breast. After a pleasant ride through a beautiful part of the town, past many charming houses and gardens, one is finally set down at an unattractive street, up which is an uncomfortably steep climb to the top of a really fine height, which, before it had been so built up with the poorer class of houses, must have commanded a magnificent view. There is green, roll- ing country and a glint of the sea still to be seen from HISTORICAL MINIATURES 95 it; but straggling up the sides of the hill in many directions from the thickly built town are innumera- ble, uninteresting roofs. The curious tourist would certainly be at a loss to discover the exact spot where the witches met their fate, if it were not that obliging little children sally forth from the various houses and offer to show one the actual iron bolts in the rocks which formed the support of the gallows. Seven little girls conducted the present writer in a joyous caval- cade to the scene of this ancient tragedy, two of whom in the picture of Callow's Hill in this chapter are standing on the exact spots where remains of the bolts are still to be seen. If anything could remove the dismal sense of a sort of commonplace horror, all the more dismal be- cause of the utterly puerile nature of its inception, which the thought and sight of this hill awakens, it must be Hawthorne's own impressions of it in the opening of one of his earliest tales, "Alice Doane's Appeal": "There are few such prospects of town and village, woodland and cultivated field, steeples and country seats, as we behold from this unhappy spot. No blight had fallen upon old Essex. All was prosperity and riches, healthfully distributed. Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chessboard, embraced by two arms of the sea, and filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs, overtopped by many a spire, and intermingled with frequent heaps of verdure, where trees threw up their shade from unseen trunks. Beyond was the bay and its islands, almost the only objects, in a country unmarked by 96 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY strong natural features, on which time and human toil had produced no change. Retaining these por- tions of the scene, and also the peaceful glory and tender gloom of the declining sun, we threw, in imagi- nation, a veil of deep forest over the land, and pictured a few scattered villages, and this old town itself a village, as when the prince of hell bore sway there. The idea thus gained of its former aspect, its quaint edifices, standing far apart, with peaked roofs and projecting stories, and its single meeting-house, point- ing up a tall spire in the midst: the vision, in short, of the town in 1692 served to introduce a wondrous tale of those old times." Hawthorne's historical tales were not, however, con- fined to Salem. Boston's colonial history had an equal fascination for him. Mentions of journeys to Boston occur many times in his diary, and, indeed, one of his earliest historical stories, "The Gray Cham- pion," published in 1836, has its setting in Boston. It tells of the sudden rising of the people of Boston when Sir Edmund Andros was governor. This tyrannical governor was the tool of James II, whose sway in the colonies had been so oppressive and unjust that con- ditions were even worse than those which finally brought on the Revolution. The charters of all the colonies had been annulled, laws were made, taxes levied, the rights of private citizens violated, the titles of all landed property declared void, and finally dis- affection was overawed by the first band of mercenary troops sent over to this country. At last, promise of succor came in the rumors rela- tive to the daring enterprises of the Prince of Orange, HISTORICAL MINIATURES 97 discontent broke loose, and Sir Edmund Andros shortly found himself a prisoner. A circumstantial account of this revolution is given in an anonymous letter to the governor of Plymouth, which it may be interesting to quote here in order fully to fill in the background of Hawthorne's tale: "The governor, with Palmer, Randolph, Lidget, West, and one or two more, were in the fort. All the companies were soon rallied together at the town house; where assembled Captain Winthrop, Shrimp- ton, Page and many other substantial men, to con- sult matters; in which time the old governor came among them, at whose appearance there was a great shout by the soldiers. Soon after, the jack was set up at the fort, and a pair of colors at Beacon Hill, which gave notice to some thousand soldiers on Charlestown side that the controversy was now to be ended; and multitudes would have been there, but there was no need." The soldiers marched to the fort in two divisions and demanded its surrender, and after some consul- tation Andros and his men came from the fort and w r ent disarmed to the town-house. Some of them were sent to jail, while the governor was confined in Mr. Usher's house. The next day the two colonels were sent to demand of the governor the surrender of the fortification of the castle, which he refused. "But they told him if he would not give it presently under his hand and seal, he would be exposed to the rage of the people, and so left him; but he sent and told them that he would, and did so; and they went down and it was surrendered to them with cursings; and they brought the men away, and made Captain 98 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Fairweather commander in it. ... The country people came armed into town in the afternoon, in such rage and heat that it made us all tremble to think what would follow, for nothing would satisfy them, but that the governor must be bound in chains or cords, and put in a more secure place, and that they would see done before they went away; and to satisfy them, he was guarded by them to the fort." This feeling on the part of the people was fully seconded by the magistrates of the city with old Gov- ernor Bradstreet at their head. They issued a procla- mation from the town-house to the governor, which settled matters, and for the safety of the people and the conservation of the peace formed a council with Bradstreet for president to take charge of the gov- ernment. A message to Andros, as follows, was sent: "At the Town-House in Boston, "April 18, 1689. "Sir: Ourselves and many others, the inhabitants of this town and places adjacent, being surprised with the people's sudden taking arms, in the first motion whereof we were wholly ignorant, being driven to it by the present accident are necessitated to acquaint your excellency, that, for the quieting and securing the people inhabiting this country from imminent danger they many ways lie open and exposed to, and tendering your own safety, we judge it necessary that you forthwith deliver up the government and forti- fications, to be preserved and disposed according to order and direction of the Crown of England, which suddenly is expected may arrive; promising all se- HISTORICAL MINIATURES 99 curity from violence to yourself, or any of your gen- tlemen or soldiers, in person and estate; otherwise, we are assured, they will endeavor the taking of the for- tifications by storm, if any opposition be made." The part taken by the people in this revolution is of especial interest in connection with Hawthorne's story, for it is their sturdy spirit of independence which he has symbolized in the mysterious, superna- tural personage, the Gray Champion, who arose at this crisis for the defense of the ancient rights and privileges. Hawthorne presents the episode after his own fashion, in a way to throw into strong relief the elemental forces which are striving for the mastery. The multitude of the people assembled in King Street, near the town-house, is first pictured in so graphic a manner that one is made aware of every factor that has gone into the development of its personnel in the fifty years of its social and political life : "Though more than sixty years had elapsed since the pilgrims came, this crowd of their descendants still showed the strong and somber features of their character perhaps more strikingly in such a stern emergency than on happier occasions. There were the sober garb, the general severity of mien, the gloomy but undismayed expression, the scriptural forms of speech, and the confidence in Heaven's bless- ing on a righteous cause, which would have marked a band of the original Puritans, when threatened by some peril of the wilderness. Indeed, it is not yet time for the old spirit to be extinct, since there were men in the street that day who had worshiped there beneath the trees before a house was reared to the 100 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY God for whom they had become exiles. Old soldiers of the Parliament were here, too, smiling grimly at the thought that their aged arms might strike another blow against the house of Stuart. There, also, were the veterans of King Philip's War, who had burned villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer. Several ministers were scattered among the crowd, which, unlike all other mobs, regarded them with reverence, as if there were sanctity in their very garments. These holy men exerted their influence to quiet the people, but not to disperse them." On the other hand are Andros and his councilors, with the mercenary troops with which they have come forth to awe the multitude : "The roll of the drum had been approaching through Cornhill, louder and deeper, till with rever- berations from house to house and the regular tramp of martial footsteps, it burst into the street. A double rank of soldiers made their appearance, occupying the whole breadth of the passage, with shouldered matchlocks, and matches burning, so as to present a row of fires in the dusk. Their steady march was like the progress of a machine, that would roll irresistibly over everything in its way. Next, moving slowly, with a confused clatter of hoofs on the pavement, rode a party of mounted gentlemen, the central figure be- ing Sir Edmund Andros, elderly, but erect and soldier-like. Those around him were his favorite coun- cilors, and the bitterest foes of New England. At his right hand rode Edward Randolph, our arch- enemy, that 'blasted wretch,' as Cotton Mather calls HISTORICAL MINIATURES 101 him, who achieved the downfall of our ancient gov- ernment, and was followed with a sensible curse, through life and to his grave. On the other side was Bullivant, scattering jests and mockery as he rode along. Dudley came behind, with a downcast look, dreading, as well he might, to meet the indignant gaze of the people, who beheld him, their only coun- tryman by birth, among the oppressors of his native land. The captain of a frigate in the harbor, and two or three civil officers under the Crown, were also there. But the figure which most attracted the public eye, and stirred up the deepest feeling, was the Episcopal clergyman of King's Chapel, riding haughtily among the magistrates in his priestly vestments, the fitting representative of prelacy and persecution, the union of Church and State, and all those abominations which had driven the Puritans to the wilderness. An- other guard of soldiers in double rank brought up the rear." Having arranged these opposing forces, the re- ligious multitude and the despotic rulers against each other, Hawthorne's imagination takes one of its ac- customed flights beyond the range of the actual. From the soul of the sad-visaged multitude is born the "Gray Champion" no individual human leader, but the "type of New England's hereditary spirit." The persistence of New England's hereditary spirit might be called a factor in the philosophy of history as it has been working itself out in the New World, but Hawthorne carefully postpones the moral until the end of his story. First he must objectively pre- sent to the reader in symbolic form the perennial spirit which may be depended upon to save the day 102 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY whenever the American ideal founded by the Pilgrim fathers shall be threatened : ' 'O Lord of Hosts/ cried a voice among the crowd, 'provide a champion for thy people!' "The ejaculation was loudly uttered and served as a herald's cry to introduce a remarkable personage. The crowd had rolled back, and were now huddled together nearly at the extremity of the street, while the soldiers had advanced no more than a third of its length. The intervening space was empty a paved solitude between lofty edifices, which threw almost a twilight shadow over it. Suddenly there was seen the figure of an ancient man, who seemed to have emerged from among the people, and was walking by himself along the center of the street to confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress, a dark cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, in the fashion of at least fifty years before, with a heavy sword upon his thigh, but a staff in his hand to assist the tremulous gait of age. The strange old man and the soldiers approached each other, until, when within twenty yards of each other, the old man grasped his staff by the middle and held it before him like a lead- er's truncheon." He bids them "Stand!" "How dare you stay the march of King James's governor!" exclaims, after some parleying, the enraged Andros. " 'I have stayed the march of a King himself, ere now. 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. And what speak HISTORICAL MINIATURES 103 ye of James? There is no longer a Popish tyrant on the throne of England, and by to-morrow morn his name shall be a byword in this very street, where ye would make it a word of terror. Back, thou that wast a governor, back! With this night thy power is ended to-morrow, the prison! back, lest I fore- tell the scaffold !'" The introduction of supernatural agencies in a story of that time only adds a final touch of reality, for, with all their stern religious and moral probity, superstition still survived among the Puritans. At this very period, the learned Cotton Mather was writ- ing his "Wonders of the Invisible World" and his "Magnalia Christi," in which are chapters upon such subjects as "miraculous rescues," "miraculous judg- ments," and strange occurrences of various sorts, some of them so puerile that Hawthorne's supernatural fancies are awe-inspiring by contrast. Cotton Mather showed an amazing credulity about occurrences with absolutely no purport, like, for instance, the tale of the woman who went out in a canoe with her husband. They saw swimming in front of them the head of a man and the tail of a cat with no body to connect them. When they turned round to come home, this mysteri- ous apparition followed them, and when they landed, instead of anything especially grewsome happening, the unrelated head and tail vanished. Hawthorne's miraculous occurrences are always brought in to serve some symbolic or spiritual purpose. To take crude superstition and, while using it for atmosphere, to metamorphose it into an artistic imple- ment of symbolic intensity, is not one of the least of Hawthorne's triumphs. 104 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY In the "Legends of the Province House," Haw- thorne has preserved the memory of one of the most important of Boston's historical centers. This fine mansion, of which there is hardly a vestige left to- day, was once the glory of provincial society. Here the royal governors, from Shute to General Gage and his successor in command of the army, General Howe, held sway with a vice-regal pomp and gayety only second to the doings of the royal court. With the new charter and the coming into power of royally appointed governors, an element of luxury and state was introduced unknown in the days of the staid, not to say frugal, regime of the early Puritan governors. To be sure, there had been official state and elaborate etiquette and apparel to distinguish government dig- nitaries from other people, but now was let loose the desire forever perennial in the human breast for the gew-gaws of fashion. Gold lace and ruffles, scarlet uniforms and powdered wigs, small-clothes and buckles in short, all the adornments which character- ized the men and women of social distinction in Eng- land, came to throw their undemocratic glamor over the social life of the colony. At the Province House, of course, occurred the chief social functions. The spirit of Merry Mount was again rampant and was doing its work in de-Puritanizing the Puritan. At the same time, fortunately, it was powerless to shatter his free spirit. The official government residence, which had so large a share in making conspicuous the altered state of society, was not built for this purpose. Its history goes back to colonial times. It was built by Mr. Peter Sergeant, a rich London merchant, THE OI/D PROVINCE HOUSE HISTORICAL MINIATURES 105 who came to live in it in 1667. It was on the highway running from Cornhill to Roxbury, then called the High Street. The grounds had a frontage of nearly a hundred feet, and a depth of three hundred feet, widening as they ran backward. It was a spacious three-story building of brick, tasteful in style, elegant, convenient, and stood far back from the highway. Its most unique feature, however, was the Indian vane which surmounted the cupola, made by Deacon Shem Drown. This archaic work of art is one of the few relics of the Province House to be preserved. It was taken down some sixty years ago and placed on the house of Dr. J. C. Warren in Brookline. Later it was given by Mr. Warren's daughter to the Massa- chusetts Historical Society. The Indian, made of two sheets of hammered cop- per, is rather pudgy in his contours. His lips are slightly parted, his nose is decidedly massive and club-shaped, and his eyes are of glass. Upon his head are three stiff feathers, his only clothing except a necklace and belt. In his hand he holds a bow and drawn arrow, which, according to a legend of the Latin schoolboy, he used to fire off whenever the "Old South" clock opposite struck twelve. To com- plete the list of his points, he is four feet six inches from the sole of his foot to the top of his plume, and weighs forty-eight pounds. This presiding genius looked down upon a beauti- ful lawn, well shaded, and a wide approach to the house paved in stone. If he had ever come down from his perch, he would have entered the house by a flight of massive stone steps, and through a mag- nificent doorway which enthusiastic chroniclers say 106 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY might have rivaled those of the palaces of Europe. Once inside, his primitive sense of the beautiful would have been astonished by the splendors therein revealed. There were large apartments finished in costly wood and hung with elegant tapestry, besides much else. When it dawned upon the provincial legislature at the time Burgess was appointed governor an ap- pointment he never filled that it would be fitting to have an official residence in the capital of the province, consonant with gubernatorial dignity, the Sergeant residence, owing to the death of its owner, was for sale. It was bought by the legislature, and from that time until the evacuation of Boston by General Sir William Howe was the official seat of the governors. After this it was used for the accommodation of Republican officials and the transaction of business until the New State House was built in 1796. Then its history is one of degeneration. In 1811 the State gave the property to the Massachusetts General Hos- pital ; it leased it to David Greenough for ninety-nine years. He cut down the trees, had stores erected in front of it, and rented the building itself for all sorts of business purposes. It became a tavern, a hall of negro minstrelsy, and was finally destroyed by a fire which left only the walls and some of the old tim- bers standing. Hawthorne describes how one summer afternoon he was walking along Washington Street and was at- tracted by a sign-board protruding over a narrow archway, nearly opposite the Old South Church, which sign represented the front of a stately edifice HISTORICAL MINIATURES 107 designated as the "Old Province House, Kept by Thomas Waite." He goes on to describe the house as it then was: "Entering the arched passage, which penetrated through the middle of a brick row of shops, a few steps transported me from the busy heart of modern Boston into a small and secluded courtyard. One side of this space was occupied by the square front of the Province House, three stories high, and sur- mounted by a cupola, on the top of which a gilded Indian was discernible, with his bow bent and his arrow on the string, as if aiming at the weathercock on the spire of the Old South." He speaks of the walls being recently overlaid with a coat of light-colored paint, but the "flight of red freestone steps, fenced in by a balustrade of curiously wrought iron," "the spacious porch, over which is a balcony, with an iron balustrade of similar workman- ship to that beneath," the letters and figures "16 P. S. 79" wrought into the ironwork of the balcony, giving the date and the founder's initials, were evidently still intact. The large room on the right, where the ancient governors held their levees, had become a dingy bar- room. The paneled wainscot was covered with dull paint, acquiring "a duskier hue from the deep shadow into which the Province House is thrown by the brick block that shuts it in from Washington Street." He also found the upper rooms cut up by partitions into little nooks for lodgers. "The great staircase, how- ever," he declares, "may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature of grandeur and magnificence. It winds through the midst of the house by flights of broad steps, each flight terminating in a square land- 108 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY ing place, whence the ascent is continued toward the cupola. A carved balustrade, freshly painted in the lower stories, but growing dingier as we ascend, bor- ders the staircase with its quaintly twisted and inter- twined pillars from top to bottom." Finally, he tells us: "The brick walls, the materials of which were imported from Holland, and the tim- bers of the mansion, are still as sound as ever; but the floors and other interior parts being greatly decayed, it is contemplated to gut the whole and build a new house within the ancient brickwork." This is a picture of the Province House as it was somewhere near the end of the thirties. To-day there is still the small passageway opposite the Old South Church on Washington Street, and the curious may penetrate its dark and uninviting-looking depths and be rewarded by the sight of a small court flanked upon every side by tall business buildings. But this is not all; if you will gaze in a rather disappointed fashion at these unromantic-looking buildings, some of the men or boys lounging about will ask you what you are looking for, and then if you do not mind a plunge through a subterranean alley, you can see about the middle of it an old brick arch, which they tell you is part of the old Province House wall. The subterranean alley is said to be an old Revolu- tionary passage, and is appropriately designated "Rats' Paradise." Emerging from the other end of the alley, you will come into a court called Province Court, and other obliging loungers will tell you that the building on the left as you leave the alley is the Province House itself. But you will know that it is hardly more than the site of the old mansion, for HISTORICAL MINIATURES 109 it was destroyed by fire in 1864, the same year that Hawthorne died. This building is at present occupied by a theatrical company and various offices. It looks rather ancient inside, as if it might be the interior Hawthorne men- tions as about to be built within the old walls, but this cannot be, for that was burnt. So if there is any more of the old building than the brick arch in the alley already mentioned, it is the wall on Province Court, which would be the side of the old Province House, built higher, painted and otherwise changed beyond recognition. As the neighborhood is to-day, it would be impossi- ble for it to fire the imagination of genius. Let us be thankful, therefore, that in Hawthorne's time the Province House was still sufficiently itself to carry his imagination back to the scenes which had there been enacted. In these Province House tales, the blending of re- ality and fancy is often so reckless that it is almost im- possible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Hawthorne, as usual, intrenches himself in a machin- ery of form by means of which he may disarm any adverse criticisms of those who do not like pranks played with the sober truth. He meets an old gen- tleman, by the delightful name of Mr. Bela Tiffany, in the Province House, who between memory and tradition "possessed some very pleasant gossip" about the house. The legend of "Howe's Masquerade" he professed to have received one or two removes from an eye-witness, "but this derivation," our author can- nily remarks, "together with the lapse of time, must have afforded opportunities for many variations of the 110 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY narrative; so that, despairing of literal and absolute truth, I have not scrupled to make such further changes as seemed conducive to the reader's profit and delight." During the siege of Boston, there appear to have been gay doings in the way of balls and theatrical per- formances. Faneuil Hall was turned into a theatre and performances given in it under the auspices of a society of soldiers and ladies formed for the purpose of promoting theatrical amusements. The proceeds were devoted to relieving distressed soldiers, their widows and children. Among the most memorable of these performances was one of "The Blockade of Boston," a local farce which had been written by Gen- eral Burgoyne himself. A paper of the day, the News Letter, reported an interesting occurrence in connection with this performance, which illustrates rather forcibly the state of affairs at the time, and no doubt, it if were known to Hawthorne, helped him in the creation of the proper atmosphere for his story. Not having access to this ancient sheet, I borrow the account as given by a recent writer* : On the evening of January 8th the comedy was to have been given for the first time. "The comedy of 'The Busybody' had been acted and the curtain was about to be drawn for the farce, when the actors be- hind the scenes heard an exaggerated report of a raid made upon Charlestown by a small party of Ameri- cans. One of the actors, dressed for his part (that of a Yankee sergeant) , came forward upon the stage, called silence, and informed the audience that the *Horace E. Scudder, in "Memorial History of Boston." HISTORICAL MINIATURES 111 alarm guns had been fired, and that a battle was going on in Charlestown. The audience, taking this for the first scene in the new farce, applauded ob- streperously, being determined to get all the fun there was out of the piece, when the order was suddenly given in dead earnest for the officers to return to their posts. The audience at this was thrown into dire confusion, the officers jumping over the orchestra, breaking the fiddles on their way, the actors rushing about to get rid of their paint and disguises, the ladies alternately fainting and screaming, and the play brought to great grief and summary confusion." The News Letter furnishes another item bearing more closely upon the story in an announcement to the effect that a masquerade was to be given at Con- cert Hall, March llth. Masques were to be pro- cured at almost all the milliners' and mantua-makers' in town. For this "most brilliant thing ever seen in America," ten capital cooks had been engaged. An announcement still more closely related to the story, and the one which probably suggested it, was to the effect that on February 22d the Queen's Ball was to be given at the Province House. This was the last ball given there, strangely enough. The truth did not need to be twisted much to place the masqued ball at the Province House, and by this means secure just the proper sort of machinery Hawthorne needed for the working up of his half actual, half specter- like procession of the defunct governors of Massa- chusetts, from Endicott to the patriarch Bradstreet, the last of the good old Puritan governors, and from the tyrant Andros through the succeeding provincial governors to General Gage, and, lastly, the appari- 112 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY tion, it is hinted, of General Howe himself. Howe approaches this figure, which is muffled, with drawn sword. "Villain, unmuffle yourself!" he exclaims. "The figure, without blenching a hair's breadth from the sword which was pointed at his breast, made a solemn pause and lowered the cape of the cloak from about his face, yet not sufficiently for the spec- tators to catch a glimpse of it. But Sir William Howe had evidently seen enough. The sternness of his countenance gave place to a look of wild amaze- ment, if not horror, while he recoiled several steps from the figure, and let fall his sword upon the floor. The martial shape again drew the cloak about his features and passed on; but reaching the threshold, with his back toward the spectators, he was seen to stamp his foot and shake his clinched hands in the air. It was afterward affirmed that Sir William Howe had repeated that self-same gesture of rage and sorrow, when, for the last time and as the last royal governor, he passed through the portal of the Province House." Among the guests at this ominous masquerade is one of whom gossip tells some interesting particulars, the "Rev. Mather Byles, whose Presbyterian scruples had not kept him from the entertainment." It is re- lated that he and his two daughters never wavered in their allegiance to the Crown of England. Fifty years later, the girls, then become maiden ladies, were wont to entertain their guests with accounts of the gallantry shown them by General Howe and Lord Percy during the winter of 1775 and '76, and how they promenaded with these great men on the Com- HISTORICAL MINIATURES 113 mon, and how Lord Percy serenaded them with the regimental band. The whole purport of Randolph's deeds in connec- tion with colonial history is concentrated in the epi- sode related in the story of "Edward Randolph's Portrait," of course without exact historical verisimil- itude, yet in such a way as to emphasize the perfidy of this arch-betrayer of the young colony. The five good-sized volumes, recently printed by the Prince Society, giving many letters of Randolph's own, as well as other important documents relating to the times, hardly bring the true personality of this man more clearly before one than Hawthorne's tale of the restored portrait, which took on an almost lifelike reality and all but frightened Governor Hutchinson from signing a paper for the establishing of a garri- son of British soldiers in the castle and a camp on the Common. The portrait of the man who made false charges against the colonists to the English government ; who petitioned for the annulling of the charter; for a clergyman of the Church of England to assume au- thority; for a governor to limit liberty of conscience, might well have such characteristics as Hawthorne has given it: "The expression of the face, if any words can convey an idea of it, was that of a wretch detected in some hideous guilt, and exposed to the bitter hatred and laughter and withering scorn of a vast surround- ing multitude. There was the struggle of defiance, beaten down and overwhelmed by the crushing weight of ignominy. The torture of the soul had come forth upon the countenance. It seemed as if the picture, 114 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY while hidden behind the cloud of immemorial years, had been all the time acquiring an intenser depth and darkness of expression, till now it gloomed forth again, and threw its evil omen over the present hour. Such, if the wild legend may be credited, was the por- trait of Edward Randolph, as he appeared when a people's curse had wrought its influence upon his nature." That this is not any too severe a criticism upon Randolph, well named "the destroying angel," who attained such bad eminence in that dramatic period which marks the closing scenes in the life of the first charter, is easily provable by one of his own letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury: "I am attacked from every part: the ministers quar- rel for my bringing in ye common prayer; the old magistrates and freemen for vacating their charter; the mobile are troubled that the laws of England are in force and the merchants for putting the acts of trade in full execution; the proprietors of Maine are troubled that the province is taken from them and is now (being well stored with masts and other naval stores) become His Majesty's; the tavern keeper and victualing houses curse me for advancing their excise ; the other colonies have a great charge against me for serving quo warranto against the charters, and all are highly incensed to see me, their enemy, His Ma- jesty's secretary of the council here. I am like to expect Samson's fate, for such is their implacable malice that Oliver, the late Tyrant, was not more ungrateful to the royalists than I am to the most of the people, and now nothing can settle this distracted country and check the insolences of the people but a HISTORICAL MINIATURES 115 sober and unbiased gentleman from England to be our governor, who must hold the reins of govern- ment in his hands, and restrain the liberty of con- science which they now grossly abuse. It is necessary ye government license all their ministers and that none be called to be a pastor of a congregation with- out his approbation; by this method alone the whole country will easily be regulated and then they will build us a church and be willing to allow our min- istry an honorable maintenance. 'Twould be very grateful to our church affairs if His Majesty would please to grant us his royal letters that the three meeting-houses in Boston, which severally collect 7 or 8 < on a Sunday, do pay to our church warden 20s. a week for each meeting-house, and were they di- rected to contribute to build us a church or part from one of their meeting-houses, such as we should ap- prove, they would purchase that exemption at a great rate, and they could but call us Papists and our ministers Baal's priests." It is noteworthy that this most true and loyal sub- ject of the Crown and Church never failed to pe- tition rewards for himself for the services he ren- dered the mother country. Andros was the "sober and unbiased gentleman" sent over upon Randolph's representations as gov- ernor, and, as we have seen, against him the "Gray Champion" arose in his might. "Lady Eleanor's Mantle" is so far removed from historical veracity that a stickler for truth in historic matters has fallen into quite a sputter of rage con- cerning it. This writer* calls it "his revolting night- *George Edward Ellis, in "Memorial History of Boston." 116 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY mare story of 'Lady Eleanor's Mantle,' in which his weird imagination, working together madness, pes- tilence and a sacramental cup, horrifies the reader." Although he has a word of praise for the other leg- ends, "still," he says, "in his case, as in the cases of all who poetize and romanticize with events and char- acters of our own or of any other history, all draughts upon the imagination and all fictitious groupings with their fanciful touches, their exaggerations and anachronisms are made at the expense of real in- struction and information as well as of truth. Men may yet come to realize that in God's universe and under God's Providence there is nothing so wonder- ful, nothing so awing, nothing so interesting, as sober and veritable fact." Sober and veritable fact no doubt has its place, but most readers will prefer "The Legends of the Province House" to the volumes upon volumes of dull and uninteresting stuff which go to the making of Massachusetts history. A writer who can catch as Hawthorne does the lights and shadows of the human spirit as it reveals itself through the forces at play in history, often touches a deeper truth than the conscientious reporter of facts. Furthermore, such indignation is quite uncalled for in the present instance, for the author himself takes care in a final outbreak of f acetiousness to warn the reader not to place any faith in the authenticity of the story, at the same time flinging a dart in ad- vance at the sort of criticism he knew he had to expect when dealing in his own way with historical subjects: "Mine host and the old loyalist and I bestowed no little warmth of applause upon this narrative, in HISTORICAL MINIATURES 117 which we had all been deeply interested : for the reader can scarcely conceive how unspeakably the effect of such a tale is heightened when, as in the present case, we may repose perfect confidence in the veracity of him who tells it. For my own part, knowing how scrupulous is Mr. Tiffany to settle the foundation of his facts, I could not have believed him one whit the more faithfully had he professed himself an eye-wit- ness of the doings and sufferings of poor Lady Eleanor. Some sceptics, it is true, might demand documentary evidence, or even require him to pro- duce the embroidered mantle, forgetting that Heaven be praised it was consumed to ashes." Of the four Province House stories, however, this has the least interest as a symbolic presentation of the forces at work in the molding of our history. It is little more than a romantic story placed in an historical setting. For this reason Woodberry re- gards it as the best of the four. He writes : "It is so because in it Hawthorne's genius passed out of the sphere of history and touched on that uni- versal moral world where his most original creation was to lie." This is, to our mind, an overstatement of its supe- riority to the others. It is true that it differs from the others and was a forerunner of what Hawthorne was to accomplish in a more completely romantic realm, but as historical miniatures the others have greater power in that they reveal his peculiar gift for seizing at once the picturesque and the philosophic in history, and making them radiant with the colors of his own fancy. In "Old Esther Dudley" there is a quality akin to 118 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY that exhibited in "The Gray Champion." As the Champion is the symbol of New England's hereditary spirit of freedom, old Esther is the symbol of the de- caying power of the past, an imaginative being who. inhabits the Province House and keeps alive its an- cient memories of royal provincial dignity, for "it was the general belief that Esther could cause the gov- ernors of the overthrown dynasty, with the beautiful ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the In- dian chiefs who had come up to the Province House to hold council or swear allegiance, the grim pro- vincial warriors, the severe clergymen in short, all the pageantry of bygone days all the figures that ever swept across the broad plate of glass in former times she could cause the whole to reappear, and people the inner world of the mirror with shadows of old life." This mysterious old lady could do even more won- derful things: "Whenever her chill and withered heart desired warmth she was wont to summon a black slave of Governor Shirley's from the blurred mirror, and send him in search of guests who had long ago been familiar in those deserted chambers. Forth went the sable messenger, with the starlight or the moon- shine gleaming through him, and did his errand in the burial ground, knocking at the iron doors of tombs, or upon the marble slabs that covered them, and whispering to those within: 'My mistress, old Esther Dudley, bids you to the Province House at midnight.' And punctually as the clock of the Old South told twelve came the shadows of the Olivers, the Hutchinsons, the Dudleys, all the grandees of a bygone generation, gliding beneath the portal into HISTORICAL MINIATURES 119 the well-known mansion, where Esther mingled with them as if she likewise were a shade." There is a special note of pathos and tenderness in this story, as when he tells of old Esther's fondness for the children of the town, her most frequent and favored guests: "And when these little boys and girls stole forth again from the dark, mysterious mansion, they went bewildered, full of old feelings that graver people had long ago forgotten, rubbing their eyes at the world around them, as if they had gone astray into ancient times and become children of the past. At home when their parents asked them where they had loitered such a weary while, and with whom they had been at play, the children would talk of all the departed worthies of the province as far back as Gov- ernor Belcher and the haughty dame of Sir William Phipps. 'But Governor Belcher has been dead this many a year,' would the mother say to her little boy. 'And did you really see him at the Province House?* 'Oh, yes, dear mother! yes!' the half-dreaming child would answer. 'But when old Esther had done speak- ing about him he faded away out of his chair.' Thus, without affrighting her little guests, she led them by the hand into the chambers of her own desolate heart, and made childhood's fancy discern the ghosts that haunted there." Again, when Hancock enters the Province House and poor old Esther is under the impression that he is a new royal governor, and descending the stairs, with silks sweeping and rustling, she uncloses the door, steps across the threshold and tremblingly hold- ing forth the heavy key of the portal, she exclaims : 120 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY ' ' Receive my trust! take it quickly! for methinks Death is striving to snatch away my triumph. But he comes too late. Thank Heaven for this blessed hour! God save King George!' ' The reaction when she recognizes Hancock is too , much for her; she "sank down beside one of the pillars of the portal. The key of the Province House fell from her grasp and clanked against the stone. *I have been faithful unto death,' murmured she. 'God save the King!' " Quite different in style from these tales is Haw- thorne's survey of old newspapers and the sketch, "Ticonderoga." The last is a rather perfunctory piece, recalling some of the scenes which have oc- curred at this famous fort, but the short series of essays, "Old News," is a lively description of informa- tion to be found in files of old newspapers. Graphic as Hawthorne's descriptions always are, they are yet serious and sober pictures of the manners of the time as they are reflected in ancient news and advertise- ments. One of Hawthorne's early ambitions was to cover the whole of New England history in his writings. Had he chosen to devote himself to history in earnest, he might have made it so readable merely through the fascination of his style, that it would have rivaled in interest his most subtle flights of fancy. On the other hand, had he chosen to use his historical material more frequently as the basis of romance, he might have performed the very remarkable feat of writing a com- plete philosophy of history in romance and symbol. This would always have had three elements in it: the sober background of actual historical personages and HISTORICAL MINIATURES 121 events; imaginative episodes, illustrating the manner of events and conversations likely to occur during any given period; and lastly, an element of the mysterious or supernatural, by means of which the true inward- ness of the events would be conveyed. He has been said to have founded his style in these early historical tales upon Scott, and that his Puritans are more like Scotch covenanters than like early New England Pil- grims. Echoes of Scott there no doubt are, but, on the one hand, the concentration of his style at his best, and on the other his perception of historical values at times humorous, and at other times profound, are most assuredly all his own. Nothing proves the all- surrounding consciousness of Hawthorne, nor his all- comprehending perception of humanity at large, more than his historical tales. PURITAN TRAGEDIES 123 "Notwithstanding Hawthorne's objectivity and reserve, of which he justly makes so much, and the low vital tone of his work, resulting from whatever cause, he did not alto- gether escape from himself in his art; his shadow followed him into that world. The clear, brown twilight atmosphere of which he speaks was an affair of temperament; it exhaled from his personality. That recurring idea of isolation, the sense of the secrecy of men's bosoms, the perception of life as always lying in the shadow that falls on it, proceeded from predilections of his own, differentiating him from other men; there may have been no very perilous stuff in his breast, nothing to record peculiar to himself in act or experience, no intensity of self -life; but there was this temperament of the solitary brooder upon life. 11 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY. 124 Ill IN "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of Seven Gables," Hawthorne reached the final fruitage of his own inheritance of Puritanism and his medi- tations upon the problems which agitated the Puritan conscience in its early days. Among his short tales, written during the forma- tive period in Salem, those which are the most in- teresting in this connection are "The Gentle Boy," "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Man of Ada- mant," "Young Goodman Brown," "John Ingle- field's Thanksgiving," each of which shows some phase of life or some attitude of mind growing out of or resultant from the unelastic mental conditions induced by over-emphasis of the sinfulness of acting or thinking contrary to a code as inflexible as the laws of the Medes and Persians. In "The Gentle Boy," the Quaker persecution sup- plies the conditions out of which the story is evolved. An introduction clearly presents these conditions those of fanaticism pitted against fanaticism. Puri- tans and Quakers each thinking they possessed the whole truth, the former bent upon stamping out the heresy, not hesitating even at the last resort, of per- secution, torture and death; the latter just as deter- mined to court persecution and resist not. That same Endicott who figures so picturesquely in "The Red 125 12C HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Cross" and "Merry Mount," receives stern criticism at Hawthorne's hands, who evidently derived his knowledge from Besse's account of the sufferings of the Quakers,* and perhaps let it bias his judgment against a man sorely tried by Quaker obstinacy, how- ever unwise and barbarous his treatment of the prob- lems involved may have been. Of the executions which resulted from the perse- cution, Hawthorne writes: "An indelible stain of blood is upon the hands of all who consented to this act, but a large share of the awful responsibility must rest upon the person then at the head of the government. He was a man of narrow mind and imperfect education, and his un- compromising bigotry was made hot and mischievous by violent and hasty passions ; he exerted his influence indecorously and unjustifiably to compass the death of the enthusiasts; and his whole conduct in respect to them was marked by brutal cruelty." This, written as far back as 1829, shows how in- grained his feeling was against the ways of his ances- tors, one of whom, if he did not hang Quakers, did later on hang witches. All this feeling comes out in the story of "The Gentle Boy," who is a sort of flower of all that is lovely in Quakerism. He reminds one of the delicate little mauve-tinted cruciform blossom, which in New England is called Innocence, but in Pennsylvania the Quaker-lady. In the execution of his father, the hounding of his mother, the attitude of the Puritan village toward the childless pair who succored the boy, Ilbrahim, an attitude shared by *See "Longfellow's Country," by the author. M r O W W H PURITAN TRAGEDIES 127 the very children of the village in their outbreak against the child, Puritanism is held up for repro- bation. On the other hand, Ilbrahim's mother is a type of the unloveliness of fanaticism, wherever it is found, albeit she is brought within the range of human sympathy by the deep affection existing between her- self and her child. Over against the unbending se- verity of the bigots in the village is the kindliness of Tobias and Dorothy, who adopt the deserted little Quaker boy, and continue steadily in their good work of caring for him in face of all the unfriendliness shown them by their associates. The beauty of Ilbra- him's character and the antipathetic and insulting ways of their neighbors has its effect upon Tobias and his wife, who, in ultimately becoming Quakers, record, not so much a triumph for the tenets of the Friends as a triumph over the bigotry of the Puritans, as Haw- thorne evidently intends to indicate. Ilbrahim dies, and his mother finally comes to live with Tobias and Dorothy. Her fierce and vindictive nature becomes softened, "as if Ilbrahim's sweetness yet lingered round his ashes ; as if his gentle spirit came down from heaven to teach his parent a true religion," and a still greater miracle! In the course of years "she became a subject of not deep, but general, interest; a being on whom the otherwise superfluous sympathies of all might be bestowed. Every one spoke of her with that degree of pity which it is pleasant to experience; every one was ready to do her the little kindnesses which are not costly, yet manifest good will; and when at last she died, a long train of her once bitter persecutors followed her, with decent sadness and 128 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY tears that were not painful, to her place by Ilbra- him's green and sunken grave." The story has some marks of immaturity for in- stance, the gentle boy is at times more like a goody Sunday-school book hero than a child of flesh and blood; and there are sentimentalisms in language which remind one of the bathos into which Dickens sometimes falls yet it reveals two characteristics which always remain prominent in Hawthorne's handling of Puritan problems, his hatred of its bigotry and fanaticism, and his perception that in the course of time its abnormal sternness must be tem- pered by those qualities of sympathy latent in the hu- man heart; qualities bound finally to unfold under the influence of innate goodness and sweetness. When the consistent Puritan looked in upon his own heart and perceived the sinfulness there, he was just as sternly unforgiving of himself as he was of others. This awful and abiding sense of a sin once committed is the subject of the powerful if tanta- lizing sketch, "The Minister's Black Veil." From Hawthorne's hints one may indulge in all sorts of conjectures as to the nature of the sin, and this un- solved mystery forms one of the most interesting ele- ments of the story. For the moral, however, it is not necessary to know the sin. It was sufficiently heinous in the minister's own eyes for him to punish himself for the rest of his life by hiding his face behind a veil of black crepe, doubled so that there could be no possibility of seeing his countenance. That he would never confess what the sin was probably adds to the poignancy of his punishment; it attached to him a mystery and horror that caused all but sinners PURITAN TRAGEDIES 129 to shun him in the fear that his sin might have been some terrible crime. It is doubtful if any but a Puri- tan conscience could have invented for itself so un- pleasant a means of punishment. The belief in the controlling power of sin comes out in "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving." The story is not convincing as a sketch of human character. It seems rather to have been written around the moral expressed at the end : "Her visit to the Thanksgiving fireside was the realization of one of those waking dreams in which the guilty soul will sometimes stray back to its innocence. But Sin, alas! is careful of her bond-slaves; they hear her voice, perhaps, at the holiest moment, and are constrained to go whither she summons them. The same dark power that drew Prudence Inglefield from her father's hearth the same in its nature, though heightened then to a dread necessity would snatch a guilty soul from the gate of heaven, and make its sin and its punishment alike eternal." Here comes out Hawthorne's own Puri- tanical inheritance, which perhaps too often seemed to "snatch" him away from his own visions of sweetness and light. The supreme egotism of the bigot is set forth in "The Man of Adamant," subtitled "an Apologue." It is not difficult to recognize in it a scathing criti- cism of the worst aspects of Puritanical doctrine, which glared out more strongly to Hawthorne, bred in it and writing almost a hundred years nearer to it, than it does to us to-day. We, in gaining a longer perspective, are enabled to see more clearly in what ways narrowness and sternness made for power in the founding of a nation. 130 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY The story of "Young Goodman Brown" illustrates the danger of too circumscribed an ideal of human goodness. If the spirit have no outlet in beauty or innocent joy, it is apt to fly to an extreme and indulge for recreation in either actual sin, or what it believes to be sin. Then the way is opened for hypocrisy, and troops of little sins gather about the skirts of the primary sin, and the last state of that man is much worse than the first. Between the writing of these tales and the "Scarlet Letter" were the uncreative periods of Custom House duties, first in Boston, from January, 1839, to April, 1841, then in Salem from March, 1846, to November, 1847, and the rosy interim of early wedded life in Salem (1842-1846), during which his tales, though sometimes somber, belong to the more universal realm of pure romance. From 1847 to the end of his Cus- tom House service in 1849, he wrote four of his finest tales, three of which have already been spoken of in other connections. These were "The Snow Image," "The Great Stone Face," "Main Street" and "Ethan Brand," illustrating in their inner content four dif- ferent phases of his mind namely, his appreciation of child life, his perception of universal moral forces, his perception of moral forces in connection with his- tory, and his perception of the possibilities of his own inner nature. This was his immediate preparation for "The Scarlet Letter," which had been brewing in his mind perhaps from the time he mentions the woman with the scarlet letter on her breast in "Endi- cott and the Red Cross." When the Custom House failed he plunged in dead earnest into this, his first long romance, which was to OLD CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM I PURITAN TRAGEDIES 131 stand among the great works of art of all time and give him undying fame. Although Salem history was in his mind, as we know from his recent story, "Main Street," and though he represents himself as having found the material for the romance in an upper room of the Salem Cus- tom House, he chose to lay the scene of "The Scarlet Letter" in Boston. The introductory chapter on the Custom House is the only artistic blot upon this unique book. It is a mere personal venting of his spleen on Custom House officials, upon the loss of his situation, and is artificially lugged into connection with the romance by the tale of the finding of Sur- veyor Pue's manuscript. Having in this chapter shaken the dust of the Custom House off his feet, he shakes off the dust of Salem also and seeks inspira- tion in the less intimate past of a Boston environment. When the story opens, Boston was little more than ten years old, but if early accounts may be trusted, it was already quite a thriving little village, or, rather, a baby city, for it seems to have had the promise of its great future in it from the start. Mr. Wood, an English visitor as far back as 1634, writes of it that it is a neck of land bare of wood, with marshes and hills, four miles in compass and in form almost a square. On the south side, at one corner is a great broad hill on which is planted a fort (Fort Hill) . On the north side another hill equal in bigness whereon is a windmill. To the northwest is a high "mountaine with three little rising hills on the top of it, wherefore it is called the Tramount. From the top of this moun- taine a man may overlook all the islands which lie be- fore the bay and descry such ships as are upon the 132 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY seacoast." The importance of these hills in the de- fense of the town is still further enlarged upon in Edward Johnson's "Wonder Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England," published in 1654 : "The form of this town is like a heart, naturally situated for fortifications, having two hills on the f ron- tice part thereof next the sea, the one well fortified on the superfices thereof. The other hath a very strong battery built of whole timber and fitted with earth at the descent of the hill in the point thereof. Be- twixt these two strong arms lies a large cave or bay, on which the chief est part of the town is built, over- topped with a third hill, all three hills like overtopping towers keep a constant watch to foresee the approach of foreign dangers, being furnished with a beacon and loud babbling guns to give notice by their re- doubled echo to all their sister towns." He speaks already of the city-like town, with its fine wharfs along the sea, built at great industry and cost; of the buildings as being beautiful and large, some fairly set forth with "brick, tile, stone and slate, and orderly placed with comely streets, whose con- tinuall enlargement presages some sumptuous city." We may think of Hester's Boston as not yet hav- ing many houses. These were, for the most part, scat- tered along the Highway to Roxbury, later called Cornhill, and now Washington Street; on the High- way to the Common, now Tremont, and at the north end of t^e town on the way leading from the Orange- tree to the Ferry, now Hanover Street. These streets were crossed by a few short ones with here and there a house. Likewise around the shore was an occasional house. PURITAN TRAGEDIES 133 There were probably a few mud houses, occupied by the poorer colonists, but most of the houses were of wood, one story in height, with thatched roofs. Be- fore long two-story frame houses, with shingled roofs running nearly to the ground behind, made their ap- pearance. There were, besides, houses of stone and brick, and if Hawthorne were to be credited, the many-gabled house and the frame house covered with plaster in which were mingled bits of glass, had al- ready come. He describes Governor Bellingham's mansion as being of this kind : "It had, indeed, a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which frag- ments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Alad- din's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suit- able to the quaint taste of the age, which had been drawn in the stucco when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times." If such houses had not been built during the first part of Hester's life, she might certainly have seen them in her latter days, for after the great Boston fire of 1679 they became general. Boston's latent sense of the beautiful evidently broke out after this fire, and, as one writer declares, subsequently hipped roofs appeared; houses with projecting stories called jetties, ornamented at their corners with pendills, 134 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY many of them rough cast, covered with cement and small pebbles and some with broken glass; brick houses, three stories in height with arched window caps; and houses with gables and towers. Add to this the large clustered chimneys and fancy bricklay- ing, and we may imagine Hester in her last days catching a glimpse of the prosperity and splendor of provincial Boston. One can bring oneself most closely in touch with the Boston of Hester's day by comparing it with the Bos- ton of to-day. The jail in which she was imprisoned stood about where the old County Court House, built in 1832, now stands on Court Street. Previous to this Court House was one built in 1810, which was afterward refitted and used as a City Hall before the present one was erected in 1862. This older Court House seems to have faced toward Court Street, with a large square in front of it called Court Square. As the present County Court House has no yard, it seems probable that the earlier Court House, of which we give a picture, more nearly marks the site of the prison, in front of which was a grassy plot. When this was turned into a city hall, the buildings behind it were taken down and the front made to face on School Street as the present City Hall does. At least so the writer has been led to think by piecing together several somewhat contradictory accounts of the re- lationships between the various court houses and city halls which have occupied this wide lot running from School Street through to Court Street. From all accounts, this early jail must have been as dismal a place as could well be imagined, and was frequently put to use for purposes which would scan- \Y PURITAN TRAGEDIES 135 dalize us to-day. Within its cells with walls three feet thick and unglazed, iron-barred windows, Quak- ers were imprisoned, victims of witchcraft, among them Mistress Hibbins, who figures in the "Scarlet Letter," and the rector of the First Episcopal Church and his leading parishioners at the time of the over- throw of Andros. Hawthorne describes it as a wood- en building, whereas accounts of it say it was built of stone in 1642. When Hester was conducted from the jail to the market place, she walked but a step down Prison Lane to the present site of the old State House. Upon this spot was built the first Town House in 1657, de- scribed by John Josselyn in 1675 as "built upon pil- lars where the merchants may confer. In the cham- bers above they keep their monthly courts." There- fore the reader may imagine, if he feels so disposed, that when Hester returned after her long absence from Boston she beheld with gladness this first Town House, erected on the spot where the scaffold so full of painful memories for her had stood. Governor Winthrop's mansion was farther down Market Street, as the Highway to Roxbury was sometimes called, at the corner of Frost Street, now Milk Street, close to the site of the Old South Church, for which it became the parsonage when that church was built. It does not seem very clear how Hester passed the scaffold in the market place, where Dim- mesdale was holding his vigil, on her way homeward from the governor's, because her humble cottage by the sea was evidently, as described by Hawthorne, on the Back Bay: "It stood on the shore, looking across 136 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, toward the west" the Milton Hills. Governor Bellingham's house, which Dimmesdale could see from the scaffold, was on the Highway to the Common near the corner of Prison Lane. The vision of romance could doubtless descry the lights in this house, but it looks on the map as if the prison might have been just in the line of his vision. Dimmesdale himself lived where King's Chapel now stands, at the corner of Tremont and School streets, and its windows looked out upon the identical bury- ing ground which we may visit now and find there the graves of many of the worthies of that day, in- cluding (Hawthorne assures us) those of Dimmes- dale and Hester, these imaginary persons being buried there. Whether a house actually stood there is doubt- ful, for the records of the time mention only the burying ground north from Winter Street. The forest where Hester and Dimmesdale met is now the thickly built up region leading in the direc- tion of Roxbury, for Dimmesdale had been to see Eliot, who used to preach to his converted Indians from Pulpit Rock, now in a bit of woods at the back of what was in Hawthorne's day the Brook Farm property. Of Beacon Hill, as it looked in Hester's day, there is no link left but the shaft now on the northeast side of the State House extension. About where it stands was the summit of Beacon Hill, on the top of which was a beacon pole set up as far back as 1634 or 1635. The beacon pole was a tall staff, with footsticks on either side, by means of which it could be climbed. This feature is very conspicuous in old maps, in which BEACON HILT,, BOSTON, IN 1809 PURITAN TRAGEDIES 137 the hill is marked by a centipede-like figure. An iron skillet, hung from the crane at the top, was kept filled with combustibles in case a warning beacon should be necessary. In 1775 the beacon pole was taken down and a small square fort was placed there by the Brit- ish forces. But as soon as the Britishers left, up went the beacon pole again, where it stayed until it was blown down in 1789. After this a Doric column sur- mounted by a large gilt eagle was erected as a monu- ment, with paneled inscriptions commemorating the events of the Revolution. In 1811 the city became poor, and sold its historic hill for a mess of pottage. It was leveled, and houses built upon it. The monu- ment, of course, went with it, but the eagle and com- memorative panels were preserved in the State House, and now grace the restoration of the monument; for the whirligig of time has in turn brought about the demolition of the houses to make way for the expan- sion of the State House and the State House grounds. The only historical personages mentioned in the novel are the two governors, Mistress Hibbins, the sister of Governor Bellingham, and the reverend John Wilson. Their connection with the story is not, how- ever, in any sense historical, for they appear merely in their personal relations to the chief characters, and no attempt is made to portray them with exactness. Though Mistress Hibbins was actually executed for witchcraft, the picture of her is entirely fanciful, and serves merely to emphasize the superstitious atmos- phere then prevalent. As Dimmesdale preached the Election Sermon in the year of Governor Winthrop's death, it was suggested by the Rev. Dr. Geo. E. Ellis that Hawthorne meant to identify him with the Rev. 138 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Thomas Cobbett, of Lynn, who actually preached the Election Sermon that year, an identification which he maintained was manifestly unjust to that gentleman. George Parsons Lathrop makes the sufficient answer to this supposition and to all others of a like nature in saying: "The historic particularization must be understood as used simply to heighten the verisimili- tude of the tale, while its general poetic truth and the possibility of the situation occurring in early New England is unquestionable." "The Scarlet Letter" is, in fine, a story of human passions at work under the social conditions of a cer- tain historical epoch. That Hawthorne has fairly presented these conditions can hardly be doubted. The bigotry and superstition may be found reflected in Cotton Mather's writings alone. Records of laws will furnish all the modes of pun- ishment, even that of the letter "A," which Haw- thorne had come upon in some of the records of Bos- ton; besides, it will be found among the laws of Plymouth Colony for 1658. That hypocrisy some- times resulted among the weaker natures because of the stringency of the laws relating to every least hu- man frailty is not to be wondered at, and is directly referred to by an English writer, Edward Ward, in 1699, who, allowing for all exaggerations caused by bias, probably hit off the truth in more than one of his caustic remarks relating to the early inhabitants of Boston. Among his choice shafts of wit may be mentioned the following: "The buildings, like the women, being neat and handsome, and the streets, like the hearts of the male inhabitants, are paved with pebbles." PURITAN TRAGEDIES 139 "The inhabitants seem very religious, showing many outward signs of an inward and spiritual grace. But though they wear in their faces the innocence of doves, you will find them in their dealings as subtle as serpents." "The penalty for drunkenness is whipping or a crown, cursing or swearing the same fine, or to be bor'd thro' the tongue with a hot iron. But get your select member into your company and treat him and you may do either without offense." "They are very busy in detecting one another's fail- ings, and he is accounted by their church governors a meritorious Christian that betrays his neighbor to a whipping-post." Some writers have felt aggrieved at this picture of our Puritan ancestors. It only shows that even Puri- tans were quite human and had failings similar to those met with to-day. Hawthorne strikes the keynote of the moral and religious atmosphere of the time in the opening para- graph of "The Scarlet Letter": /"Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted cul- prit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an in- ference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an un- dutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the 140 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping- post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbens, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of de- meanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thor- oughly interfused that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful." In this environment Hawthorne makes a psycho- logical study of the effects of sin upon three different individuals and its reaction upon the environment. The unbendingness of the taboo against Hester is not much greater than it would be in many sections of society to-day, but more mercy would be shown in not blazoning the sin abroad to the whole community. Hester, being a great-souled woman who loves with that sincerity and devotion possible only to such women, accepts the miserable notoriety thrust upon her with bravery and meekness. She refuses to reveal the name of her lover, she shuns none of the tortures, but she determines, in spite of her overwhelming sense of sin, to bring all the beauty she is capable of out of the situation. She turns the scarifying letter "A" into a wonderful gold-embroidered adornment for her person. She lavishes untiring devotion upon her p ^ O PURITAN TRAGEDIES 141 | child, whom she likewise adorns, so that she becomes a figure of rare and elfin beauty in that sober com- munity. And all this outward beauty is but the sym- bol of the beauty that develops within her soul through her patient bearing of her punishment; her helpfulness toward her fellow creatures, all with no thought on her part of receiving reward, or even miti- gation of her punishment. The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, on the other hand, not only sins in the first place, but he allows the woman he has wronged to bear the whole brunt of it for years, and continuing to lead his blameless life as a clergyman, adds hypocrisy to his sin. Shirking thus the outward punishment he deserves, he suffers not only the untold tortures of the Puritan conscience, but is tormented daily, hourly, by the gadfly Chilling- worth, determined to worm his secret out of him. Chillingworth, in his implacable hatred and his fiend- ish way of showing it, far outdoes the others in sin. Hawthorne, all through the larger half of the book, almost identifies himself with the point of view of the bigoted Puritan; but toward the end we begin to see his solution of the problems presented. Hester, hav- ing lived so blameless a life, and one in such isolation from her fellows, is made to recognize more clearly the true values of things : "Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged but outlawed from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was alto- gether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, 142 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Soli- tude! These had been her teachers stern and wild ones and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss." Because of this emancipation she dares to propose to Dimmesdale that they shall seek happiness for themselves far away in other lands a proposition she makes because of his utter dejection and weakness under the torments of Roger Chillingworth. Dimmes- dale, since he is irrevocably doomed, decides to snatch what he calls "the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution." One or two touches here show what the author thought of his Dimmesdale : "The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched, with morbid zeal and minute- ness, not his acts for those it was easy to arrange PURITAN TRAGEDIES 143 but each breath of emotion and every thought." Again, when Hester tells him that the boat upon which they are to take passage will sail on the fourth day from the present, " 'That is most fortunate!' he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless, to hold nothing back from the reader it was because, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election Ser- mon; and as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. 'At least, they shall say of me,' thought this exemplary man, 'that I leave no public duty unperformed or ill performed!' Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we ap- prehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence at once so slight and irrefragible, of a subtle disease, that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." It is not surprising that when Dimmesdale came to think of the proposed step, he could see nothing but sin in it, for he had been living in sin for years, through his own cowardliness, and had not won a shadow of right to happiness as Hester had through her public punishment. Moreover, the truth and sin- cerity of her life caused her to see that a loveless mar- 144 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY riage was the true sin against God and man, and that Chillingworth in his hatred and revenge had put him- self beyond the pale not only of love but of law. With Dimmesdale, however, the letter of the law and religion were one. He was right enough, to see that his salvation could not come in seeking happiness for himself because his sins had not been expiated. His only salvation was to confess them to the community. And finally, at the end, Hester's clarified vision sees that, at least in eternity, they have won the right to happiness together. " 'Shall we not meet again?' whispered she, bend- ing her face down close to his. * Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou look- est far into eternity with those bright, dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest?' ' But Dimmesdale, with the sense still strong upon him of broken law, replies : "'Hush, Hester, hush! The law we broke! the sin here so awfully revealed! let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be that when we forgot our God, when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved His mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting I had been lost forever! Praised be His name! His will be done! Farewell!' " PURITAN TRAGEDIES 145 It has been objected that the love problem in this story is not solved. It could not be otherwise, given the natures of Hester and Arthur. It is noticeable that while Arthur is deeply steeped in the moral and religious law of the Puritans, he transcends his own mental attitude in that he does not repent of his love ; he repents of his cowardice and his hypocrisy; of the love he only knows, that while he cannot repudiate it, the law was broken. Hester so far transcends the Puritan ideals that she not only does not repent, but sees that their love had a certain "consecration of its own." The only solution in keeping with the times would have been the absolute repentance of and cast- ing away from them of the love they bore each other. Hester's solution, on the other hand, would not have been possible in connection with a man of Dimmes- dale's character. His only hold upon truth was through the law, while her vision of truth came from the revelations of her own heart, for, after the manner of true women, her love was of the soul, deep, intense and capable of bearing all things for love. The type of man whose only hold on truth is the law is not a rare one. He breaks the law, calls it a sin, and the woman a temptress, repents and fixes it up with his own soul by returning to the law. Dimmesdale goes a step beyond this, since he does not repudiate the love, but he leaves the solution of the problem in God's hands. The only sign we have that Chillingworth repented of his sins, is the fact that at his death he left consid- erable property to Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne. The end of Hester's life shows how she was en- 146 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY abled to bring beauty from all this sin, sorrow and suffering, by voluntarily assuming again the badge of her punishment. Even this Puritan community came to love Hester and reverence her badge : "In the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful and self- devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence, too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sor- rows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy ! Hester com- forted them and counseled them as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief that at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mu- tual happiness." Then, after having written a whole book, the cumu- lative effect of which is to convince us of the greatness and beauty of Hester's character, and of its power for working a beneficent change in the hearts of a Puritan community, Hawthorne's own persistent PURITAN TRAGEDIES 147 Puritanical bias crops out in the latter half of the paragraph just quoted: "Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mis- sion of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a lifelong sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure and beautiful; and wise, more- over, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal me- dium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy by the truest test of a life successful to such an end." This is charming as a tribute to his wife, as all who run may read, but it does not sound like the Hester we have learned to admire and love. If ever a woman had won the right to be called pure, surely that woman was Hester. It may be said, however, that all through the book there are signs of a curious conflict between Haw- thorne's hatred of Puritan narrowness, his genuine admiration for Hester, and his own inherited bias in favor of law. It frequently gives great piquancy to his style, which fluctuates between outright criticism of the Puritans and their ways, a sort of whimsical sympathy with their supposed criticisms of sinners, suggestive of underlying sarcasm, and an occasional breaking out of genuine sympathy for Hester. All this reveals that Hawthorne's sense of beauty and his sense of rectitude one pulling him toward more liberal ways of regarding life, one holding the rod of convention over his head were not entirely bar- 148 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY monized in his nature. His only resting place, there- fore, was in an ideal where his sense of beauty and his sense of . rectitude could both be filled. The posses- sion of beauty through perfection and joy appealed to him more strongly, after all is said, than the attain- ment of beauty through sin and suffering; therefore he could find it in his heart to cast the slur of impurity over Hester in the end, and, in doing so, prove him- self a true son of the Puritans. In "The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne presents the effects of what might be called an in- herited tragedy which had its origin in witchcraft days. The inspiration for it is less historical than personal, for he draws directly upon his own ances- tral relations and his own experiences for inspiration. As for the setting of the story, the seven-gabled house, which he describes with such particularity, we are bound to believe him when he declares it was made of such stuff as are castles in the air. Nevertheless, there was a house of many gables in Salem, not far from Herbert Street, on Turner Street, near the bay, with which he was especially familiar, because of its being the house of his cousin, Miss Ingersoll. Tra- dition says that he spent many hours in this house with his cousin and her adopted son, and while he certainly does not describe it with exactitude, nor the location, yet, doubtless, pictures of its peculiarities flitted through his mind as he wrote. In fact, it is related that on one of his visits to his cousin she men- tioned to him that the house once had seven gables, and showed him the beams and mortises to prove the statement. The story goes that Hawthorne seemed perfectly infatuated with the sound of the phrase, PURITAN TRAGEDIES 149 "house of the seven gables," and remarked to his cousin: "It is just what I wanted." Another interesting ray of light upon the possible connection of this house with the romance is found in a letter of Hawthorne's, written to Horace Inger- soll, in which he said: "I went with David Roberts to make a call on the Duchess (a nickname he gave his cousin) at the old Turner Street house. I had a more than ordinarily pleasant visit, and among other things, in speaking of the old house, she said it has had in the history of its changes and alterations, seven gables. The expres- sion was new, and struck me very forcibly. I think I shall make something of it. I expressed a wish to go over the house; she assented, and I repaired to the attic, and there was no corner or dark hole I did not peep into. I could readily make out five gables; and on returning to the parlor I inquired where the two remaining gables were placed. The information I received was that the remaining gables were on the north side, and that when Colonel Turner became the owner of the house he removed the 'lean-to' on which were the missing gables, and made amends by placing three gables on the L, or addition, which he made on the south side of the house; the mark of beams still remains in the studding to show precisely where they were." All this does not necessarily prove that Hawthorne described this identical house, though it proves, if the letter is authentic, that the house suggested the story and its title. Upon this point it may be well to quote his son-in-law, Mr. Lathrop, who may be 150 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY supposed to have direct authority on the subject. In his preface to the novel he writes: "Hundreds of pilgrims annually visit a house in Salem, belonging to one branch of the Ingersoll family of that place, which is stoutly maintained to have been the model for Hawthorne's visionary dwell- ing. Others have supposed that the now vanished house of the identical Philip English, whose blood, as we have already noticed, became mingled with that of the Hawthornes, supplied the pattern; and still a third building, known as the Curwen mansion, has been declared the only genuine establishment. Not- withstanding persistent popular belief, the authen- ticity of all these must positively be denied ; although it is possible that isolated reminiscences of all three may have blended with the ideal image in the mind of Hawthorne. He, it will be seen, remarks in the preface, alluding to himself in the third person, that he trusts not to be condemned for laying out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights . . . and building a house of materials long in use for construct- ing castles in the air! More than this, he stated to persons still living that the house of the romance was not copied from an actual edifice, but was simply a general reproduction of a style of architecture be- longing to colonial days, examples of which survived into the period of his youth, but have since been radic- ally modified or destroyed. Here, as elsewhere, he exercised the liberty of a creative mind to heighten the probability of his pictures without confining himself to a literal description of something he had seen." Be all this as it may, the house has lately been re- claimed from decay or degeneration for it must be PURITAN TRAGEDIES 151 admitted that no one living to-day had ever seen it with the right number of gables by an enthusiastic townswoman of Hawthorne's. At great expense she has had the house transported back to its original gablehood. Architects with heads full of antiquarian lore were consulted. One of them went to work and discovered several beams where gables ought to be, and forthwith they were restored with such zeal that it is said the house now has eight gables. The present writer lost count in circumnavigating the house, and cannot say positively. Other restorations consisted in the removal of walls which had been built up plumb with the overhanging jetty already described in this chapter, and the adding of the appropriate pendills at the corners. An old oaken door found up in the attic, studded with iron nails, has been imitated for the main entrance, and a very handsome door it is. Inside, the house has been furnished with antique fur- niture and reproductions of it, until it has the vrai- semblance of an ancient residence. The restored kitchen is especially interesting, with its big brick fire- place and iron bar upon which the pots and kettles were hung. And there is an old-fashioned iron oven in which bread was baked upon the hearth. And most important of all, the toasting fork not with which Hepzibah toasted bread for Clifford, but with which Susie Ingersoll toasted bread for her cousin, Na- thaniel Hawthorne. It is said that in this kitchen Hawthorne and Ingersoll and a few others used to have somewhat hilarious meetings, in which punch or some other not entirely innocuous beverage played a not unimportant part. This and the fact that Haw- thorne sometimes associated with men of a somewhat 152 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY shady cast in barrooms and taverns in his search for human types, has led to some criticism upon his early habits. On the other hand, his biographers have taken every care to exonerate him from all suspicion. His admirers may at least rest assured that if he occasion- ally fell in with the rollicking habits of the time and there are not only traditions, but letters which indicate it his higher nature always triumphed. A fellow townsman declared that "he had no uncon- trolled appetites, and possessed a calm prudence un- usual in a man of so much imagination, that kept him out of excesses of all kinds, in which one circle of his friends often indulged." Most fascinating of all is the restoration of the little cent shop, with its jangling bell to announce customers. I believe it is not absolutely certain that the house ever had such a shop, but what matter? There it is now, as a fitting memorial of the pathetic Hepzibah. It is a failing of the human mind that it especially likes to identify the abiding places of imagi- nary people. One has the feeling of being present at a miracle when these "airy nothings" are given "a local habitation and a name." Therefore, this charm- ing little cent shop, just like Hepzibah's, with ginger- bread elephants and Jim Crows, besides numerous other more modern dainties in the way of cakes and candies, tugs at our heart-strings even more strongly than the sight of the toasting-fork, already mentioned, in the kitchen. The one thing lacking is the exterior of plaster, composed of lime, pebbles and bits of glass, and ornamented with quaint figures. It has been deemed sufficient to suggest its early self by having its PURITAN TRAGEDIES 153 outside wooden covering stained a delightful warm yellow. Not the least interesting aspect of this restoration is that the building is devoted to settlement uses, and much good work is being done there for the mothers and children in the neighborhood. Pilgrims, besides regaling themselves in the cent shop with Jim Crows and elephants, as if they were Hepzibah's first cus- tomers, may pay a quarter and be conducted over the house, which, aside from any romantic associations it may possess, is certainly a thoroughly interesting and charming specimen of the gabled colonial architecture. Every one must feel glad that Miss Emerton has done this thing, for whatever additions of fancy Hawthorne may have made in his description, this house is not only identified with his personal life, but it is a type of the kind of house he has described, and as such forms a permanent illustration of the time he depicts. There is another bit of tradition which connects this house in a suggestive way with the story. Accord- ing to this, Horace Ingersoll "one day fell asleep in his chair in the south parlor, in such a position that he could be seen through the entryway by a person passing in the street. . . . Seeing him in this way as he approached the house, Hawthorne was at first startled by his friend's appearance, sitting there mo- tionless in the half shadow and cross lights. To re- assure himself, Hawthorne tapped on the window and waked the sleeper, and then, rushing into the house, he exclaimed: 'Good Heavens, Horace, I thought you were dead!' ' This incident, of course, calls to mind Judge Pyncheon's fate in the novel. The ancestral story upon which Hawthorne based 154 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY this romance was, of course, in connection with John Hathorne, the judge of four generations back, who, as already mentioned, is known in history for his un- compromising barbarity in the witch trials. It is recorded that toward one of the women who was on trial for witchcraft, he used peculiar severity, and that her husband in anger uttered a curse to the effect that God would take revenge upon his wife's perse- cutors. The persistence of this curse against the de- scendants of John Hathorne became a fixed idea in the Hawthorne family, it lingered on and on in the family memory, and was regarded as the sufficient cause of any ill luck that might befall the family. Upon this mere incident, which, nevertheless, cast its dark shadow upon the Hawthorne temperament, Hawthorne has elaborated a complicated superstruc- ture. To the curse of the executed woman's husband he added the incident of the lasting feud which ex- isted between this same old judge and a certain Philip English, who had suffered at the hands of the an- cient Puritan, which feud is said to have been wiped out in the marriage of one of English's daughters to Judge Hathorne's son. In old Colonel Pyncheon, Hawthorne has depicted not only a persecutor of witchcraft, but one who was so for personal ends. He wanted Matthew Maule's property, and Matthew knew it; therefore he uttered his curse on the scaffold: "God will give him blood to drink." Personal enmity and the desire for personal gain were not unknown factors in this persecution. It was so easy to get rid of any one in your way by calling him a witch, just as it was easy to confiscate property THE WINDOW OF THE LITTLE SHOP, HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES PURITAN TRAGEDIES 155 in the day of the Duke of Alva by calling its pos- sessor a heretic. There is nothing exaggerated, there- fore, in representing Colonel Pyncheon as a religious fanatic with an eye to the main chance. In the story, the curse persists and the feud persists for several generations, exerting its spell on innocent and guilty alike. The curse shows itself in an inherited disease, which carries off three of the Pyncheon family, sud- denly, at different times, causing untold evil to follow. The original Pyncheon's hardness and selfishness, and utter lack of principle, also crops out from time to time in his descendants, and is conspicuous in the Judge Pyncheon who lives in the pages of the story. On the other hand, there were beautiful and artistic Pyncheons like Alice and Clifford, illustrating, as Hawthorne always does, the gradual softening of Puritan rigor, through the coming in of other in- fluences. These both, however, with no justice that any one can see, suffer from the effects of the curse and the feud. The sudden death of the bachelor uncle makes it possible for Judge Pyncheon to allow his cousin Clifford to be accused and imprisoned for his murder, while he seizes his inheritance. And Alice Pyncheon's life had been ruined by a Maule with mesmeric powers, for in the Maule family there con- tinued to be an inheritance of those weird characteris- tics which were probably instrumental in causing the original Maule to be accounted a witch. Hepzibah, too, a perfectly harmless and honorable Pyncheon, suffered because of the injustice to Clifford. Thus it is shown that there is a fatalism in a curse harder to be overcome than the inheritances of evil nature. In other words, that the tendency to sin inherited from an 156 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY ancestor works itself out sooner than do the effects of that ancestor's original sin, which are visited upon the third and fourth generations without regard to their goodness. Yet even that finally works itself out, for there blossoms at last the charming young Pyn- cheon, Phoebe, and the honorable young Maule, Hoi- grave, who fall in love with each other. The odious old Judge Pyncheon dies by the hand of the curse just as he is arranging to incarcerate the wronged Clifford in an insane asylum. His son, who is in Europe, also dies, and at last the money comes to its rightful owners, Clifford, Hepzibah and Phoebe- while in their good fortune is also included Holgrave. Thus both curse and feud at last work themselves out. It has been pointed out by Mr. Lathrop that in characterizing the Maules, Hawthorne gave to them some of the Hawthorne traits; for example, "so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other men not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken of by an hereditary characteris- tic of reserve." Similarly, Judge Pyncheon is said to have been a study of the man who was most active in removing Hawthorne from the Custom House. Not only does the feud, and with it the evil of the past, die out with Holgrave, but he is a man with an outlook into the future of society. He looked upon the world, "that gray-bearded and wrinkled profli- gate, decrepit, without being venerable, as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming." He was a reformer such as PURITAN TRAGEDIES 157 Hawthorne had met in his affiliations with Brook Farm and Concord. Though Hawthorne could throw himself into ar- tistic sympathy with the fire of social reform, just as he perceives the seeds of progress in the independent moral speculations of Hester Prynne, yet always in the final analysis he comes back to the fatalistic con- } servative attitude. The world will grow better, not ' because of man's efforts to push along the chariot of progress, but because Divine steeds will draw it in the appointed direction. Man's enthusiasm for a bet- ter world, and his active participation in efforts to bring it about, are greatly for his own moral good, but his puny and short-lived attempts are of little avail in bringing about the ideal which he perceives. When men grow older and wiser, they leave these things in God's hands. Of Holgrave he writes : "As to the better centuries that are coming, the ar- tist was surely right. His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of antiquity ex- changed for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable achieve- ment; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he him- self should contend for it or against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm, infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modi- 158 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY fied by inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf, and the haughty faith with which he began life would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its close, in discern- ing that man's best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities." The conclusions here expressed show forth merely another aspect of Hawthorne's tendency to hold him- self aloof and look at human beings and their actions as material for art namely, to hold himself aloof and look at human actions as material for philosophy. This is a better direction for the fulfilment of the ar- tistic temperament, than the one developed by Ethan Brand experimentation with human souls. Aloof- ness is perhaps a necessity of the most intense artistic temperaments; their sympathies must be "dream" sympathies. If actual, the artist would dissipate him- self in varied emotions. Keats, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, puts the thought in a paradoxical way: "A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in exist- ence, because he has no identity he is continually in- forming and filling some other body. The Sun the Moon the Sea, and men and women, who are crea- tures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures." These two novels bring to a climax in Hawthorne's work the Puritan influence as derived through his PURITAN TRAGEDIES 159 Salem environment. Of Salem he was not fond, as all the world knows, yet it had a grip upon him which he could never quite shake off. His reserved spirit made it difficult for Salem society to come to him or for him to go to it, so society drifted into indifference. Besides, an artist athirst for material dealing with the deep, inner problems of humanity would know the hopelessness of finding any such in the exemplary, conventional society of a small town, eighty or ninety years ago. He would be more likely to find the types he needed as models for his characters among the democratic masses he was said to court. This sug- gestion in regard to the reason of the anti-sympathetic attitude of Salem society and Hawthorne toward each other is further borne out by a remark which recently came to the ears of the writer, made by a woman of social standing, whose family traditions gave as the reason for the Hawthorne isolation from society the fact that the Hawthornes were so much above the so- ciety of the day in culture and thought that there was not enough in common between them for them to find each other interesting. So much surprise has been expressed that this man, with a judge in his ancestry, was not the curled dar- ling of Salem society, that one is driven to wonder whether people in general will ever discover that the place for genius is in the social world, not in a Social Clique. The indifference of Salem society became in some quarters positive rancor, when "The Scarlet Letter," with its introductory chapter upon the Custom House, came out. In it Hawthorne held up to ridicule people from whom he had received favors and hospitality, 160 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY and Salem's feelings were justly hurt. As a clever and penetrating bit of character study, it is capital reading for one born far away from the center of dis- turbance, both in point of time and locality, yet, even so, one cannot get over a sense of the lack of dignity shown here, as well as in the portrayal of Judge Pyn- cheon, by Hawthorne, in literally caricaturing his ene- mies. In spite of an almost Aristophanic humor, there is something in it of old Judge Hathorne's vindictive- ness toward witches, the moral of which is that sen- sitive, artistic temperaments ought never to allow themselves to be served by political wire-pulling; the hurt to their amour propre is too great when the wires happen to be pulled in the opposite direction. THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL 3 161 "/TO dealmg with imaginary characters, -few of whom are drawn from actual human life, he seems to produce on us the impression of what they are, not so much by an effort of words, but by presenting an image or phantasm of the mner bemg much as a painter reveals character by touches of his brush, without explanations." FRANK B. SANBORN. 162 IV AMONG the wholly imaginative pieces in "Mosses from an Old Manse," there is none more subtle in its symbolism, nor more impor- tant in its suggestions of Hawthorne's own attitude in regard to the artist and his work, than the charm- ing story, "The Artist of the Beautiful." It seems almost as if he had his own delicately and finely wrought artistic methods in mind when he chooses as the type of the artistically beautiful a piece of compli- cated mechanism, by means of which the spiritual as- piration of the artist was to be conveyed, and which, if it could ever te made complete, would result in a perfect work of art. Written in the blossoming of his new and unusually happy wedded life at Concord, it possibly records a step in Hawthorne's psycho- logical growth as decisive as that recorded in "Ethan Brand." The moods through which Owen Warland passes suggest at once to the reader the different aspects of Hawthorne's temperament. Solitary and alone in his little shop, Owen works away at the creation of his butterfly, much as Hawthorne worked in his solitary chamber at Salem, shrinking from the touch of the unsympathetic, who, full of everyday affairs of life, are incapable of appreciating the aspirations of the artist. With their blundering they wound so con- ies 164 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY stantly his sensitive nature that he falters in his work, and kills for the time being his power of creation. Upon this general antagonism of worldly forces fol- lows discouragement ; then the determination to work at his trade after the manner of an ordinary mortal, as Hawthorne worked from time to time in his official capacities, always with the same result: going into it with enthusiasm at first, with a desire to be an actual worker, breast to breast with men, but coming after a while to despise it as the true artistic bent of his nature asserted its inborn rights. Then follows the seeking in nature, or experience, renewed inspira- tion. However conscientious Hawthorne may have been in his outward performance of his duties, what he writes of Owen would apply equally well to his own longings near the end of one of his official inter- regnums : "But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating fresh vigor during its apparent slug- gishness. As the summer advanced he almost totally relinquished his business, and permitted Father Time, so far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks and watches under his control, to stray at ran- dom through human life, making infinite confusion among the train of bewildered hours. He wasted the sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods and fields and along the banks of streams. There, like a child, he found amusement in chasing butterflies or watching the motions of water insects. There was something truly mysterious in the intent- ness with which he contemplated these living play- things as they sported on the breeze, or examined the structure of an imperial insect whom he had impris- "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL'' 165 oned. The chase of butterflies was an apt emblem of the ideal pursuit in which he had spent so many golden hours ; but would the beautiful idea ever be yielded to his hand like the butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet, doubtless, were these days, and congenial to the ar- tist's soul. They were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through his intellectual world as the butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and were real to him, for the instant, without the toil and perplexity and many disappointments of attempt- ing to make them visible to the sensual eye. Alas that the artist, whether in poetry, or whatever other material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge of his ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a material grasp! Owen Warland felt the impulse to give external re- ality to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the rich- ness of their visions." The worst effect upon Owen, however, comes through his finding a lack of comprehension in Annie, the woman he loves, who fails in her sympathy be- cause she lacks enlightenment by the deep intelligence of love. She touches the dainty mechanism in its most fragile part, and again the toil of months is rendered null. Just as in "Ethan Brand" we catch a glimpse of the direction in which Hawthorne's nature might have gone, had he not had an abiding belief in love and a profound capability for loving, so perhaps we catch here a glimpse of a possibility in his nature, had he 166 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY not found a complete and sympathetic response where he had given his heart. Poor Owen, when he received this blow to his sym- pathies, "spent the ensuing winter in a way that satis- fied any persons who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him that he was, in truth, irrevocably doomed to inutility as regarded the world, and to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a rela- tive had put him in possession of a small inheritance. Thus freed from the necessity of toil, and having lost the steadfast influence of a great purpose great, at least, to him he abandoned himself to habits from which it might have been supposed the mere delicacy of his organization would have availed to secure him. But when the ethereal portion of a man of genius is obscured, the earthly part assumes an influence the more uncontrollable, because the character is now thrown off the balance to which Providence had so nicely adjusted it, and which, in coarser natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen Warland made proof of whatever show of bliss may be found in riot. He looked at the world through the golden medium of wine, and contemplated the visions that bubble up so gayly around the brim of the glass, and that people the air with shapes of pleasant madness, which so soon grow ghostly and forlorn. Even when this dismal and inevitable change had taken place, the young man might still have continued to quaff the cup of enchantment, though its vapor did but shroud life in gloom and fill the gloom with specters that mocked him. There was a certain irksomeness of spirit, which, being real, and the deepest sensation of which the artist was now conscious, was more intolera- "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 167 ble than any fantastic miseries and horrors that the abuse of wine could summon up. In the latter case, he could remember, even out of the midst of his troubles, that all was but a delusion; in the former, the heavy anguish was his actual life. "From this perilous state he was redeemed by an incident which more than one person witnessed, but of which the shrewdest could not explain or conjecture the operation on Owen's mind. It was very simple. On a warm afternoon of spring, as the artist sat among his riotous companions with a glass of wine before him, a splendid butterfly flew in at the open window and fluttered about his head. " 'Oh!' exclaimed Owen, who had drunk freely, "are you alive again, child of the sun and playmate of the summer breeze, after your dismal winter's nap? Then it is time for me to be at work!' "And leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed and was never known to sip another glass of wine." Thus Owen was saved by the return of his spirit to its higher self. He set to work again, and finally ac- complished his ideal of the Beautiful, only to have it crushed in a baby's fist, the child of Anne, who had loved and married the practical blacksmith. Owen's experiences, however, in the quest for the Beautiful have revealed to him the true meaning of this quest. When the artist had risen high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the form is no longer of any moment to him; "the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality." 168 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Touching upon her husband's love of beauty, Mrs. Hawthorne remarks : "He has such a spiritual taste for beauty. It is both wonderful and admirable to see how his taste for splendor and perfection is not the slightest temp- tation to him; how wholly independent he is of what he would like, all things being equal. Beauty and the love of it in him are the true culmination of the good and the true, and there is no beauty to him without these bases." Hawthorne parts company with the artist of the story in the fact that his redemption so far as he was in need of it, that is came through love. In the perfection of that, not in the perfection of his art, he attained the spiritual possession of the Beautiful. Though, in the story, the earthly reality of the ex- istence of Annie and the blacksmith makes little ap- peal to the artist of the Beautiful, it cannot be doubted that Hawthorne himself had much sympathy with the scorn of Annie and the baby in their instinctive consciousness of the simple beauty of nature, as typi- fied in themselves. As Owen glances sidelong at Annie, he perceives that "amid all her kindness toward himself, amid all the wonder and admiration with which she contem- plated the marvelous work of his hands and incarna- tion of his idea," there was "a secret scorn too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness, and perceptible only to such intuitive perception as that of the artist." And when the butterfly settles on the baby's finger, in spite of his infantine delight at the waving of its wings, "there was a certain odd expression of sagacity that made Owen Warland feel as if here were old "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 169 Peter Hovenden, partially, and but partially, re- deemed from his hard scepticism into childish faith." * 'How wise the little monkey looks!' whispered Robert Danf orth to his wife. ' 'I never saw such a look on a child's face,' an- swered Annie, admiring her own infant, and with good reason, far more than the artistic butterfly. 'The darling knows more of the mystery than we do.' ' Thus Hawthorne pays his tribute to nature's beauty, which he himself was so fortunate as to be able to experience along with the deepest sympathy for his own artistic aspirations. Far away as this story is from any record of actual events in Hawthorne's life, one cannot escape the feeling that it has pertinence in relation to Haw- thorne's own development. He has discovered, as well as Owen, that the true worth of art to the artist is the aspiration toward the Beautiful, rather than its attainment, and that the antagonism beween nature and art, always felt to be a problem by a man of ar- tistic temperament, a problem, too, that may lead him as far astray as the temptation to experiment with human souls, already spoken of in connection with "Ethan Brand," finds its solution only in the "en- lightenment" that comes with the "deep intelligence of love." Had Owen "found Annie what he fancied, his lot would have been so rich in beauty that out of its mere redundancy he might have wrought the Beau- tiful into many a worthier type than he had toiled for." In describing what Owen might have done, Haw- thorne reveals what he himself had actually attained, 170 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY and no better description of his own life and work in these early Concord days could be found. It was not a remarkably productive period, but it is one in which his writing was divided between ecstatic outbursts over the mere joy of living, and imaginative flights ranging through the whole gamut of his moods, from the whimsical to the profound, from the satiric to the melancholy, and all in that fantastic borderland between the real and the unreal where his genius was always most at home. Hawthorne's new-found joy in life was not de- pendent in any way upon the fact that he was set down among a remarkable group of people for neigh- bors, whose genius and aspirations were equal to his own, and who were in every way fitted to be his com- panions and sympathizers. What he says of Emer- son, the greatest of them all, reveals just how close people outside of his own charmed world came to him : "For myself, there had been epochs in my life when I, too, might have asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle of the universe ; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no ques- tion to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the wood paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so with- out pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart." A further glimpse into Hawthorne's proverbially unenthusiastic attitude toward reformers, such as he "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 171 was likely to fall in with in the Concord circle, is given in the words following those last quoted: "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly- behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath and thus become imbued with a false originality. This triteness of novelty is enough to make any man of common sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered im- movable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it eVer yet arrived at, rather than be bene- fited by such schemes of such philosophers." This statement is so exaggerated that it probably does not stand for a sober opinion, but it does reflect the state of personal irritation to which Hawthorne might be aroused by uncongenial society. Ellery Channing, one of the best of his friends, said that "he had the greatest aversion to company," and thought it "a damnable bore, and would sometimes swear about it." The verdict in regard to his absolute silence when in company is universal. Not long ago the writer heard the book-tales upon this point confirmed by Colonel T. W. Higginson, who remembers Haw- thorne as "the most silent man" he had ever known; "but," he added, "he was also the most remarkable for personal beauty." This fact every one who knew him mentions, and such beauty, with a look of intelli- 172 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY gence and an angelic smile frequently lighting up his countenance, seemed to go far toward dispelling the uncomfortable effect of his silence. When he did es- say to speak, Channing again informs us that he had the greatest difficulty in expressing himself, stammer- ing and twisting himself about awkwardly. It is quite evident from these and other reminis- cences of Hawthorne's early married life in Concord that he was hardly a less solitary being than he had been in Salem. According to Channing, his habits were far more solitary than that of any other of the Concord brotherhood, who, in fact, were eminently social, while Hawthorne was rather a student than a companion of mankind in general. He was seldom at his ease with more than two or three persons at a time.* Although Hawthorne may not have come very closely in touch with these Concord lights, yet he cer- tainly saw them and talked with them, and occa- sionally dined with them and walked with them, as entries in the "American Notebooks" prove. Here are a few glimpses of meetings with his fellow human beings that do not seem to have bored him in the least : "About nine o'clock, Hillard and I set out for a walk to Walden Pond, calling by the way at Mr. Emerson's, to obtain his guidance or directions, and he accompanied us in his own illustrious person. We turned aside a little from our way to visit Mr. - [Hosmer], a yeoman, of whose homely and self-ac- quired wisdom Mr. Emerson has a very high opinion. *Letter given in F. B. Sanborn's "Hawthorne and His Friends." "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 173 We found him walking in his fields, a short and stal- wart and sturdy personage of middle age, with a face of shrewd and kind expression, and manners of nat- ural courtesy." After some talk with this sage of the plough, they leave Mr. Emerson and proceed to Wai- den Pond, picking blackberries of enormous size along the way, and finally end with a bath in its trans- parent water, which Hawthorne says seemed like the "very purest liquid in the world." Another pleasant rencontre occurred in Sleepy Hollow: "Entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading; for she had a book in her hand, with some strange title, which I did not understand, and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us ; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground, and me sitting by her side. He made some remark about the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard, and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recol- lection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low 174 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY philosophy. In the midst of our talk, we heard foot- steps above us, on the high bank; and while the person was still hidden among the trees, he called to Mar- garet, of whom he had gotten a glimpse. Then he emerged from the green shade, and, behold! it was Mr. Emerson. He appeared to have had a pleasant time ; for he said that there were muses in the woods to-day, and whispers to be heard in the breezes. It being now nearly six o'clock, we separated Mar- garet and Mr. Emerson toward his home, and I toward mine." For Thoreau, he seems to have had a more genuine fondness than for the others. At one time he records : "Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He is a keen and delicate observer of nature a genuine observer which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness." At another time, when Thoreau is about to leave Concord: "I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau's own account, that he is going away, as he is out of health, and may be benefited by his removal ; but, on my ac- count, I should like to have him remain here, he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest tree ; and, with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him, too." At the time this was written, Mrs. Hawthorne was away, and a characteristic entry follows which shows in a whimsical way who it was that ever held the center of his consciousness: "I had a purpose, if circumstances would permit, "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 175 of passing the whole term of my wife's absence with- out speaking a word to any human being ; but now my Pythagorean vow has been broken, within three or four hours after her departure." The companionship of Emerson and Thoreau, delightful as he seemed to find it, pales into insignificance beside the joy of re- ceiving a letter from his wife: "About a quarter to nine, came a knock at my door, and, behold, there was Molly with a letter! How she came by it I did not ask, being content to suppose it was brought by a heavenly messenger. I had not ex- pected a letter; and what comfort it was to me in my loneliness and somberness ! I called Molly to take her note (enclosed), which she received with a face of delight as broad and bright as the kitchen fire. Then I read and re-read, and re-re-read and quadruply, quintuply and sextuply re-read my epistle, until I had it all by heart, and then contined to re-read it for the sake of the penmanship." Doubtless, it was pleasanter to have the Concord brethren in the background of his consciousness, than the uncongenial society of Salem, while his solitary spirit basked in the sunshine of one being whom he found absolutely congenial. His journal during this first residence at Concord reflects on every page the great contentment of his life. In it the artist seems lost in the man; his writing he refers to casually, but his mind is filled with the delights of his home and his garden. When he is not counting his apples or pottering over his squashes and peas, he is off catching fish for breakfast in the Concord River. But the great event of the day is the long walk with Sophia in the afternoon, when what 176 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY beauty is there of sky and field or of passing spring and summer that does not reveal itself to their at- tentive spirits? How he makes us see, long before we have taken our first pilgrimage to Concord, the avenue of black ash trees leading from the street to the front door of the Manse, up which came their first visitors, among them Emerson and Thoreau, not to speak of the young colt and the company of cows, or the black dog that stood wistfully at the farther extremity of the avenue! Pilgrims to-day feel especial sympathy with the sable quadruped. We, too, stand and look wistfully up the avenue to the quaint, weather-beaten old house. Would that we might enter! but the gates to "Para- dise" are guarded, not by angels with flaming swords, but by a prosaic sign: "Private Property. No Tres- passing." We meekly content ourselves by taking a photograph of the avenue and house from the street, only to be almost ruthlessly driven down by a farm wagon which enters the sacred precincts with the air of possessing ancestral rights to the place. As every one knows, this house had formerly been lived in by Emerson, and in the study where Haw- thorn wrote, he had written "Nature," and, as Hawthorne expressed it, "used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the sum- mit of our eastern hill." Of this same hill Emerson wrote in his journal: "I went Sunday evening at sundown to the top of Dr. Ripley's hill and renewed my vows to the genius of that place. Somewhat of awe, somewhat grand and solemn mingled with the beauty that shined afar, "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL'' 177 around. I beheld the river like God's love, journey- ing out of the gray past into the green future." This study "had three windows set with little, old- fashioned panes of glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked, or, rather, peeped, between the willow branches down into the orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing northward, commanded a broader view of the river at a spot where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the Manse stood watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between two nations; he saw the ir- regular array of his parishioners on the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British on the hither bank. He waited in an agony of suspense the rattle of the musketry. It came, and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the battle smoke around this quiet house." When Hawthorne first saw the room, "its walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages." It was not long before the study was converted into a nook befitting the translation of the abode into the realms of Paradise: "A cheerful coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the overhanging eaves attempered the 178 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints there was a sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como." Perhaps the most delightful way to catch a first glimpse of the old Manse is when gliding in a canoe up the "Musketaquid," by which old Indian name Emerson has made the river famous in his verse. As viewed from the river, the house seems to assume a mysterious half-shadowy look, as if it were only partly of earth, and capable of sympathy with the transcen- dental and imaginative spirits, who wrought within its walls their aspiration or their fancy into rare and enchanting forms. Almost at the same moment ap- pear the North Bridge and the Minute Man, and sud- denly we are aware that we are in the spot where a great nation was born, and where its literature put forth some of its most beauteous manifestations. Here, more especially than elsewhere in Concord, seem to be centered its brave, stern, historical moment and its gracious literary memories. The charm of this town is no fable built up out of the sentimental musings of the visitor. It is real and yet indescribable. Restfulness and peace brood over it as if, in serene matronhood, like a noble mother, she had sent forth her great progeny, in history, thought and literature, to conquer the world, and now beholds how good has been the work of her spirit. The Concord River, flowing past the foot of the Manse garden, did not immediately win Hawthorne's admiration, and one wonders at this somewhat, for where is there a river with the peculiar idyllic charm that distinguishes this one? Its sluggish current "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 179 seemed to irritate his sense of fitness in a river that flowed beneath the famous North Bridge, where our impetuous forefathers made their stand for liberty. He declares that he spent three weeks by its side and swam across it every day before he could determine in which direction its current ran, and then he was compelled to decide the question by the testimony of others instead of by his own observation. He ends by saying: "On the whole, the Concord River is no great favorite of mine; but I am glad to have any river at all so near at hand, it being just at the bot- tom of our orchard." He compares it to the half- torpid earthworms he digs for bait: "The worm is sluggish, and so is the river the river is muddy, and so is the worm. You hardly know whether either of them be alive or dead ; but still, in the course of time, they both manage to creep away." Yet even in this mood his description of it is charm- ing enough to have convinced his own sceptical self: "It slumbers along between broad meadows, or kisses the tangled grass of mowing-fields and pastures, or bathes the overhanging elder bushes and other water-loving plants. Flags and rushes grow along its shallow margin. The yellow water-lily spreads its broad flat leaves upon the surface; and the fra- grant white pond-lily occurs in many favored spots." Two days after deciding the river is no great favor- ite of his, he ascends Emerson's favorite hilltop op- posite the house, and looking downward at the long extent of the river, it strikes him he had done it some injustice in his remarks, and in the following fashion he makes amends: "Perhaps, like other gentle and quiet characters, it 180 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY will be better appreciated the longer I am acquainted with it. Certainly, as I beheld it then, it was one of the loveliest features in a scene of great rural beauty. It was visible through a course of two or three miles, sweeping in a semicircle round the hill on which I stood, and being the central line of a broad vale on either side. At a distance it looked like a strip of sky set into the earth, which it so etherealized and idealized that it seemed akin to the upper regions. Nearer the base of the hill I could discern the shad- ows of every tree and rock imaged with a distinctness that made them even more charming than the reality; because, knowing them to be unsubstantial, they as- sumed the ideality which the soul always craves in the contemplation of earthly beauty. All the sky, too, and the rich clouds of sunset, were reflected in the peaceful bosom of the river; and surely if its bosom can give back such an adequate reflection of heaven, it cannot be so gross and impure as I described it yesterday." Later, when he became the possessor of Thoreau's boat, the Musketaquid, whose name, by the way, was changed to the much less happy one of Pond-lily, he took many voyages on the river, and came to love it, at least for its good qualities, if he never could quite forgive its muddiness. The pure waters of Lake Walden made a par- ticularly happy impression upon him. He delighted to swim in it, and felt that the mud and river slime of the Concord which were accumulated upon his soul were washed away in its bright waters. Taking a solitary walk to the lake one day, he breaks into rhapsodies: "Walden Pond was clear and beautiful as usual. O o JZ5 O U "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 181 It tempted me to bathe; and, though the water was thrillingly cold, it was like the thrill of a happy death. Never was there such transparent water as this. I threw sticks into it, and saw them float suspended on an almost invisible medium. It seemed as if the pure air were beneath them, as well as above. It is fit for baptism; but one would not wish it to be polluted by having sins washed into it. None but angels should bathe in it; but blessed babies might be dipped into its bosom." The supreme expression of what his new life meant to him is in an entry of July 9, 1843: "I know not what to say, and yet cannot be satis- fied without marking with a word or two this anni- versary. . . . But life now swells and heaves be- neath me like a brimful ocean; and the endeavor to comprise any portion of it in words is like trying to dip up the ocean in a goblet. . . . God bless and keep us! for there is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it." This humanized Hawthorne is a very lovable being, and one does not wonder at Mrs. Hawthorne's un- bounded admiration of her husband, though Channing considered that she over-idolized him. Channing evi- dently lacked the penetration of the poet who thanked God that a man had two sides, one to show the world and one to show a woman when he loves her. The joy of his own personal existence is reflected especially in three of the sketches or essays in the volume entitled "Mosses from an Old Manse": "The 182 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Old Manse," "Birds and Bird Voices/' and "The New Adam and Eve." "Fire Worship" might also be in- cluded, in which he has enshrined his detestation of the stove, a subject he not infrequently touches upon in his Notes. "The Old Manse" is no more than a pleasant bit of biography, giving to the world the external aspects of Hawthorne's life at the Manse, and drawn quite largely from the notes he kept during the three years he lived there. In it, the old Manse has been de- scribed once for all, and will be found still to answer to his description in all important particulars. In his day, as now, tourists go to visit the old North Bridge, which is within sight of the windows of the old Manse. Then as now they paused at the grave enclosed by an iron chain, where two British soldiers were buried, and perhaps, like a party of pilgrims with whom the writer once visited the spot, threw flowers upon the graves in token of eternal peace. Then as now the modest monument commemorating the spot stood on this side of the bridge, but the Minute Man on the other side of the bridge was not there to be seen by Hawthorne. It dates only as far back as the hundredth anniversary of the battle. Probable the Minute Man would have aroused little enthusiasm in Hawthorne if he could have seen it, for he is uncompromisingly cold-blooded in his re- marks upon this famous spot: "For my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or any other scene of historic celebrity ; nor would the placid margin of the river have lost its charm for me had men never fought and died there." A strange remark in one who could so vividly work up historic "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 183 scenes of the more remote past. Surely, if ever, this was the time, nearly a hundred years after the Andros rebellion, when the spirit of the Gray Champion was abroad. He was more enamored of Indian arrow-heads that might be picked up near the old Manse, having been introduced to them by Thoreau. There is an interesting passage in this essay, illus- trating the hold that his old wander-lust habits still had upon him. He describes a fishing jaunt with Ellery Channing on the Assabeth. Nature every- where seemed overflowing with beauty, "but," he con- cludes, "the chief profit of those wild days to him and me lay, not in any definite idea, not in any angular or rounded truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and conventionalism and fettering influences of man on man. We were so free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow. When we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhung the Assabeth were whispering to us: 'Be free! be free!' There- fore along that shady river-bank there are spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half -consumed brands, only less sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of a household fire." The most sacred things of his life, as he indicates, are not to be found in this mood, however, but in moods he has not even touched upon with the reader. His real self comes out near the end of the essay, when he declares that his conscience does not reproach him with betraying anything too sacredly individual 184 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY to be revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit: "How narrow how shallow and scanty, too is the stream of thought that has been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim emo- tions, ideas, and associations which swell around me from that portion of my existence." "Birds and Bird Voices" is, as the name indicates, a rhapsody on spring, full of the mere joy of living and the most exquisite perception of nature as it shows itself in the lovely ways and byways of Concord. "The New Adam and Eve" is a half-whimsical, half-serious advocacy of a return to nature, and might be imagined to have been written by a new Rousseau. Hawthorne pictures a return to nature in which all the unlovely accumulations of civilization shall be discarded, and all most beautiful that nature has developed from her latent germs shall be pre- served, Love and Purity and Aspiration. It is as charming as anything Hawthorne has written, the perfect blossom artistically of his experience of a noble and exalting love; an example of organic art, growing as naturally and simply and mysteriously out of the thoughts and aspirations of the new sphere of his existence the inner sphere which Adam and Eve inhabit together as an embryo from its seed. It is just such a creation of the Beautiful as Owen might have attained if Annie had loved him, and is prophetic of the growth of a type of art befitting an exalted conception of nature. The remainder of the stories written at Concord, with one or two exceptions, do not touch the palpable earth. They are such stuff as dreams are made on, born in the "dim caverns" of thought and furnished "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 185 with the wings of fantasy. "The Artist of the Beau- tiful," which I have taken as a sort of sign-post to the work of these few years, belongs in this category. A strong contrast to this serious story of an artist's soul is the fantastic and fascinating legend of Feather- top, the story of a soulless being, kept alive only by the pipe lit by magical means. Hawthorne calls it a moralized legend. If the moral be simply a satire pointed at an ordinary society fop, it would be almost too trite to catch our attention. But there is a remark in the course of the story which takes it into another region of morals and makes it a symbol of an artistic failure. Our sympathies are aroused because the poor creature, not responsible for its own aping of hu- manity, yet has enough reality to perceive what real life might be, and what a thing of shreds and patches he is, then for one brief moment to rise to a point of human, or, rather, superhuman courage, and refuse to exist any longer. The passage referred to is where, during the process of the scarecrow's vivification by Mother Rigby, Hawthorne confesses: "The scare- crow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abor- tive characters, composed of heterogeneous materials, used for the thousandth time, and never worth using, with which romance writers (and myself, no doubt, among the rest) have so overpeopled the world of fiction." There is a touch of deep pathos in the thought of the mechanically contrived hero of romance deciding he will no longer live. Creators of such characters ought to have some compunctions about placing them in positions where they may catch a glimpse of a re- ality they are not fitted to sustain. Mother Rigby 186 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY did actually have such compunctions, for she re- frained from forcing the pipe again upon Feathertop. Mother Rigby's Feathertop is at the opposite end of the scale from Owen Warland's butterfly, the perfect symbol of the Beautiful; but for some unexplainable psychological reason the inconsequential whimsical- ness of Feathertop's being makes him one of our best beloved acquaintances in fiction. Part of our liking for him is no doubt due to the exquisite art with which the making of him is described, an art full of laughter lying very near to tears. Another phase of Hawthorne's versatile genius is exhibited in "The Celestial Railroad." Like many a child of past generations, and some few of present generations, he was exceedingly fond of reading Bun- yan's "Pilgrim's Progress." Mr. Lathrop has pointed out at some length the effect upon his art of Bunyan's allegorizing vein. It is a point worthy of note that most of the ten- dencies in Hawthorne's genius, as well as most of the influences operative upon his mind, reach through various minor manifestations at last some one supreme manifestation. His historical vein reaches its cul- mination in the "Legends of the Province House"; his indictment of Puritanism reaches its culmination in "The Scarlet Letter"; witchcraft persecution and its true inwardness are at length fully treated in "The House of the Seven Gables"; the artist-tendency to regard all humanity as material to be experimented upon is most powerfully dealt with in "Ethan Brand." Ideas also touched upon from time to time in his earlier writings are later on fully developed in some one story; for example, there is a woman in the crowd "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 187 with a scarlet letter on her breast in "Endicott and the Red Cross." In the stories written at the old Manse, the allego- rizing vein is always prominent, reaching its culmina- tion in the modern pilgrim's progress, "The Celestial Railroad," an allegory built upon an allegory. Could a more delicious satire be imagined than that of making the journey between the City of Destruction and the Celestial City an easy one? A railroad with Apollyon for engineer, and a baggage-car in which are stowed the burdens of the passengers; a bridge over the slough of Despond, and Tophet only a half-extin- guished volcano, in which forges had been set up for the manufacture of railroad iron! The whole piece satirizes the compromise between strict integrity and the desire for worldly ease and pleasure so character- istic of the world's way of doing things to-day, that only such biting shafts as those with which Haw- thorne has peppered his pages awakens one's con- sciousness of the essential truth of the picture. Take, for example, this capital picture of polite society: "In the ladies' apartment, too, I rejoiced to dis- tinguish some of those flowers of fashionable society who are so well fitted to adorn the most elevated cir- cles of the Celestial City. There was much pleasant conversation about the news of the day, topics of busi- ness and politics, or the lighter matters of amuse- ment; while religion, though indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the back- ground. Even an infidel would have heard little or nothing to shock his sensibility." The gem of description in the essay is that of Vanity Fair, for which, we fear, Boston furnished so many 188 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY hints that it is a wonder the feelings of the Boston of the day were not as much hurt as were those of Salem by the Custom House description. In this descrip- tion, part of which I quote, is shown a keenness of per- ception on the part of Hawthorne not to be equaled ever by his illustrious forerunner, Bunyan : "It was late in the day when the train thundered into the ancient city of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and exhibits an epit- ome of whatever is brilliant, gay and fascinating be- neath the sun. As I purposed to make a considerable stay here, it gratified me to learn that there is no longer the want of harmony between the town's-people and pilgrims, which impelled the former to such la- mentably mistaken measures as the persecution of Christian and the fiery martyrdom of Faithful. On the contrary, as the new railroad brings with it a great trade and a constant influx of strangers, the Lord of Vanity Fair is its chief patron, and the capi- talists of the city are among the largest stockholders. Many passengers stop to take their pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead of going onward to the Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place that people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the Celestial City lay but a bare mile beyond the gates of Vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither. Without sub- scribing to these perhaps exaggerated encomiums, I can truly say that my abode in the city was mainly agreeable, and my intercourse with the inhabitants productive of much amusement and instruction. "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 189 "Being naturally of a serious turn, my attention was directed to the solid advantages derivable from a residence here, rather than to the effervescent pleas- ures which are the grand object with too many visi- tants. The Christian reader, if he have had no ac- counts of the city later than Bunyan's time, will be surprised to hear that almost every street has its church, and that the reverend clergy are nowhere held in higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve such honorable estimation; for the max- ims of wisdom and virtue which fall from their lips come from as deep a spiritual source, and tend to as lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philoso- phers of old. In justification of this high praise, I need only mention the names of the Rev. Mr. Shallow- deep; the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth, that fine old clerical character ; the Rev. Mr. This-to-day, who ex- pects shortly to resign his pulpit to the Rev. Mr. That- to-morrow; together with the Rev. Mr. Bewilderment, the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-spirit, and, last and greatest, the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are aided by those of innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a variety of profundity, in all subjects of human or celestial science, that any man may obtain an omnigenous erudition without the trou- ble of even learning to read. Thus literaure is etherealized by assuming for its medium the human voice ; and knowledge, depositing all its heavier parti- cles, except, doubtless, its gold, becomes exhaled into a sound, which forthwith steals into the ever-open ear of the community. These ingenious methods consti- tute a sort of machinery, by which thought and study are done to every person's hand without his putting 190 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY himself to the slightest inconvenience in the matter. There is another species of machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality. This excellent result is effected by societies for all manner of vir- tuous purposes, with which a man has merely to con- nect himself, throwing, as it were, his quota of virtue into the common stock, and the president and di- rectors will take care that the aggregate amount be well applied. All these, and other wonderful improve- ments in ethics, religion and literature, being made plain to my comprehension by the ingenious Mr. Smooth-it-away, inspired me with a vast admiration of Vanity Fair." Much of the sting of this is removed when the re- lator of the experience finds it all a dream, and for that is profoundly thankful. Perhaps Hawthorne realized that his sardonic muse had run away with him, and that society was not quite so bad, after all, as he had pictured it, gazing out upon it from the en- chanted precincts of the old Manse. "The Hall of Fantasy" is an allegory picturing a visit to the world of imagination and idea. Besides poets and inventors and men of affairs, the visitor meets theorizers and reformers, and finally Father Miller, who is prophesying the end of the world. The glamor of the old Manse life gleams out plainly in this sketch, for with all his sympathy with the world of idea, our author breaks out in defense of the earth that Father Miller is so calmly prophesying will soon be destroyed: "For my own part, not to speak of a few private and personal ends, I really desired our old mother's prolonged existence for her own dear sake. "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 191 " 'The poor old earth!' I repeated. What I should chiefly regret in her destruction would be that very earthliness which no other sphere or state of existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of flowers and of new-mown hay ; the genial warmth of sunshine and the beauty of a sunset among clouds ; the comfort and cheerful glow of the fireside ; the deliciousness of fruits and all good cheer; the magnificence of moun- tains and seas and cataracts, and the softer charm of rural scenery ; even the fast-falling snow and the gray atmosphere through which it descends all these and innumerable other enjoyable things of earth must perish with her." His host in the "Hall of Fantasy" makes a reply very much to the point, reminding us of the squashes and peas in the old Manse garden : 'You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued with a scent of freshly turned soil!' exclaimed my friend." His transcendental friends come in for a "dig" in this essay also, for Hawthorne could never be made to see, as before noted, anything but the indirect value of schemes of reform. After calling all the varieties of reformers a most incongruous throng, he says: "Yet, withal, the heart of the stanchest conserva- tive, unless he abjured his fellowship with man, could hardly have helped throbbing in sympathy with the spirit that pervaded these innumerable theorists. It was good for the man of unquickened heart to listen even to their folly. Far down beyond the fathom of the intellect the soul acknowledged that all these vary- ing and conflicting developments of humanity were united in one sentiment. Be the individual theory as wild as fancy could make it, still the wiser spirit would 192 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY recognize the struggle of the race after a better and purer life than had yet been realized on earth. My faith revived even while I rejected all their schemes." From the "Hall of Fantasy," bordering on the seri- ous, we may pass to "The Select Party," which comes as near being an uproarious bit of fun as Hawthorne was capable of. Everybody was at this select party in the realm of Nowhere, including such celebrities as the Oldest Inhabitant, Davy Jones, Old Harry, the Wandering Jew, the Master Genius, and a pro- fessor of gymnastics, who had succeeded in jumping down his own throat. Similar in style to these two stories is "The Christ- mas Banquet," though the guests at the banquet cast a decided gloom over the story, since they are chosen from among the most unhappy of human beings. The guest who finally proves his claim to be the unhappiest of all is he to whom life has always been unreal. Pos- sibly another tendency of Hawthorne's own nature is touched upon here. In his diary he more than once refers to his sense of the unreality of life and things. It was evidently an evanescent mood with him, but yet pronounced enough for him to perceive what the horror of it might be if it should become permanent. In 1837, he writes in his notebook: "On being transported to strange scenes, we feel as if all were unreal. This is but the perception of the true un- reality of earthly things, made evident by the want of congruity between ourselves and them. By and by we become mutually adapted, and the perception is lost." Of his own woe, Gervayse Hastings, in the story, writes: "It is a chilliness a want of earnest- "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 193 ness a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor a haunting perception of unreality!" The stories included in "Mosses from an Old Manse" which border on reality are "Browne's Wooden Image," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "The Birthmark." Of these Deacon Drowne, the hero of "Drowne's Wooden Image," was an actual person- age, who lived in the early days of Boston, and with whom we have already become acquainted as the creator of the gilt Indian which surmounted the cupola of the old Province House. Hawthorne has imagined a very pretty story of his once having been so deeply inspired by love that, for the time being, he became a genius and created such an apparition of oaken beauty for a ship's figurehead that all Boston was agog with wonder and admiration. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is a marvelous tale of Italy and her strange poisoning arts, prefaced by Hawthorne with a humorous introduction as being translated from the works of M. de 1'Aubepine. "The Birthmark" is an equally marvelous tale of a scientist who experiments upon the mark in his wife's cheek, with the idea of removing it, until he ends by killing her.* "The Procession of Life," "Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent," "The Intelligence Office," "P.'s Corre- spondence," "Earth's Holocaust," and possibly "The Old Apple Dealer," complete the list of the stories written in the old Manse. With the exception of those *The other stories included in the original edition of "Mosses from an Old Manse" were written at earlier dates. In the definitive edition, all written at Concord are included as well as several earlier essays. 194 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY already referred to as reflecting Hawthorne's new joy in existence, none of them owe anything in the way of inspiration to the Concord environment. "Drowne's Wooden Image" and "The Old Apple Dealer" are left over from Boston and Salem influences, and the rest are either purely romantic tales or fantasies of an entirely imaginary character. George E. Woodberry calls attention to the fact that Hawthorne is in the habit of fixing upon some striking physical object to serve as a central motive about which revolve his thought and fancy in the development of his story, and which may serve also as a kind of symbol of the larger moral intent of the work. Among his longer works, the "Scarlet Letter" is a striking example of this; also the "House of the Seven Gables,*' within which revolves the fate of many generations of Pyncheons; and among the numerous examples in his shorter works, "Lady Eleanor's Man- tle" may be taken as a fine specimen of this sort of artistic workmanship. Of this Mr. Woodberry says: "In this tale he has fully seized the power of the physical object, plainly sensible to all as matter of fact, to serve as the medium for moral suggestion often difficult to put into words, of that sort whose effect is rather in the feelings than in thought; and this without turning the object into an express sym- bol. The mantle of Lady Eleanor is a garment of pride and also a garment of death in its dread form of pestilence; the story continually returns to it as its physical theme, and the imagination fixes upon it by a kind of fascination, as through it the double as- pect of Lady Eleanor's isolation is sensibly clothed, her haughtiness and her contagion, whose fatal bond "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 195 is in this mantle, which finally seems not only to ex- press her life, but to rule her tragedy." An idea sometimes formed the central motive of his stories, as well as a physical object. This is fre- quently the case in the stories under discussion in this chapter. "A Select Party," "Rappaccini's Daugh- ter," "The Hall of Fantasy," "The Celestial Rail- road," "The Christmas Banquet" are all worked up around a central idea. A glance at the notebook will show among his hints for stories many with an idea for their initial motive, some of them the identical ideas upon which the stories just mentioned were based. Even "The New Adam and Eve," much as it is the outcome of the life at the old Manse, was first thought of as an idea for a story in 1836. Among these hints we find such suggestions as: "A well concerted train of events to be thrown into confusion by some misplaced circumstance, unsus- pected till the catastrophe, yet exerting its influence from beginning to end." "In a dream to wander to some place where may be heard the complaints of all the miserable on earth." "To picture the predicaments of worldly people, if admitted to Paradise." "A Thanksgiving dinner. All the miserable on earth are to be invited, etc." "The race of mankind to be swept away, leaving all their cities and works. Then another human pair to be placed in the world, with native intelligence like Adam and Eve, but knowing nothing of their prede- cessors or of their own nature and destiny. They, perhaps, to be described as working out this knowl- 196 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY edge by their sympathy with what they saw, and by their own feelings." "A Fancy Ball, in which the prominent American writers should appear, dressed in character." Others of these hints show how Hawthorne began with a physical object, as: "To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes. From different points of view, it should appear to change now an old man, now an old woman a gunner, a farmer, or the Old Nick." "To represent a man as spending life and the in- tensest labor in the accomplishment of some mechan- ical trifle as in making a miniature coach to be drawn by fleas, or a dinner service to be put into a cherry stone." The relation of some of these hints to the stories mentioned in this chapter is obvious, though in all cases the working up of the story has been much finer than the suggestions given in the hints. This exhibition of Hawthorne's manner of getting at a story amounts to saying that his creative methods were in part mechanical. His initial conception is not that of human character developing under the play and interplay of conditions and environment, though these may form part of the envelope, as it were, en- circling the central object or thought. But in spite of this basic mechanism, his stories are artistic and beautiful in the manner of Owen Warland's butter- fly. Over the mechanically constructed skeleton is a wonder of waving wings, feathered and varicolored, and giving forth a shining radiance as they soar into the upper regions of aspiration or imagination. Hawthorne has often been called a morbid writer,' "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 197 and a favorite pastime with critics has been to com- pare his work with that of Poe, sometimes to the dis- credit of the former. It is claimed that while Poe delighted in the morbid, he took care always to make it merely artistic and never moral. A recent writer, who finds Hawthorne's moralizing irksome, remarks that: "With a moral to be rolled and fiction-coated for his readers, Hawthorne could not easily surrender himself to pure fancy," yet he declares there is a cer- tain basic resemblance between them, a common ground upon which they stand, namely: "Their rare imagination found its challenge in the melancholy, the weird, the morbid, the horrible. In their studies each showed himself a rare craftsman, an artist of the ab- normal, it is true, but certainly a man who knew and loved what was beautiful in literary workmanship."* The charge of morbidness or pessimism is always made against writers who study deeply the problems of character. Hawthorne's gaze was directed into the souls of humanity. The sins with which he deals are subtle and his analysis of them psychological. His people, it is true, sometimes give us the impression of being typical sins dressed in human clothing. His interest in sin is not that, however, of a morbid ob- server of the pathological. On the contrary, he is so profound a lover of beauty that he is a specially keen observer of the unbeautiful, and would fain sweep it away by presenting the miseries it brings upon hu- manity and pointing the moral. One might as well say that ^Esop's fables are morbid. Ay! but here's *George D. Latimer, in New England Magazine, August, 1904. 198 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY the rub: What has an artist to do with pointing a moral? If he points it too pointedly, or too prosily, and it must be admitted that Hawthorne sometimes does, then he is certainly in danger of arousing the ordinary reader's mortal fear of being preached at, and of himself being stigmatized as didactic and no artist. On the other hand, art which is not infused with deep moral aspiration is never the greatest art. The artist's philosophy of life may be so profound and far-reaching, and his observation so universal, that he is able to present human characters in perfectly natural action, and make them reveal through their lives the ideals he means to inculcate. This was in part Hawthorne's method in his novels, but he never quite forgot that he was the showman, and his moral- izing wand might at any time pounce upon some weak point in the ethics of his characters, while he turns to make explanations to the audience. If he had had another life to live he would have dropped the showman's wand altogether and given us plays greater than Shakespeare's. In his short stories, his habitual method of revealing his ideals was symbolical and allegorical though even here the showman's wand is often in evidence. Nevertheless, his thought was invariably presented in a style which for subtlety, humor and a lofty percep- tion of the beautiful it would be hard to match any- where in English literature. Then why is he not an artist of another and, indeed, a profounder mold than Poe? There are many sorts of gods in Olympus, and many sorts of geniuses, climbing up the slopes of Parnassus, and, perchance, the dragon-fly, darting "ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL" 199 with its light and filmy wings through the air, does not mount so high as the butterfly with its weight of feathers, nor show such exquisite complexity and beauty in form and color. THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 201 "It was the supernatural element m Hawthorne which gave him his high distinction. When he entered upon his work as a writer he left his personality entirely behind him. In this work he allowed no interference, he asked for no aid. He was shy of those whose intellectual power and literary fame might seem to give them a right to enter his sanctuary. The working of his mind was so sacred and mysterious to him, that he was impatient of any attempt at familiarity, or even intimacy with the divine power within him. . . . "And so in great loneliness he toiled, conscious that no human power could guide him, and that human sympathy was of no avail. The sacredness of his genius was to him like the sacredness of his love." DR. GEORGE B. LORING. 202 TEN or fifteen years ago the stranger within the gates of Boston found himself frequently in some gathering where the chief entertainment was a reminiscent talk upon life at Brook Farm. Long will the sprightly recollections of Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who was at one time resident there, be remembered by those who had the good fortune to hear her. Among others who may still be heard upon this perennially interesting topic are Mr. Frank San- born, whose dulcet oratory is only to be matched by the grace of his tall and willowy form as it sways rhythmically to the tune of his subject, and Colonel T. W. Higginson, the "gentleman and scholar," who more than any one else conserves the atmosphere of America's golden age in literature. Both of these men recollect, among their early associations, the group of transcendental enthusiasts who went into the Brook Farm experiment. It has been remarked that if it had not been for Kant and the schools of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schleiermacher, there would likely have been no Brook Farm, although Kant might with difficulty have recognized the progeny of his own genius. Not to go into the multifarious details of the philo- sophical and ethical discussions which agitated the minds of certain intellectuals of the day in the neigh- 203 204 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY borhood of Boston, and of which Brook Farm was an outcome, let us refresh our memories with a glimpse at the purposes of this famous organization. Its founder was George Ripley, who, becoming dissatis- fied with his own attitude toward the office of the min- istry, resigned from his pulpit in 1840 and proposed that some practical application be made of the fresh views of philosophy and life, which were then ram- pant.* To this end he soon made himself the pos- sessor of a milk farm in West Roxbury, a suitable spot for the carrying out of his ideal: "To insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists ; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing all with labor adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple life than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions." To the more shining lights in the transcendental movement the scheme did not make a strong enough appeal for them to join in it, but we find them all among the visitors Emerson, Margaret Fuller, William Henry Channing, Alcott, Elizabeth Pea- body, Theodore Parker and others. *Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars and Visitors, by Lindsay Swift. THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 205 How Hawthorne, with his habitual scorn for schemes of reform, happened to cast in his lot with the Brook Farmers would be inexplicable were it not that just at this time he lost his position in the Boston Custom House, and the Brook Farm experiment offered a possible opening which might lead to a home there for himself and his prospective bride. His residence here succeeded immediately upon that in Boston, but the literary outcome of it in "The Blithedale Romance" did not appear for ten years. In the meantime he had written "Mosses from an Old Manse," "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of Seven Gables," "Tanglewood Tales" and a number of short stories. He had lived through the happy experiences of Concord, the uncongenial stunt at the Salem Cus- tom House, and renewed happy experiences among the Berkshire Hills. At the time the "Blithedale Romance" was being written he was living tempo- rarily in West Newton, in the neighborhood of Brook Farm. The Note Books record his usual change of mood in relation to any contact with the outer world into which circumstances from time to time forced him, as well as his impressions of the countryside about the farm. He seems at first quite well satisfied with a life in which farm labor formed a large share. Lathrop re- lates in his "Life of Hawthorne" that Hawthorne had two ends in view connected with Brook Farm: One, to find a suitable and economical home after marriage; the other, to secure a mode of life thoroughly balanced and healthy, which would successfully distribute the sum of his life's labor between body and brain. He hoped to secure leisure for writing by perhaps six 206 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY hours of daily service, but he found nearly sixteen needful. "He worked like a dragon," according to Mr. Ripley. Hawthorne went to Brook Farm April 13th in a driving snowstorm, a sort of vindictive stab into the heart of spring New England winters are fond of. He speaks of being in a "polar paradise." Very soon after his arrival he caught a severe cold, which inter- fered for a time with his initiation of a farmer. Once having made a beginning, however, in his farm duties, he seems to have progressed rapidly, and on the 16th he records: "I have milked a cow! . . . The herd has re- belled against the usurpation of Miss Fuller's heifer; and, whenever they are turned out of the barn, she is compelled to take refuge under our protection. So much did she impede my labors by keeping close to me, that I found it necessary to give her two or three gentle pats with the shovel, but still she preferred to trust herself to my tender mercies rather than venture among the horns of the herd." On another day he writes: "What an abominable hand do I scribble! But I have been chopping wood and turning a grindstone all the forenoon, and such occupations are likely to disturb the equilibrium of the muscles and sinews. It is an endless surprise to me how much work there is to be done in the world ; but, thank God, I am able to do my share of it, and my ability increases daily. What a great, broad- shouldered, elephantine person I shall become by and by." His enthusiasm appears to reach its height on May THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 207 4th, when his cold having ceased to trouble him, he writes : "All the morning I have been at work under the clear, blue sky on a hillside. Sometimes it almost seemed as if I were at work in the sky itself, though the material in which I wrought was the ore from our gold mine. Nevertheless there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul. This gold ore is a pure and wholesome substance, else our Mother Nature would not devour it so readily and derive so much nourishment from it and return such a rich abundance of good grain and roots in requital of it. "The farm is growing very beautiful now not that we yet see anything of the peas and potatoes which we have planted, but the grass blushes green on the slopes and hollows. ... I do not believe that I should be patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life." Before the summer was over the enthusiasm for the bucolic aspects of Brook Farm had entirely evapo- rated and he writes: "Joyful thought! In a little more than a fortnight I shall be free from my bondage free to enjoy Nature free to think and feel! . . . Even my Custom House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified! It is a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing' food for cows and horses. Is it not so?" 208 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Looking back upon the experience in September, he half seriously, half in fun, philosophizes upon his life there. "But really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm, and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuit- able and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself." In spite of his decision that he did not belong in the community, he went back shortly after writing the above, but this time only as a boarder. Of his new status he writes: "Here I am again, slowly adapting myself to the life of this queer community, whence I seem to have been absent half a lifetime, so utterly have I grown apart from the spirit and manners of the place. . . . I have a friendlier disposition toward the farm, now that I am no longer obliged to toil in its stubborn furrows." During the remainder of his stay the Notes tell of walks along the Needham Road or along the meadows to Cow Island. A cattle fair at Brighton gives him food for entertaining observations upon the scenes of the fair, where "one could hardly stir a step without running upon the horns of one dilemma or another in the shape of ox, cow, bull or ram." Four newly bought pigs come in for a large share of attention, for Hawthorne finds "something deeply and inde- THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 209 finably interesting in the swinish race. They appear the more a mystery the longer one gazes at them. It seems as if there were an important meaning to them, if one could but find it out." The story of the "Blithedale Romance" is not founded in any respect upon experiences at Brook Farm. It is a romance pure and simple, set in an environment resembling Brook Farm and with char- acters colored more or less by ideals which were held by the men and women who were interested in that social experiment. Coverdale, who is a man of the Ethan Brand type, has been identified with Hawthorne simply, one sus- pects, because the relating of the tale is put into his mouth. Zenobia, of course, being a woman of re- markable cleverness and of literary renown, has been taken for a portrait of Margaret Fuller. It is well to bear in mind upon this point Hawthorne's ex- plicit denial that he had any of his acquaintances in mind when developing the persons of his dramas. Miss Elizabeth Peabody explains that "in this very instance of Zenobia he remarked, on being asked, that once or twice a floating but only par- tial likeness between his heroine and Miss Fuller had presented itself to him, but this merely as one indi- vidual might remind him vaguely of another. The woman he had imagined was so real to him and so distinctive, that the actual woman just referred to offered herself simply as an illustration of the former. On the other hand, where he had seen but little of people and did not know them like the seamstress and the vagrant, standing respectively for Priscilla and Moddie he seized upon their outward appear- 210 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY ance and then invented their inner traits to suit his own purpose." It is probable, however, that in the very process of inventing the traits of his characters, there bubbled up from Hawthorne's sub-consciousness qualities of actual men and women he had known, Margaret Fuller among them. Any one who has had an oppor- tunity to observe the workings of artists' minds will have perceived that the impressions received through their intellect often seem to be forgotten by them, but have in reality sunk into their inner consciousness, whence they emerge by and by into full consciousness with all the force of a wholly new invention. An art- ist may also take some one aspect of himself or an- other and work it up in such a fashion as to make it the dominating note of a fictitious personality. The snowstorm which actually ushered Hawthorne into his new life is used at the opening of the romance as Coverdale's introduction to Blithedale. "It was an April day, as already hinted, and well toward the middle of the month. When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature was mild enough to be pronounced even balmy by a lodger like myself in one of the midmost houses of a brick block, each house partaking of the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its individual furnace heat. But toward noon there had come snow, driven along the street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the roofs and sidewalks with a business-like perseverance that would have done credit to our severest January tempest. It set about its task apparently as much in earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a thaw for months to come. The greater, surely, was my hero- THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 211 ism, when, puffing out a final whiff of cigar smoke, I quitted my cozy bachelor rooms with a good fire burning in the grate and a closet right at hand, where there was still a bottle or two in the champagne bas- ket, and a residuum of claret in a box quitted, I say, these comfortable quarters and plunged into the heart of the pitiless snowstorm in quest of a better life." The cold which Hawthorne speaks of in the Notes falls upon Coverdale in the story and puts him into a mood not unlike Hawthorne's when he had worn out all his initial enthusiasm, though it also reflects a nature and describes a manner of living very far from his. "As for me, I lay abed, and, if I said my prayers, it was backward, cursing my day as bitterly as patient Job himself. The truth was, the hothouse warmth of a town residence and the luxurious life in which I in- dulged myself had taken much of the pith out of my physical system, and the wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general chill of our airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the mar- row of my bones. In this predicament I seriously wished selfish as it may appear that the reforma- tion of society had been postponed about half a cen- tury or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question. "What, in the name of common sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bed-chamber adjoining; my center-table strewn with books and periodicals; my writing desk with a half-finished poem in a stanza of my own con- 212 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY trivance ; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession of human faces and the brisk throb of human life in which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hun- dred dishes at command and could banquet as deli- cately as the wizard Michael Scott when the devil fed him from the King of France's kitchen; my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theater or at some- body's party if I pleased. What could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef and earn it with the sweat of my brow and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?" In one of his walks Hawthorne saw a number of grape vines growing over the trees, one of which he transplanted into the romance. He describes how "sometimes the same vine had enveloped several shrubs and caused a strange, tangled confusion, con- verting all these poor plants to the purpose of its own support and hindering their growing to their own benefit and convenience. The broad vine leaves, some of them yellow or yellowish tinged, were seen appar- ently growing on the same stems with the silver- maple leaves, and those of the other shrubs, thus married against their will by the conjugal twine; and the purple clusters of grapes hung down from above and in the midst, so that one might gather grapes, if not of thorns, yet of as alien bushes. THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 213 "One vine had ascended almost to the tip of a large white pine, spreading its leaves and hanging its purple clusters among all its boughs, still climbing and clam- bering as if it would not be content till it had crowned the very summit with a wreath of its own foliage and bunches of grapes. I mounted high into the tree and ate the fruit there, while the vine wreathed still higher into the depths above my head." Touched up with imagination this grape vine and pine tree became Coverdale's hermitage. "Long since, in this part of our circumjacent wood, I had found out for myself a little hermitage. It was a kind of leafy cave, high upward into the air, among the midmost branches of a white pine tree. A wild grape vine of unusual size and luxuriance had twined and twisted itself up into the tree, and, after wreath- ing the entanglement of its tendrils almost around every bough, had caught hold of three or four neigh- boring trees and married the whole clump with a per- fectly inextricable knot of polygamy. Once, while sheltering myself from a summer shower, the fancy had taken me to clamber up into this seemingly im- pervious mass of foliage. The branches yielded me a passage and closed again beneath, as if only a squirrel or a bird had passed. Far aloft, around the stem of the central pine, behold a perfect nest for Robinson Crusoe or King Charles! A hollow chamber of rare seclusion had been formed by the decay of some of the pine branches, which the vine had lovingly strangled with its embrace, burying them from the light of day in an aerial sepulchre of its own leaves. It cost me but little ingenuity to enlarge the interior and open loopholes through the verdant walls. Had it ever 214 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY been my fortune to spend a honeymoon, I should have thought seriously of inviting my bride up thither, where our next neighbors would have been two orioles in another part of the clump." This is an excellent example of the sort of embel- lishments Hawthorne used in transforming a real object into one suited to the purposes of a romance. Another instance of the same nature is the develop- ment of little Frank Dana's picnic party in honor of his sixth birthday into the Blithedale masquerade. The picnic as described in the Notes must have been a very charming and merry affair, graced by the pres- ence of Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller. "I strolled out, after dinner, with Mr. Bradford, and in a lonesome glade we met the apparition of an Indian chief, dressed in appropriate costume of blan- ket, feathers and paint and armed with a musket. Almost at the same time a young gypsy fortune-teller came from among the trees and proposed to tell my fortune. While she was doing this the goddess Diana let fly an arrow and hit me smartly in the hand." Among other masqueraders there was "a Swiss girl, an Indian squaw, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two foresters and several people in Christian attire, besides children of all ages." His attitude toward all the fun and frolic is characteristic. "Then followed childish games, in which the grown people took part with mirth enough, while I, whose nature it is to be a mere spectator both of sport and serious business, lay under the trees and looked on. Meanwhile Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller, who arrived an hour or two before, came forth into the little glade where we were assembled. Here followed much talk. The ceremo- THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 215 nies of the day concluded with a cold collation of cakes and fruit an excellent piece of work 'would 'twere done.' " The Indian chief, Diana and the fortune-teller all ; appear in the story ; also the negro of the Jim Crow . order, but to these are added many more groups of masquers. Shepherds of Arcadia, allegoric figures from the Faerie Queen, Puritans, gay cavaliers, Revo- lutionary officers, not to speak of a Kentucky woods- man, a Shaker elder, Moll Pitcher, the renowned old witch of Lynn, "while a horned and long-tailed gen- tleman (in whom I recognized the fiendish fiddler erst seen by Tarn o' Shanter) tuned his fiddle and sum- moned the whole motley rout to a dance before par- taking of the festal cheer." Miles does not seem to enjoy the scene much better than Hawthorne, though for dissimilar reasons. His spirits are burdened with the human problems being enacted before him in the relations of Hollingsworth, Zenobia and Priscilla. He comes upon the gay scene after an absence in Boston and makes himself known to the assembled masquers by a burst of laughter. ' 'Miles Miles! Miles Coverdale, where are you?' they cried. "The whole fantastic rabble forthwith streamed off in pursuit of me, so that I was like a mad poet hunted by chimeras. Having fairly the start of them, how- ever, I succeeded in making my escape, and soon left their merriment and riot at a good distance in the rear. Its fainter tones assumed a kind of mournful- ness and were finally lost in the hush and solemnity of the wood. In my haste I stumbled over a heap of logs and sticks that had been cut for firewood a great while 216 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY ago by some former possessor of the soil and piled up square, in order to be carted or sledded away to the farmhouse. But, being forgotten, they had lain there perhaps fifty years, and possibly much longer, until by the accumulation of moss and the leaves falling over them and decaying there from autumn to autumn a green mound was formed, in which the softened out- line of the woodpile was still perceptible. In the fitful mood that then swayed my mind I found something strangely affecting in this circumstance. I imagined the long dead woodman and his long dead wife and children coming out of their chill graves and essaying to make a fire with this heap of mossy fuel! "From this spot I strayed onward, quite lost in reverie, and neither knew nor cared whither I was going until a low, soft, well-remembered voice spoke at a little distance. " There is Mr. Coverdale!' "'Miles Coverdale!' said another voice and its tones were very stern. 'Let him come forward then!' 'Yes, Mr. Coverdale,' cried a woman's voice clear and melodious, but just then with something unnatural in its chord 'you are welcome! But you come half an hour too late, and have missed a scene which you would have enjoyed!' "I looked up and found myself nigh Eliot's pulpit, at the base of which sat Hollingsworth, with Priscilla at his feet and Zenobia standing before them." The little seamstress who formed the starting point for Priscilla is described in the Notes with a good deal of enthusiasm, evidently being the person to whom Hawthorne was most attracted among the Brook Farm sojourners. THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 217 "For a week past we have been especially gladdened with a little seamstress from Boston, about seventeen years old, but of such a petite figure that at first view one would take her to be hardly in her teens. She is very vivacious and smart, laughing and singing and talking all the time talking sensibly, but still taking the view of matters that a city girl naturally would. If she were larger than she is, and of less pleasing aspect, I think she might be intolerable, but being so small, and with a fair skin, and as healthy as a wild flower, she is really very agreeable ; and to look at her face is like being shone upon by' a ray of the sun. She never walks, but bounds and dances along, and this motion in her diminutive person does not give the idea of violence. It is like a bird, hopping from twig to twig and chirping merrily all the time. Sometimes she is rather vulgar, but even that works well enough into her character and accords with it. On continued observation one discovers that she is not a little girl, but really a little woman, with all the prerogatives and liabilities of a woman. This gives a new aspect to her, while the girlish impression still remains and is strangely combined with the sense that this frolicsome maiden has the material for the sober bearing of a wife. She romps with the boys, runs races with them in the yard and up and down the stairs and is heard scolding laughingly at their rough play. She asks William Allen to place her 'on top of that horse,' whereupon he puts his large brown hands about her waist, and, swinging her to and fro, lifts her on horse- back. William threatens to rivet two horseshoes round her neck for having clambered with the other girls and boys upon a load of hay, whereby the said 218 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY load lost its balance and slid off the cart. She strings the seed berries of roses together, making a scarlet necklace of them, which she fastens about her throat. She gathers flowers of everlasting to wear in her bon- net, arranging them with the skill of a dressmaker. In the evening she sits singing by the hour, with the musical part of the establishment often breaking into laughter, whereto she is incited by the tricks of the boys. The last thing one hears of her she is tripping upstairs to bed, talking lightsomely or warbling; and one meets her in the morning, the very image of bright morn itself, smiling briskly at you, so that one takes her for a promise of cheerfulness through the day. Be it said, with all the rest, that there is a perfect maidenly modesty in her deportment. She has just gone away, and the last I saw of her was her vivacious face peeping through the curtain of the cariole and nodding a gay farewell to the family, who were shout- ing their adieus at the door. With her other merits, she is an excellent daughter and supports her mother by the labor of her hands. It would be difficult to con- ceive beforehand how much can be added to the enjoy- ment of a household by mere sunniness of temper and liveliness of disposition, for her intellect is very ordi- nary and she never says anything worth hearing or even laughing at in itself. But she herself is an ex- pression well worth studying." These few extracts from the "American Note Books" show in just what manner Hawthorne was in- debted to his personal experiences at Brook Farm for material in "The Blithedale Romance." The plot of the story is as usual with Hawthorne a somewhat me- chanical contrivance, not of course beyond the bounds THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 219 of possibility, yet showing all the marks of being pure invention. Two women, one a sophisticated, worldly, brilliant and beautiful woman, brought into relation with another, the very opposite simple, unsophisti- cated, with only the charm of a sweet, affectionate nature. Both of them discovered to be the children of one father; both of them, entirely unknown to each other, under the baleful influence of the same man, Westervelt ; both in love with the same man, Hollings- worth. In a way it reminds one of a chess problem: The white pawn, Priscilla, to move and checkmate the red queen, Zenobia, in so many moves. Given such a series of situations, and the environment of a social experiment embodying the ideals of transcendental philosophy, Hawthorne's genius had a fruitful field to work in for the development of the characters and their relations to each other. Two of the dominant notes in Hawthorne's thought receive in the novel very full treatment his disbelief in the reformer and his perception of the peculiar weakness of the artistic temperament. In Hollings- worth he shows that the guiding star of a certain type of reformer or philanthropist, especially one with an idee fixe, is colossal egotism. In his determination to see his own particular cause succeed he becomes intol- erant of all human beings who cannot narrow their vision to coincide with his own. This concentration upon one aspect of life deadens his perceptions of all other relations. Everything that comes to him is turned into the channel of help toward the carrying out of his pet idea. Hearts are of no account to a man of this caliber, and unfortunately it is a type of man who is likely to make deep impressions. Such 220 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY men, who are apparently working for some great and good cause, regardless of self, seem in the eyes of many to be heroes, and ere long come to be heroes in their own eyes. Whatever hearts bring to them, either in the way of sympathy or devotion or even more ma- terial help in service and money, they accept. They respond to the sympathy sufficiently to mislead the adoring disciple often to a phase of personal feeling in which there lurk all the tragic elements of love doomed to be unappreciated, for such men rarely love. So it was with Hollingsworth. He has no further use for Coverdale when he finds that brother egotist unwilling to throw over everything for the Hollings- worth ideal. He plays with Zenobia, a woman of magnificent possibilities, because he wants her wealth in aid of his schemes. He plays with the simple little Priscilla in another way, because it gives his egotism exquisite support and comfort to have her devotion and unquestioning belief in him and his ideals. By his own confession he never loved her until Zenobia, in her desire to get Priscilla out of her way, over- reached herself and, instead of making the way clear for herself, awakened Hollingsworth's genuine feel- ing of protection toward Priscilla into love. Zenobia, with her keen insight, sees his grievous faults, and still loves him. She speaks daggers of truth to him at the end, when completely worsted, she finally turns upon him. 'With what, then, do you charge me?' asked Holl- ingsworth, aghast and greatly disturbed by this at- tack. 'Show me one selfish end in all I ever aimed at, and you may cut it out of my bosom with a knife ! ' " 'It is all self,' answered Zenobia with still intense THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 221 bitterness. 'Nothing else, nothing but self, self, self! The fiend, I doubt not, has made his choicest mirth of you these seven years past, and especially in the mad summer which we have spent together. I see it now. I am awake, disenchanted, disenthralled. Self, self, self! You have embodied yourself in a project. You are a better masquerader than the witches and gypsies yonder, for your disguise is a self-deception. See whither it has brought you ! First you aimed a death- blow, and a treacherous one, at this scheme of a purer and higher life which so many noble spirits had wrought out. Then, because Coverdale could not be quite your slave, you threw him ruthlessly away. And you took me, too, into your plan, as long as there was hope of my being available, and now fling me aside again, a broken tool. But, foremost and blackest of your sins, you stifled down your inmost consciousness ! You did a deadly wrong to your own heart. You were ready to sacrifice this girl, whom, if God ever visibly showed a purpose, He put into your charge, and through whom He has striven to redeem you.' 'This is a woman's view,' said Hollingsworth, growing deadly pale; 'a woman's whose whole sphere of action is in the heart and who can conceive of no higher nor wider one.' "'Be silent!' cried Zenobia imperiously. 'You know neither man nor woman! The utmost that can be said in your behalf and because I would not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain ex- cuse my wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it is, that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Leave me now. You have done with me and I with you. Farewell !' ' 222 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY He is so completely an egotist as to be quite uncon- scious of his egotism himself, but from this time it dawns upon him. Even without Zenobia's tragic taking off of herself Hollingsworth would have learned his lesson. Her keen, intellectual perception of his glaring defect, hurled forth in a moment of time, did more to awaken him than worlds of such submissive devotion as Pris- cilla's, though he could never have risen to the point of seeing what the love the sympathetic appreciation of an intellect equal with his own, yet in its inmost re- cesses transcendently womanly might have meant to a man with truly lofty ideals to realize. Zenobia is right again when she exclaims to Coverdale: "After all, he has flung away what would have served him better than the poor, pale flower he kept. What can Priscilla do for him? Put passionate warmth into his heart when it shall be chilled with frozen hopes? Strengthen his hands when they are weary with much doing and no performance ? No, but only tend toward him with a blind, instinctive love and hang her little puny weakness for a clog upon his arm. She cannot even give him such sympathy as is worth the name. For will he never, in many an hour of darkness, need that proud, intellectual sympathy which he might have had from me the sympathy that would flash light along his course and guide as well as cheer him? Poor Hollingsworth! Where will he find it now?" In saying this, however, Zenobia interprets him through her own nature. He could see how, in his devotion to his own ends, he had caused untold anguish to another, and his nature was fine enough for him to feel perhaps undying remorse for it, but he THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 223 was not sufficiently developed to be attracted by any such ideal as Zenobia here pictured. Neither was Coverdale, who is an egotist only one remove from Hollingsworth. As Hollingsworth looks upon all human beings as possible aids in the carrying out of his own ends, so Coverdale looks upon all human beings as possible material for his work as a poet. He has a clearer conciousness of himself, however, than Hollingsworth, and also some conscience. What emotions he has, he carefully keeps to himself in the realm of imagination, so that no one is in the slightest degree misled by any show of sympathy on his part. On the contrary, they are irritated by the lack of it. His gazing upon all emotions in the attitude of a spec- tator is so habitual with him that he actually doesn't know when he himself has a genuine emotion. He imagines his interest in Priscilla is only a humani- tarian and artistic one. Sitting one day in his airy grape-vine hermitage in the white pine, he observes many things and is brought face to face with an im- pending tragedy. He meditates upon all after his own fashion. "Turning toward the farmhouse, I saw Priscilla (for though a great way off, the eye of faith assured me that it was she) sitting at Zenobia's window and making little purses, I suppose, or perhaps mending the community's old linen. A bird flew past my tree, and, as it clove its way onward into the sunny atmos- phere, I flung it a message for Priscilla. " 'Tell her,' said I, 'that her fragile thread of life has inextricably knotted itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it will be broken. Tell her that Zenobia will not be long her friend. Say that 224 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Hollingsworth's heart is on fire with its own purpose, but icy for all human affection, and that if she has given him her love, it is like casting a flower into a sepulcher. And say that if any mortal really cares for her, it is myself, and not even I for her realities- poor little seamstress as Zenobia rightly called her! but for the fancy-work with which I have idly decked her out!' " At the close of the book this nonchalant person con- fesses that he also loves Priscilla, yet he made not one step to save her from a fate which, from the first, with his habits of observation he saw impending. If Zenobia had not tried to save herself by entangling Priscilla in an evil mesh this unhappy fate might have engulfed Priscilla utterly. But for Zenobia's penetrating sarcasms at Cover- dale's expense, the reader might never know that Hawthorne is showing up in Coverdale almost as in- sidious a form of egotism as that of Hollingsworth's. For example, when she discovers him gazing in at her drawing-room from the windows of a Boston hotel opposite, her greeting of him when he calls throws a strong sidelight upon the author's conception of Mr. Coverdale's character. " "Ah, Mr. Coverdale,' said she, still smiling, but, as I thought, with a good deal of scornful anger under- neath, 'it has gratified me to see the interest which you continue to take in my affairs. I have long recog- nized you as a sort of transcendental Yankee, with all the native propensity of your countrymen to investi- gate matters that come within their range, but ren- dered almost poetical in your case by the refined meth- ods which you adopt for its gratification. After all, it TREMONT STREET, BOSTON As IT LOOKED IN THE DAYS OF "THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE" THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 225 was an unjustifiable stroke on my part, was it not, to let down the window curtain?' " And again, when Zenobia finds herself in the cruel embrace of her tragic destiny, she gives Coverdale several sharp stabs. She tells him: "This long while past you have been fol- lowing up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark corners of the heart. Had you been here a little sooner, you might have seen them dragged into the daylight." And later: "Ah, I perceive what you are about. You are turning this whole affair into a ballad. Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you hap- pen to have ready. . . . By all means, write this ballad and put your soul's ache into it, and turn your sympathy to good account as other poets do, and as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering icicles instead of lines of fire. As for the moral, it shall be distilled into a final stanza in a drop of bitter honey!" The human problems he has the opportunity of ob- serving exert so strong a fascination upon Coverdale that real participation in the action of life is impos- sible to him. One even suspects, at the end, that he takes more satisfaction in the situation of a hopeless love for Pris- cilla than he would in actual realization of it, so com- pletely has the real man been lost in the artistic man. Hawthorne also takes care to show that he is but a minor type of artist. The truly great artist rises above his merely artistic interest in humanity and is capable of an intensity and depth of feeling to which the ordinary mortal can scarcely attain. Of such was Hawthorne himself. In his portrayal of Zenobia Hawthorne shows that 226 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY same curious mixture of criticism and sympathy which marks his attitude toward Hester Prynne. The sum total of the impression left of Zenobia is that she is a splendid personality. No amount of carping at her on the part of Coverdale can destroy that impression. She is a transitional woman, one in whom the promise of the future is at war with the inheritances of the past. There is something intrinsically unlovely in the need stridently to insist upon one's rights, and yet this is what women have needed to do and still need to do in order to get anything like justice and true appre- ciation meted out to them in a world where power is still the dominating influence. Coverdale sees the jus- tice of her ideals and really sympathizes with them, though he indulges in some sarcasm to the effect that women only become reformers by pressure of excep- tional misfortune. But the traits which have been developed in her because of her need to fight and to assert herself, he is ever ready to criticize. His feel- ing for her is divided between admiration of her beauty and power and squeamishness over what he imagines is a feminine lack of innocence and purity. Zenobia herself is not proof against regrets upon the same subject. Because she had had an early, unfor- tunate love affair she talks about her battered heart as if it must henceforth be regarded as incapable of any genuine love, and as if no man could be expected to care for the possession of such a heart. Poor Zenobia ! It was the very splendor of her intellect, combined with the warmth of her nature, that gave her a deeper comprehension of what love might be than most women possess, and created in her a greater need for the realization of her ideal. In a mood of indignation THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 227 at Westervelt, Coverdale rises to a perception of this possibility in Zenobia. "How many a woman's evil fate has yoked her with a man like this! Nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with hardly any sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals ; no passion, save of the senses ; no holy tenderness nor the delicacy that results from this. Externally they bear a close resemblance to other men and have perhaps all save the finest grace, but when a woman wrecks herself on such a being she ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her has no cor- responding part in him. Her deepest voice lacks a response ; the deeper her cry the more dead his silence. The fault may be none of his ; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul. But the wretchedness on her side and the moral deterioration attendant on a false and shallow life, without strength enough to keep itself sweet, are among the most pitiable wrongs that mortals suffer. "Now, as I looked down from my upper region at this man and woman outwardly so fair a sight and wandering like two lovers in the wood I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might have fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had dis- covered its mistake, here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which distinguished the more public portion of her life." His sympathy, however, goes no farther than recog- nizing the "pitiable wrong." No way of righting the wrong occurs to him. Like Hollingsworth again, he can rise to the point of sympathy with suffering, but 228 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY he has no vision. On the other hand, the detestable Westervelt with his unregenerate soul sees a future for Zenobia in keeping with his own low views of life, to which he gives expression at her funeral with that consummate cold-bloodedness which sets him down as the worst egotist of the lot. * 'Her mind was active and various in its powers,' said he. 'Her heart led a manifold adaptation; her constitution an infinite buoyancy, which (had she pos- sessed only a little patience to await the reflux of her troubles) would have borne her upward triumphantly for twenty years to come. Her beauty would not have waned or scarcely so and surely not beyond the reach of art to restore it in all that time. She had life's summer all before her and a hundred varieties of brilliant success. What an actress Zenobia might have been! It was one of her least valuable capabili- ties. How forcibly she might have wrought upon the world, either directly in her own person or by her influence upon some man, or series of men, of con- trolling genius! Every prize that could be worth a woman's having and many prizes which other women are too timid to desire lay within Zenobia's reach.' " 'In all this,' I observed, 'there would have been nothing to satisfy her heart.' " 'Her heart!' answered Westervelt contemptu- ously. 'That troublesome organ, as she had hitherto found it, would have been kept in its due place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly claim. She would soon have established a con- trol over it. Love had failed her, you say. Had it never failed her before? Yet she survived it and THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 229 loved again possibly not once alone, nor twice either. And now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philan- thropist!'" Before her death Zenobia makes a heartrending apology for herself. ' 'Now, God be judge between us,' cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden passion. * Which of use two has most mortally offended Him! At least I am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had weak, vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex, for our virtues, when we have any, are merely impul- sive and intuitive) , passionate, too, and pursuing my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond- slave must; false, moreover, to the whole circle of good in my reckless truth to the little good I saw before me, but still a woman, a creature whom only a little change of earthly fortune, a little kinder smile of Him who sent me hither, and one true heart to encour- age and direct me, might have made all that a woman can be/ " The moral of her life she proposes to Coverdale shall be "that in the battle of life the downright stroke that would fall on a man's steel head-piece is sure to light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breast-plate, and whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict." Or this: "That the whole uni- verse, her own sex and yours, and Providence or Des- tiny to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track. Yes, and add (for I may as well own it now) that, with that one hair's breadth, she goes all astray and never sees the world in its true aspect afterward." 230 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Zenobia was too much at war with herself to see how she might have triumphed over her own weaknesses, how, with the full consciousness of them to which she had attained, she might have used them as the step- ping stones to her own higher development, and thereby have made patent to the world how narrow- minded and shallow was its view of life. Instead of giving way to despair, because the love upon which she had counted for her regeneration had been denied her, and ending her life, she should have risen to the height of self-regeneration in the exercise of pity and love and genuine helpfulness toward society. Thus would she have found that higher womanhood, the fruit of intellectual power and suffering, even sin if you will, which lives unseeking of love, until one day a higher manhood shall recognize its worth. But here we stumble against Hawthorne's own limi- tations. Just as he in the end clouds Hester Prynne's vision, so he clouds Zenobia's. His own spirit was not sufficiently progressive to go beyond sympathy with the sinner and an occasional glimpse into a possible future where life is not to be judged so narrowly as in puritanical Salem or transcendental Boston. He lacked the talisman of the modern moralist namely, development. He could not conceive of sin as the means by which evil may be worked out of a nature and its good forces allowed to come into play. Nor could he realize that by such a process happiness may become the rightful possession of even the most degenerate. Brook Farm is a beautiful tract of country in West Roxbury, which has not yet fallen into the clutches of any improvement syndicate. The neighborhood is still I o PQ w" o THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 231 rural, with wide stretches of undulating land rising on the horizon line into hills and dotted with patches of woodland. None of the buildings used in the Brook Farm days are standing, unless it be the cottage chris- tened Margaret Fuller's Cottage. It is, however, not worth while to waste sentiment upon this cottage, for even if it dates back to the time of Brook Farm, it was never occupied by Margaret Fuller. As a matter of fact, she was merely an occasional visitor to the farm, and this cottage is said to be the only house on the estate which she never occupied. A Lutheran orphan- age now stands partly on the site where the building called the Hive originally stood, not far from the road, while nearby the brook still babbles quietly along. Romance once having thrown its glamor over the place, the associations with it are much more strongly on the side of the imaginary beings who had their dream existence there than on that of the group of real men and women, however our admiration may go out toward them for the good and true work they ac- complished in the direction of social progress. When we wander along its paths we think of them as the paths trod by Hollingsworth and Zenobia, or if we penetrate the woodland shadows it is not Frank Dana's birthday picnic that dwells in our mind, but the gayer, more fantastic scene of the Blithedale mas- querade, with the queenly Zenobia presiding over the revels, and by and by when we reach Eliot's pulpit in the woods the thought of the godly Eliot preaching to his Indians is quite lost in the more vivid memory of the vital and tragic conversations held there by Hollingsworth, Coverdale and Zenobia, with Priscilla 232 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY as the still, pervading presence. The quiet pond brings to mind the last tragic scene of Zenobia's life, although this episode was based upon an actual drowning case which occurred at Concord. Mr. San- born, alluding to this, writes: "On the 9th of July in that year, the first anniversary of the Hawthorne mar- riage, several sad events happened, one of which be- came celebrated from Hawthorne's use of it after- ward, rather too grimly, in his 'Blithedale Romance.' This was the drowning of poor Martha Hunt in the Concord River and the finding of her body by Haw- thorne, Channing and their neighbor, Buttrick, row- ing about in the moonlight night, in the boat that had been Thoreau's and which Channing afterward in- herited. The drowned girl was found among the meadows over which the three authors had skated in the December preceding." Hawthorne transports Concord River and all to Blithedale and describes the rescue of Zenobia's body very much as that of Martha Hunt's had been. It seemed a curious coincidence that, when visiting for the first time Brook Farm, so full of associations with Zenobia's dismal ending, as we entered the grounds, climbing up the hill from the road along the banks of the brook, a bell began to toll loudly. We supposed it was some bell for calling the little German orphans to their morning task. After asking for di- rections at the door of what was once the Hive, we wandered along the path on the search for Margaret Fuller's cottage. Having found it, we were gazing at it with sentiments proper to the occasion, and photo- graphic intent in our eyes, when we beheld a long funeral procession winding its way from the door of THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 233 the orphanage through the grounds in the same direc- tion as that in which we had come, while the bell again tolled a solemn knell. The effect was actually start- ling, as if some malicious fiends were determined that the Blithedale tragedy should indelibly impress itself upon the memory in connection with this beautiful, smiling country, or as if failure was the symbol of all things connected with Brook Farm, whose end came practically with the burning of a just completed phalanstery in which was concentrated a sublimation of Fourierism. The little orphans we saw playing in the garden seemed to our depressed spirits like weary little fail- ures also. In this mood we were ready for any strange occur- rence, and were not much surprised to find the ground all around the shores of the pond strewn with confetti. Was it possible that the weary little orphans had been holding carnival on the shores of the pond, or was it not rather that the ghosts of the Blithedale company had been re-living their bygone masquerade, while we had been hobnobbing with Zenobia, Hollingsworth and the rest at the foot of Eliot's pulpit in the last episode of Zenobia's life. The Boston of Hawthorne's day has a small part in the story. No doubt the hotel where Coverdale stayed was the old Tremont House, which we know from the Notes, Hawthorne used to frequent. In one of his entries he actually speaks of looking in at the windows opposite as Coverdale did into Zenobia's windows. "View from a chamber of the Tremont of the brick edifice opposite, on the other side of Beacon Street. 234 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY At one of the lower windows a woman at work, at one above a lady hemming a ruff or some such lady-like thing. She is pretty, young and married, for a little boy comes to her knees and she parts his hair and caresses him in a motherly way. A note on colored paper is brought her, and she reads it and puts it in her bosom. At another window, at some depth within the apartment, a gentleman in a dressing gown, read- ing and rocking in an easy chair, etc., etc., etc. A rainy day and people passing with umbrellas discon- solately between the spectator and these various scenes of indoor occupation and comfort. With this sketch might be mingled and worked up some story that was going on within the chamber where the spectator was situated." Some of Hawthorne's studies of reformers may have been made, too, at the Peabodys' "shop," on West Street in Boston. In 1840 the Peabodys had moved to Boston and had opened a shop, a library and book store and homoeopathic drug store all in one. Elizabeth Peabody was the presiding genius here, and the shop became the center of transcendentalism. As Mr. Woodberry suggests, Hawthorne probably had his attention turned in the direction of Brook Farm through hearing about it in this hotbed of reform. No direct influence from the "shop," however, can be traced in the "Blithedale Romance." As feelings had been hurt by Hawthorne's facetious treatment of the Salem Custom House, so were they more or less outraged at the presentation of Brook Farm in the "Blithedale Romance." In spite of the author's express statement to the contrary, transcen- x THE ROXBURY UTOPIA 235 dentalists insisted on forcing their own foot into the shoe. Mr. Sanborn writes that before 1860 he had heard "the verdict upon him of Emerson, Thoreau, Theo- dore Parker and many women of delicate literary per- ception and liberal taste. It was voted that he was an exquisite artist in words, but inclined to be morbid, and that in the "Blithedale Romance" he had gone beyond what strict delicacy demanded in his treatment of former associates at Brook Farm, some of whom I knew." This verdict is unpardonable in the face of Haw- thorne's prefatory words. "These characters, he feels it right to say, are en- tirely fictitious. It would, indeed (considering how few amiable qualities he distributes among his imagi- nary progeny), be a most grievous wrong to his for- mer excellent associates, were the author to allow it to be supposed that he has been sketching any of their likenesses. Had he attempted it, they would at least have recognized the touches of a friendly pencil. But he has done nothing of the kind. The self -concen- trated Philanthropist; the high-spirited Woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex ; the weakly Maiden, whose tremulous nerves en- dow her with Sibylline attributes; the Minor Poet, beginning life with strenuous aspirations which die out with his youthful fervor all these might have been looked for at Brook Farm, but by some accident never made their appearance there." Perhaps full appreciation of this romance is pos- sible only to the children of a later day or to such earlier critics as were entirely removed from any per- 236 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY sonal bias in connection with the subject, among whom a shining example is Moncure D. Conway. With well-founded enthusiasm he exclaims, "It is wonderful that the pen that wrote the other romances should have written this. What worldly wit, what life studies and subtlety of suggestion! Not only is every character alive, but the very language, in which each is incarnate." IN WONDERLAND 237 "Una and her brother knew nothing about the romances; they knew and approved the fairy tales; but their feeling about all their father's writings was 9 that he was being wasted in his study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing m any books, whether his own or other authors, that could for a moment bear comparison with his actual companionship. What he set down upon the page was but a less free and rich version of the things that came from his, living mouth in our heedless play times. 'If only papa wouldn't write, how nice it would be. 9 " JULIAN HAWTHORNE. 23S VI influence of Hawthorne's early married life upon his genius is indelibly associated with the Concord environment. There, the new Adam and Eve, lived in their paradise and found it replete with a peace and beauty which reflected itself directly in such exquisite sketches as "The Old Manse" or "The New Adam and Eve," and indirectly in the brill- iancy of the imagination and the sure artistic touch of the stories written during these years. Similarly with Lenox is associated the influence upon Hawthorne of his children's lives. Long ago, in the early Salem days, he had written the charming sketch, "Little Annie's Ramble," wherein he gives the strongest pos- sible expression to his sympathy with children. It has all the marks of being but a dream ramble, after Haw- thorne's fanciful manner, but still we feel pretty sure that this imaginative ramble must have been started by some real little girl in blue silk frock and white pantalets and with brown curls whom he saw standing on her mother's doorstep, and feeling a sympathy be- tween them, immediately welcomed her into his artistic consciousness. "If I pride myself on anything," the narrator in the story remarks, "it is because I have a smile that children love ; and, on the other hand, there are few grown ladies that could entice me from the side of little Annie, for I delight to let my mind go hand in hand with a sinless child." 239 240 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Sophia Peabody relates that one day when Mr. Hawthorne was calling upon her he said he wished he could have intercourse with some beautiful children- beautiful little girls he did not care for boys. She goes on to remark upon what a beautiful smile he has, and refers to his mention of his own smile as being one that children love in "Little Annie's Ramble," adding: "I should think they would indeed. There is the innocence and purity and frankness of a child's soul in it." Hawthorne belonged to the age when it was cus- tomary for people to feel as if there were some mys- terious boundary line between childhood and man- hood or womanhood, as if when one had once gazed upon life with full knowledge there was nothing for it but to go henceforth attended by a dismal conscious- ness of age and sin. He never seemed to suspect that there is in every one of us a perennial source of child- like faith and simplicity, which, if the soul is but kept open to it, wells up and floods whatever ugly facts there may be in life with its clear, pure stream. Thus it is that the thoughts awakened in him by little Annie have that morbid tinge characteristic of many of his moralizing moods, though be it always remembered they invariably tend upward "like plants in mines that feel the sun." He closes the story by saying: "Sweet has been the charm of childhood on my spirit throughout my ramble with little Annie! Say not that it has been a waste of precious moments, an idle matter, a babble of childish talk and a reverie of childish imaginations about topics unworthy of a grown man's notice. Has it been merely this? Not so, not so. They are not truly wise who would affirm IN WONDERLAND 241 it. As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts, their native feelings, their airy mirth for little cause or none, their grief, soon roused and soon allayed. Their influence on us is at least reciprocal with ours on them. When our infancy is almost forgotten and our boyhood long departed, though it seems but as yesterday; when life settles darkly down upon us and we doubt whether to call ourselves young any more, then it is good to steal away from the society of bearded men and even of gentler women and spend an hour or two with chil- dren. After drinking from those fountains of still fresh existence, we shall return into the crowd, as I do now, to struggle onward and do our part in life perhaps as fervently as ever, but for a time, with a kinder and purer heart and a spirit more lightly wise. All this by thy sweet magic, dear little Annie." If Hawthorne desired to know only little girls, he certainly showed warm sympathy for the little Quaker boy, Ilbrahim, in his "Gentle Boy," and in the "Snow Image" he describes as fascinating a little boy as could well be imagined, "known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sun- shine and great scarlet flowers." Hawthorne came to count on his facility in writing for children as the most probable source of earning an income by his literary labors. In a letter to Longfel- low he says : "I see little prospect but that I shall have to scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as children's books, etc." 242 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Such drudgery was undertaken in the Peter Parley histories and in the series of stories called "Grand father's Chair." These last he wrote while at the Cus torn House in Boston. He gleans among the inci dents of Colonial history most appealing to the child but their value as history is minimized by his constani tendency to liven things up by drawing upon hi* fancy. While it is perfectly legitimate in the writer'! opinion to use historical facts as the basis for full fledged romance, when the purpose is known to be i work of art, not a work of instruction, it may be ques tioned whether tales purporting to be historical tale* for the information of young people should be in th( slightest degree sugar-coated with fiction. Be that as it may, these tales are pleasant enougl reading for idle moments even for grown-ups, for the} are like preliminary studies in Hawthorne's manne] of handling in mature form historical incidents anc episodes. There is an opportunity to make a dired comparison in the story of Endicott's cutting out o1 the red cross from the King's colors. Endicott's re marks, equally imaginary in both cases, are in the Ias1 suited to the comprehension of the youngsters as fol- lows: "And now, fellow soldiers, you see this old ban- ner of England. Some of you, I doubt not, maj think it treason for a man to lay violent hands upon it But whether or not it be treason to man, I have good assurance in my conscience that it is no treason tc God. Wherefore I have resolved that we will rather be God's soldiers than soldiers of the Pope of Rome, and in that mind I now cut the papal cross out of this banner." In "The Snow Image" Hawthorne has written a IN WONDERLAND 243 genuine fairy tale, a forerunner of the fairy-tale treatment of the Greek myths which was to be the distinctive outcome of the Lenox life. Hawthorne's interest in children was not merely a sentimental one. He took endless pains to make him- self acquainted with the workings of the childish intel- lect. As soon as he had children of his own he spent hours in watching them and recording in his journal their doings and sayings. The most curious of these records is that made at the time of his mother's death in Salem, when the children were constantly playing the scene of their grandmother's death bed. "Now Una is transformed into grandmamma and Julian is mamma, taking care of her. She groans and speaks with difficulty and moves herself feebly and wearisomely, then lies perfectly still as if in an insen- sible state, then rouses herself and calls for wine, then lies down on her back with clasped hands, then puts them to her head. It recalls the scene of yesterday to me with frightful distinctness, and out of the midst of it little Una looks at me with a smile of glee. Again Julian assumes the character. 'You're dying now,' says Una, 'so you must lie still.' " With minute real- ism he continues to describe their play until his mother's death. About a year after this event came the move to Lenox. The enchantment of the beautiful region of the Berkshire Hills had remained in Hawthorne's memory since his journey thither just prior to his engagement. A home by the sea would have been more to his taste, his son Julian tells us, and might have added twenty years to his life, for he had "always dwelt 244 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY within sight and sound of the Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his well-being." His friend Bridge made unavailing efforts to find a suitable cottage by the sea, and the next best thing was decided upon a cottage in the hills, to which he seems to have gone with his usual buoyancy when entering upon any new venture. He wrote to Bridge: "I have taken a house in Lenox. I long to get into the country, for my health is not what it has been. An hour or two of labor in a garden and a daily ramble in country air would keep me all right." In the notes of his journey twelve years be- fore there is a minute description of Pittsfield, which is now a half hour's ride from Lenox. At that time Hawthorne continued his journey northward to North Adams, while Lenox is in the other direction. The famous little red house to which he took his fam- ily, situated on the shores of Stockbridge Bowl, no longer exists, having been destroyed by fire, but it has been described so often that it is not difficult to create a vivid mental picture of it. Its smallness seems to have been its most noticeable characteristic after its redness. It was but a story and a half in height, with a lower wing at the side, while its redness was miti- gated only by green window shutters. Such a house as this, while not possessing much intrinsic beauty, often looks exceedingly picturesque when set down in the midst of beautiful scenery. Julian Hawthorne gives the best idea of any one of the interior economy of this small house: "A fair-sized city drawing-room of these sumptuous contemporary days could stow away in a corner the entire structure which then be- a 02 ^ - E4 PQ o cq IN WONDERLAND 245 came our habitation and retain space enough outside it for the exploitation of social functions. Neverthe- less, by the simple expedient of making the interior divisions small enough, this liliputian edifice managed to contain eight rooms on its two floors (including the kitchen) . One of the rooms was, in fact, the entrance hall. You stepped into it across the threshold of the outer door and the staircase ascended from it. It was used as an extension of the drawing-room, which opened out of it. The drawing-room adjoined the dining-room, with windows facing the west, with a view of the mountains across the lake, and the dining- room communicated with the kitchen. One of the western-looking upstairs rooms served as my father's study; my sister Una had her chamber, I mine (which was employed as the guest chamber upon occasion) and our parents the other. What more could be asked? for when Rose was born her crib stood beside her mother's bedstead." The smallness of the house was made up for by the largeness of the setting. On one side was a meadow sloping down to the lake, Stockbridge Bowl, and on the other a hill ending in Bald Summit, described in the "Wonder Book." In this lovely sheet of water, three miles long, is reflected its wooded shores and adjacent hills. Beyond its margin rise the sheer gray walls of Monument Mountain, and still farther off the loftier summits of the Taconics loom through the haze. The visitor may gaze upon the exact site of the cot- tage which has been marked out by an appreciative inhabitant of the region. He may see the actual elms under which Hawthorne lounged, the evergreens, the 246 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY fruit trees whose leaden labels were destroyed by Julian. Though there is no longer any study which we may enter, we may still look through Hawthorne's eyes at the exquisite view that met his gaze from his study window whenever he raised his eyes from his writing. He observed Monument Mountain in all its varying phases and gives us many a ravishing glimpse of it. In August he looks out upon "Monument Moun- tain in the early sunshine, its base enveloped in mist, parts of which are floating in the sky, so that the great hill looks really as if it were founded on a cloud. Just emerging from the mist is seen a yellow field of rye, and, above that, forest." In October, "the foliage having its autumn hues, Monument Mountain looks like a headless sphinx wrapped in a rich Persian shawl. Yesterday, through a diffused mist, with the sun shining on it, it had the aspect of burnished copper. The sun gleams on the hills are peculiarly magnificent just in these days." In February Hawthorne and Una take a walk across the frozen lake directly toward Monument Mountain. "Its prominences, projections and rough- ness are very evident, and it does not present a smooth and placid front as when the grass is green and the trees in leaf. At one end, too, we are sensible of pre- cipitous descents, black and shaggy with the forest that is likely always to grow there and in one streak a headlong sweep downward of snow." At this same date he speaks of the incomparable splendor of the winter sunsets. "When the ground is covered with snow, no brilliancy of tint expressible by words can come within an infinite distance of the IN WONDERLAND 247 effect. Our southern view at that time, with the clouds and atmospherical lines, is quite indescribable and unimaginable, and the various distances of the hills which lie between us and the remote dome of Taconic are brought out with an accuracy unattain- able in summer. The transparency of the air at this season has the effect of a telescope in bringing objects apparently near, while it leaves the scene all its breadth. The sunset sky, amidst its splendor, has a softness and delicacy that impart themselves to a white marble world." In March "Monument Mountain stands out in great prominence, with its dark forest-covered sides and here and there a large, white patch, indicating tillage or pasture land, but making a generally dark contrast with the white expanse of the frozen and snow-covered lake at its base and the more undulating white of the surrounding country. Yesterday, under the sunshine of midday and with many voluminous clouds hanging over it and a mist of wintry warmth in the air, it had a kind of visionary aspect, although still it was brought out in striking relief. But though one could see all its bulgings, round swells and pre- cipitous abruptness, it looked as much akin to the clouds as to solid earth and rock substance." In May he thinks "the face of Nature can never be more beautiful than now, with this so fresh and youth- ful green, the trees not being fully in leaf, yet enough so to give airy shade to the woods. The sunshine fills them with green light. Monument Mountain and its brethren are green and the lightness of the tint takes away something from their massiveness and ponder- osity, and they respond with livelier effect to the shine 248 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY and shade of the sky. Each tree now within sight stands out in its own individuality of hue." The Note Books are full also of walks with the children about the neighborhood hunting for spring flowers in their season or tramping over the frozen lake in the winter. The glen, which was christened "Tanglewood," often figures in the accounts of these rambles. "There is a glen between this house and the lake, through which winds a little brook with pools and tiny waterfalls over the great roots of trees. The glen is deep and narrow and filled with trees, so that in the summer it is all a dense shadow of obscurity. Now the foliage of the trees being almost entirely of a golden yellow, instead of being full of shadow, the glen is absolutely full of sunshine and its depths are more brilliant than the open plain or the mountain-tops. The trees are sunshine, and many of the golden leaves being freshly fallen, the glen is strewn with sunshine, amid which winds and gurgles the bright, dark little brook." On the way homeward in a winter walk with Una they trace the brook as far as it lies in their course. "It was considerably swollen and rushed fleetly on its course between overhanging banks of snow and ice, from which depended adamantine icicles. The little waterfalls with which we had impeded it in the sum- mer and autumn could do no more than form a large ripple, so much greater was the volume of water. In some places the crust of frozen snow made a bridge quite over the brook, so that you only knew it was there by its brawling sound beneath." Julian Hawthorne gives an attractive picture of the THE ROAD TO LENOX IN WONDERLAND 249 life Hawthorne led at Lenox with his children. In- doors the children had plenty of playthings, among them a big portfolio containing tracings by Mrs. Hawthorne of the Flaxman designs for the Iliad and Odyssey. Of these Julian remarks: "We knew by heart the story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my father his 'Wonder Book' and 'Tanglewood Tales,' and, to- gether with the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the exception of our father and mother, that we had or desired." Tanglewood was the chief playground out of doors, and, not forgetting father and mother, the brook was the chief play fellow. Summer and winter each gave its own charm to the brook. In summer "it was clear brown, with glancing gleams of interior green, and sparkles diamond white; tiny fishes switched them- selves against the current with quivering tails. The shaggy margins were flecked with sunshine and beau- tiful with columbines, violets, arbutus and houstonias. Fragments of rock and large pebbles interrupted its flow and deepened its mellow song. Above it brooded the twilight of the tall pines and walnuts, responding to its merriment with solemn murmurings." But in winter "it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with snow, its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns, as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairyland and carried treasures of the elves and gnomes. Zero with its utmost rigors could not still its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. Indeed, the frosty god conspired with it for our delight, building crystal bridges with tracery of 250 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY lace delicater than Valenciennes and spangled string pieces and fretted vaultings, whimsical sierras, stalac- tite and stalagmite." All this Nature and child-life lives glorified in the "Wonder Book." Other things Hawthorne wrote while living in Lenox, but into the "Wonder Book" and the later "Tanglewood Tales" has been woven all the charm and spirit of the place, unless we except the chickens. These interesting fowls were transported to Salem to be fed by the fair hand of Phoebe Pyn- cheon, a journey very easily made, for "The House of Seven Gables" was written at Lenox, so Hawthorne's own much observed hen "looking about for a place to deposit her egg, her self-important gait, the sideway turn of her head and cock of her eye as she pries into one and another nook, croaking all the while, evidently with the idea that the egg in question is the most important thing that has been brought to pass since the world began," was clapped forthwith into the Pyncheon garden. The idea of giving a Gothic atmosphere to Greek myths was certainly a unique one, and whatever feel- ing one may have that for a Greek myth a Greek at- mosphere is the preferable one, Hawthorne's success in making modern and very human fairy tales out of Greek stories goes a long way toward convincing one that the thing was well worth doing. Only let them not be presented to children as Greek myths. How- ever, the author himself takes care in his various interludes between the tales to make it clear that the young college student, Eustace Bright, has a new and original way of telling Greek myths not altogether IN WONDERLAND 251 satisfactory to Mr. Pringle, the father of some of the little girls and boys to whom he tells the stories. Eustace Bright begins his stories one autumn morn- ing at Tanglewood, the name given to Mr. Pringle's country seat, the real name of which was Highwood and its real occupants the Tappans. While the chil- dren, all with delectable flower names, are waiting on the Tanglewood porch for the mists to roll away, a nutting excursion being planned for the day, Eustace Bright tells them the story of the "Gorgon's Head" after his own fashion. When it is finished, the mists have vanished and there follows a glowing description of the scene already made familiar in the Note Books, but now warmed up with human emotion. "About half a mile distant, in the lap of the valley, now appeared a beautiful lake, which reflected a per- fect image of its own wooded banks and of the sum- mits of more distant hills. It gleamed in glassy tran- quillity, without the trace of a winged breeze on any part of its bosom. Beyond its farther shore was Monument Mountain in a recumbent position, stretch- ing almost across the valley. Eustace Bright com- pared it to a huge, headless sphinx wrapped in a Persian shawl, and indeed so rich and diversified was the autumnal foliage of its woods that the simile of the shawl was by no means too high-colored for the reality. "Over all this scene there was a genial sunshine, intermingled with a slight haze, which made it un- speakably soft and tender. Oh, what a day of Indian summer was it going to be! The children snatched their baskets and set forth with hop, skip and jump and all sorts of frisks and gambols." 252 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY We recognize in "Shadow Brook" the brook Haw- thorne and his little family loved so well. On its banks is told the story of Midas, or as Hawthorne calls it, "The Golden Touch," when autumn has appropriately turned all its trees to gold. "The dell was narrow and its steep sides, from the margin of the stream upward, were thickly set with trees, chiefly walnuts and chestnuts, among which grew a few oaks and maples. In the summer time the shade of so many clustering branches, meeting and intermingling across the rivulet, was deep enough to produce a noontide twilight. Hence came the name of Shadow Brook. But now, ever since autumn had crept into this secluded place, all the dark verdure was changed to gold, so that it really kindled up the dell, instead of shading it. The bright yellow leaves, even had it been a cloudy day, would have seemed to keep the sunlight among them, and enough of them had fallen to strew all the bed and margin of the brook with sunlight too. Thus the shady nook where sum- mer had cooled herself was now the sunniest spot any- where to be found. "The little brook ran along over its pathway of gold, here pausing to form a pool in which minnows were darting to and fro and then it hurried onward at a swifter pace as if in haste to reach the lake, and, forgetting to look whither it went, it tumbled over the root of a tree which stretched quite across its current. You would have laughed to hear how noisily it bab- bled about this accident. And even after it had run onward the brook still kept talking to itself, as if it were in a maze. It was wonder-smitten, I suppose, at finding its dark dell so illuminated and at hearing the o IN WONDERLAND 253 prattle and merriments of so many children. So it stole away as quickly as it could and hid itself in the lake." The next story must needs be told in the Tangle- wood playroom, for winter is now upon them, and a snowstorm is raging outside. "Twenty miles of it might have been visible at once, between the windows of Tanglewood and the dome of Taconic, had it been possible to see so far among the eddying drifts that whitened all the atmosphere. It seemed as if the hills were giants and were flinging monstrous handfuls of snow at one another in their enormous sport. So thick were the fluttering snow- flakes that even the trees, midway down the valley, were hidden by them the greater part of the time. Sometimes, it is true, the little prisoners of Tangle- wood could discern a dim outline of Monument Moun- tain, and the smooth whiteness of the frozen lake at the base, and the black or gray tracts of woodland in the nearer landscape. But these were merely peeps through the tempest." When the two days' snowstorm is over Eustace and the children go forth for a frolic in the snow, and like the Hawthorne children, enjoy sliding down hill into the valley, "nobody knows how far; and to make it all the merrier, upsetting their sledges and tumbling head over heels quite as often as they came safely to the bottom." And Eustace was glad to escape from the many children for a while and from their snowball attack on him and take refuge by our old friend the brook. He could hear the streamlet grumbling along, under great overhanging banks of snow and ice, which would scarcely let it see the light of day. 254 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY There were adamantine icicles glittering around all its little cascades. Thence he strolled to the shore of the lake and beheld a white, untrodden plain before him, stretching from his own feet to the foot of Monument Mountain." Around the fireside, after this merry day in the snow, Eustace tells the story of "The Three Golden Apples," with Mr. Pringle for an auditor as well as the children. By making Mr. Pringle a decidedly unsympathetic critic, Hawthorne forearms himself against any actual criticism that might be showered upon him for the liberties he takes with Greek myths. Mr. Pringle re- marked, "I find it impossible to express such an opin- ion of this story as will be likely to gratify, in the smallest degree, your pride of authorship. Pray let me advise you nevermore to meddle with a classical myth. Your imagination is altogether Gothic and will inevitably Gothicize everything that you touch. The effect is like bedaubing a marble statue with paint. This giant! How can you have ventured to thrust his huge, disproportioned mass among the seemly outlines of Grecian fable, the tendency of which is to reduce even the extravagant within limits by its pervading elegance?" Eustace defends him- self upon the ground that "an old Greek had no more exclusive right to them than a modern Yankee has. They are the common property of the world and of all time. The ancient poets remodeled them at pleasure and held them plastic in their hands, and why should they not be plastic in my hands as well?" While the remarks of Mr. Pringle are true, the defense of Eustace is also, in a certain sense, unan- IN WONDERLAND 255 swerable. The fundamental elements of the myths in their animal or cosmic origins certainly are the pos- session of mankind. On the other hand, Hawthorne does not build his variations upon these fundamental elements, but quite regardless of their existence, of which he probably had no knowledge, takes the Greek form and changes it according to his own vagrant fancy. Hawthorne was consciously indulging in the pro- cess of turning culture myths which had received the indelible impress upon them of great poetic treat- ments into folklore of the moral tale order. They should take their place in a scientific classification of mythology as variants upon the originals, and might serve as an illustration of the way some earlier vari- ants upon universal mythological themes arose namely, through the conscious changing of them ac- cording to the taste of a single raconteur instead of in some mysterious communal manner. It is spring, the month of May, when Eustace tells the next story, "The Miraculous Pitcher," on the hill- side half way up to Bald Summit. The little com- pany is "no longer in Tanglewood playroom or at Tanglewood fireside, but more than half way up a monstrous hill or a mountain, as perhaps it would be better pleased to have us call it. They had set out from home with the mighty purpose of climbing this high hill even to the very tiptop of its bald head. To be sure, it was not quite so high as Chimborazo or Mont Blanc and was even a good deal lower than old Graylock. But, at any rate, it was higher than a thou- sand ant hillocks or a million of mole hills, and, when 256 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY measured by the short strides of little children, might be reckoned a very respectable mountain." Then follows a pretty description of the spring flowers, for which Hawthorne seems always to have watched with expectant delight. "The month of May, thus far, had been more ami- able than it often is, and this was as sweet and genial a day as the heart of man or child could wish. In their progress up the hill the small people had found enough of violets blue and white and some that were as golden as if they had the touch of Midas on them. That sociablest of flowers, the little houstonia, was very abundant. It is a flower that never lives alone, but which loves its own kind and is always fond of dwelling with a great many friends and relatives around it. Sometimes you see a family of them cover- ing a space no bigger than the palm of your hand and sometimes a large community, whitening a whole tract of pasture, and all keeping one another in cheer- ful heart and life. "Within the verge of the wood there were colum- bines looking more pale than red, because they were so modest and had thought proper to seclude them- selves too anxiously from the sun. There were wild geraniums, too, and a thousand white blossoms of the strawberry. The trailing arbutus was not yet quite out of bloom, but it hid its precious flowers under the last year's withered forest leaves as carefully as a mother bud hides its little young ones. It knew, I suppose, how beautiful and sweet scented they were. So cunning was their concealment that the children sometimes smelt the delicate richness of their per- fume before they knew whence it proceeded." hi a H O IN WONDERLAND 257 One more story, "The Chimera," is told when the party arrives at the top of the hill called "Bald Sum- mit." From here we must take our farewell glance at Lenox scenery through Hawthorne's appreciative eyes. Monument Mountain still holds the center of the canvas, like the sacred mountain Fusiyama of the Japanese, which is so frequently in evidence in their paintings. From Bald Summit, however, it "seemed to have sunk and subsided, so that it was now but an undistinguished member of a large family of hills. Beyond it the Taconic range looked higher and bulk- ier than before. Our pretty lake was seen, with all its bays and inlets, and not that alone, but two or three new lakes were opening their blue eyes to the sun. Several white villages, each with its steeple, were scat- tered about in the distance. There were so many farm houses, with their acres of woodland, pasture, mowing fields and tillage, that the children could hardly make room in their minds to receive all these different ob- jects. There, too, was Tanglewood, which they had hitherto thought such an important apex of the world. It now occupied so small a space that they gazed far beyond it and on either side and searched a good while with all their eyes before discovering whereabout it stood. "White, fleecy clouds were hanging in the air and threw the dark spots of their shadow here and there over the landscape. But by and by the sunshine was where the shadow had been and the shadow was some- where else. "Far to the westward was a range of blue moun- tains which Eustace Bright told the children were the Catskffls." 258 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY There is nothing more charming in the book of wonder tales than the descriptions of the wonderland in which they were conceived and written. This dainty nature setting ends in a whimsical burst of combined realism and romance, at once giving infor- mation about some of the celebrities who were wont to haunt the region and calculated to mystify children in just the manner most fascinating to their sprouting minds by casting a doubt upon the important fact as to whether Eustace Bright and his little flower cousins ever existed "really and truly." Referring to Pegasus, who has an important part in the story he has just told, 1 Tor my part, I wish I had Pegasus here at this moment,' said the student. *I would mount him forth- with and gallop about the country within a circumfer- ence of a few miles, making literary calls on my brother authors. Dr. Dewey would be within my reach at the foot of Taconic. In Stockbridge, yonder, is Mr. James, conspicuous to all the world on his mountain pile of history and romance. Longfellow, I believe, is not yet at the Ox-bow, else the winged horse would neigh at the sight of him. But here in Lenox I should find our most truthful novelist who has made the scenery and life of Berkshire all her own. On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his "White Whale," while the gigantic shape of Graylock looms upon him from his study window. Another bound of my flying steed would bring me to the door of Holmes, whom I mention last because Pegasus would certainly unseat me the next minute and claim the poet as his rider.' " IN WONDERLAND 259 ' 'Have we not an author for our neighbor?' asked Primrose. 'That silent man who lives in the old red house near Tanglewood Avenue, and whom we some- times meet, with two children at his side, in the woods or at the lake? I think I have heard of his having written a poem, or a romance, or an arithmetic, or a school history, or some other kind of a book.' ' 'Hush, Primrose, hush!' exclaimed Eustace in a thrilling whisper and putting his finger on his lip. " 'Not a word about that man, even on a hill-top! If our babble were to reach his ears and happen not to please him, he has but to fling a quire or two of paper into the stove, and you, Primrose, and I and Peri- winkle, Sweet Fern, Squash Blossom, Blue Eye, Huckleberry, Clover, Cowslip, Plantain, Milkweed, Dandelion and Buttercup yes, and wise Mr. Pringle, with his unfavorable criticisms on my legends, and poor Mrs. Pringle, too would all turn to smoke and go whisking up the funnel! Our neighbor in the red house is a harmless sort of person enough, for aught I know, as concerns the rest of the world, but some- thing whispers to me that he has a terrible power over ourselves, extending to nothing short of annihi- lation.' " Before the second volume of Greek legends was written Hawthorne had left Lenox and become a resi- dent of Concord once more. In spite of the wonder of sky and mountain, Hawthorne's health had suf- fered from the climate, and he appears to have left Lenox with more alacrity even than he showed upon going there. "We shall leave here (with much joy) on the first day of December." Furthermore, he had doubtless exhausted all the artistic possibilities the 260 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY place had for him, and his wandering spirit felt the need of entering fresh realms. By the time "The Tanglewood Tales" are under way he is rejoicing in the broad meadows and gentle eminences of Concord. "They are better than mountains," he writes, "because they do not stamp and steoreotype themselves into the brain and thus grow wearisome with the same strong impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains, a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever new, because continually fading out of the memory such would be my sober choice." In the "Tanglewood Tales" the group of children and Eustace Bright are in consequence banished in an introduction. Eustace is represented as having told the tales to the children at Tanglewood and as then bringing them to Hawthorne at the Wayside. The pretty fiction is laid aside by having Eustace hand over the tales to Hawthorne to edit for publication. One misses the eager group of listening children with their naive criticisms and remarks, especially those of Sweet Fern, who always wants to know the exact di- mensions of every giant and every mountain. It's a delightfully real little boy who wants to know of Atlas "exactly how tall was this giant?" "Well, if you must know to a hair's breadth, I sup- pose he might be from three to fifteen miles straight upward, and that he might have seated himself on Taconic and had Monument Mountain for a foot- stool." ' 'Dear me,' ejaculated the good little boy with a contented sort of grunt, 'that was a giant, sure enough! And how long was his little finger?' IN WONDERLAND 261 ' 'As long as from Tanglewood to the lake,' said Eustace. ' 'Sure enough, that w^f giant!' repeated Sweet Fern in an ecstasy at th|MBcision of these measure- ments. 'And how broad,i^ronder, were the shoulders of Hercules?' " The treatment of all the stories is interesting and especially so with the Greek stories in mind. They are just the thing for children brought up on Flax- man's outlines, who knew all the Greek legends al- ready by heart and who must have read them with a perception of the artistic workmanship their father had put into them. Among the myths which adapt themselves most charmingly to this "Gothic" treatment are the stories of Pandora and Proserpina. Pandora, no longer an artificial young woman fashioned by Vulcan, loaded with every grace and art of enchantment by all the gods, and deliberately intended by Zeus to be a harm- ful bane to mankind, is a delightful being in the guise of a little girl who lives with her brother in a children's paradise and whose curiosity about the chest finally overcomes her in a very natural and not so very wicked a manner. It is pleasant, too, to have Epimetheus given a full share of the blame through making him just as curious if not quite so venturesome as Pan- dora. It is a long call from the crabbed Hesiod, who makes Pandora the excuse for a diatribe against woman to Hawthorne with this exquisite bit of sar- casm at the expense of man. "Epimetheus himself, although he said very little about it, had his own share of curiosity to know what was inside. Perceiving that Pandora was resolved to 262 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY find out the secret, he determined that his play fellow should not be the only wise person in the cottage. And if there were anything pretty or valuable in the box, he meant to takelBkof it to himself. Thus, after all his sage speech^^ro Pandora about restrain- ing her curiosity, Epimetheus turned out to be quite as foolish and nearly as much in fault as she. So whenever we blame Pandora for what happened we must not forget to shake our heads at Epimetheus likewise." Equally delightful is the figure of Proserpina, not as the wife of Pluto in Hades and queen of the dead, but as an innocent little girl whom Pluto, the king of the world of gold and diamonds under the earth, car- ried off to be his little girl. She cheers him up with her flowery presence in his dominions where there was hardly light, but rather what Milton calls darkness made visible by the blazing of precious stones. In this story the nature origin of the myth has been preserved, as it has not been in some of the others, and for this reason appears to be a natural artistic evolution upon the Greek stem. In Hawthorne's hands it is just as clearly a myth of the disappearance of the summer flowers, children of Mother Ceres or the Earth, under- ground for six months in the year, as it is in its Greek form. ft ENGLISH EPISODES 263 "Should you ask me^Who is Hawthorne? Who this Hawthorne that you mention? 9 I should answer, I should tell you, 'He's a Yankee, who has written Many books you must have heard of; For he wrote "The Scarlet Letter" And "The House of Seven Gables,' 9 Wrote, too, "Rappacini's Daughter,' 9 And a lot of other stories, Some are long, and some are shorter; Some are good, and some are better. And this Hawthorne is a Consul, Sitting in a dismal office, Dark and dirty, dingy office, Full of mates and full of captains, Full of sailors and of niggers, And he lords it over Yankees' . . . Do you ask me, 'Tell me further Of this Consul, of this Hawthorne? 9 I would say, 'He is a sinner, Never goes inside a chapel, Only sees outsides of chapels. Says lie prayers without a chapel! I would say that he is lazy, Very lazy, good-for-nothing; Hardly ever goes to dinners, Never goes to balls or soirees; Thinks one friend worth twenty friendly; Cares for love, but not for liking; Hardly knows a dozen people.' " HENEY BRIGHT, 26* VII Y |^HE official interregnums in Hawthorne's life always interfered more or less with his imagina- tive work, but were prolific in observations of life at first hand and sober descriptions of events and scenes. Much as he hated these plunges into the mael- strom of public duty, they had their use in rounding out his character and art, as well as in keeping at arm's length the poverty which is only too prone to dog the footsteps of men of letters in the earlier days of their career. It was fortunate for him that he had friends at court like Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce, through whose influence positions were given to him which he could not otherwise have secured. The first one of these positions as weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House was given him by George Bancroft upon the recommendation of his old college friend, Congressman Cilley. He writes in January, 1839, to Longfellow in a merry mood upon this first venture into the world of work: "I have no reason to doubt my capacity to fulfil the duties, for I don't know what they are. They tell me that a con- siderable portion of my time will be unoccupied, the which I mean to employ in sketches of my new experi- ence under some such titles as follow: * Scenes in Dock,' 'Voyages at Anchor,' 'Nibblings of a Wharf Rat,' 'Trials of a Tide Waiter,' 'Romance of the Reve- 265 266 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY nue Service,' together with an ethical work in two volumes on the subject of duties, the first volume to treat of moral and religious duties and the second of duties imposed by the Revenue Laws, which I begin to consider the most important class." In July he is still in a tolerable state of contentment with the work, for he writes: "I do not mean to imply that I am unhappy or discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the same way that it is to every toilsome man, and mine is a healthy weariness such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn and borne the fervor of the midday sun nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide. Years hence, perhaps, the experience that my heart is acquiring now will flow out in truth and wisdom." In August he gives a poetic picture of a day at Long Wharf. "I have been stationed all day at the end of Long Wharf, and I rather think that I had the most eligible situation of anybody in Boston. I am aware that it must be intensely hot in the midst of the city, but there was only a short space of uncomfortable heat in my region, half way toward the center of the harbor, and almost all the time there was a pure and delightful breeze fluttering and palpitating, sometimes shyly kissing my brow, then dying away and then rushing upon me in livelier sport, so that I was fain to settle my straw hat more tightly upon my head. Late in the afternoon there was a sunny shower, which came ENGLISH EPISODES 267 down so like a benediction that it seemed ungrateful to take shelter in the cabin or to put up an umbrella. Then there was a rainbow, or a large segment of one, so exceedingly brilliant and of such long endurance that I almost fancied it was stained into the sky and would continue there permanently. And there were clouds floating all about great clouds and small, of all glorious and lovely hues so glorious indeed that I had a fantasy of heaven's being broken into fleecy fragments and dispersed through space, with its blest inhabitants dwelling blissfully upon those scattered islands." Winter, with its long days spent in measuring coal on board of a "black little British schooner in a dismal dock at the north end of the city" or in other "very black business as black as coal," put a different face on the matter, and in March he writes : "I pray that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom House, for it is a very griev- ous thraldom. I do detest all offices all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want noth- ing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to India rubber or to some substance as black as that and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my Custom House experi- ence to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me, because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." A year later the wished-for happened and he lost his place through a change in administration. Hawthorne himself felt, however, that, distasteful 268 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY as the life had been in every particular, it had yet taught him many things, "for, after all," he writes, "a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House. And, with such materi- als as these, I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing and which I should not know unless I had learned them there, so that the present position of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence. . . . It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. I have gained worldly wisdom and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And, when I quit this earthly cavern where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not perceive, I trust, by my look or the terror of my thoughts and feelings that I have been a Custom House officer." At another time he declares: "When I shall be again free I will enjoy all things with the fresh simplicity of a child of five years old. I shall grow young again, made all over anew. I will go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon." After this came the "Brook Farm" experiment, from which as we have seen he escaped with almost as much joy as he escaped from the Custom House in Boston. Then three years of paradise and poverty at Concord, from which he went to the Salem Custom House. One might have supposed from his feeling upon leaving the last that nothing under heaven ENGLISH EPISODES 269 would again induce him to take an official position. But necessity is a powerful wielder of feeling; besides, incomprehensible as it may seem, he was ready for a change. The rarefied atmosphere of Concord tran- scendentalists and poets was beginning to pall upon him. The old wandering spirit was exciting its in- fluence and he seems to have taken up his new Cus- tom House burden with a sense of escape from a life which had been lacking because it did not appeal to his whole nature. He writes: "After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic specula- tions beside our fire of fallen boughs with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming im- bued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearth- stone it was time at length that I should exercise other faculties of my nature and nourish myself with food, for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced and lacking no essential part of a thor- ough organization that, with such associates to re- member, I could mingle at once with men of alto- gether different qualities and never murmur at the change." The appointment to the Salem Custom House he 270 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY received through the influence of Bridge, who had tried to get him the postmastership. Political ob- stacles prevented this, and consequently his efforts were turned in the direction of the surveyorship of the Custom House. In order to promote Hawthorne's interests, Bridge invited a party of influential people to meet Hawthorne and his wife in his quarters at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. The party consisted of Senator and Mrs. Pierce, Senator and Mrs. Atherton of New Hampshire, Senator Fairfield of Maine, be- sides Bridge's two sisters and other Washington friends. "What with boating, fishing and driving," Bridge writes, "and the entire absence of formality, the visit went off smoothly, and its main object that of interesting men of influence in Hawthorne's behalf, was attained." Influence had put Hawthorne in the position, but it could not keep him there. Three years later, in 1849, he was turned out upon a change in the administra- tion. Although there had come the same revulsion of feeling against official work which he had before ex- perienced, he was almost in despair at the loss of this position, upon which he was almost entirely dependent for the living of himself and family. The tale has often been told of how when he went home and told Sophia what had happened, she triumphantly brought from a secret hiding place a little pile of gold dollars, which she had been saving and which was enough for their immediate wants, and exclaimed, "Oh, then you can write your book." The book was "The Scarlet Letter," which he had been revolving in his mind for some time and reflects in its introductory chapter the impressions of Haw- ENGLISH EPISODES 271 thorne's sojourn in the Salem Custom House. Ex- cept the entries in the "American Note Books," there seems to be no trace in Hawthorne's romantic writing of the experiences upon the wharfs in Boston, while the introduction to "The Scarlet Letter" and the por- traiture of Judge Pyncheon in "The House of Seven Gables" are all that directly resulted from his experi- ences with Salem politicians. Like other aspects of Hawthorne's life and genius, the official aspect was to reach a final climax in the Liverpool Consulate, bestowed'upon him by his stanch friend, Franklin Pierce, whose life Hawthorne had written at the time he was running for President. Al- though work up and down amid men did not prove to have a fascination any more abiding than it had had on previous occasions, this position had the advantage of a salary and perquisites sufficient to enable Haw- thorne to save enough to make the means of living less a constant worry to him. Besides, it took him farther afield than he had before been, brought into his life a multitude of fresh impressions and made possible some delightful months of travel and idleness in Eng- land, France and Italy. Copious notebooks tell of the impressions he received upon these outings, the chief literary outcome of which was "The Marble Faun," though he made several attempts at a romance revolving around the legend he heard in England of the bloody footstep, full particulars of which will be found in the last chapter. The other literary outcome of the European experience is the volume of essays called "Our Old Home." The first essay in this volume, "Consular Experiences," may be compared with the essay on the 272 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Salem Custom House. In the American essay his caustic wit plays about the lazy officials who tilt their chairs day in and day out in the Custom House hall with seemingly nothing to do. In the English essay we are introduced to the multitude of "human wa- rious" who besiege the consul's office with grievances and demands more startling than any which might be conjured up by the most vivid imagination. Of all the environments in which we have seen Haw- thorne, from the little room under the eaves in the tall, angular house in Salem to the study in the little red house in Lenox, the one most wholly unattractive from every point of view must have been the office of the American consul at Liverpool. The approach to this sanctum was "a narrow and ill-lighted staircase,'" which gave access to an "equally narrow and ill- lighted passageway on the first floor, at the extremity of which, surrounding a door frame, appeared an ex- ceedingly stiff pictorial representation of the goose and gridiron, according to the English idea of those ever-to-be-honored symbols." The door opened into an outer office, where the Vice-Consul and clerks stayed the tide of individuals designated as sea mon- sters by Hawthorne in its rush toward the Consul in search of assistance for wants or redress for griev- ances. Passing through this outer court, behold Hawthorne! who had known what it was to live in Paradise, seated in "an apartment of very moderate size, painted in imitation of oak and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street at the rough brick side of an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier structure than ever was built in America. On the walls of the room hung a large map M u o Q ENGLISH EPISODES 273 of the United States (as they were twenty years ago, but seem little likely to be twenty years hence) and a similar one of Great Britain." He goes on to describe the further adornments of the room, which included "some rude engrav- ings of our own naval victories in the War of 1812, together with the Tennessee State House, and a Hudson River steamer, and a colored life- size photograph of General Taylor with an hon- est hideousness of aspect, occupying the place of honor above the mantelpiece. On the top of a bookcase stood a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military collar which rose above his ears and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold. I am afraid, however, that the truculence of the old General's ex- pression was utterly thrown away on this stolid and obdurate race of men, for when they occasionally in- quired whom this work of art represented, I was mor- tified to find that the younger ones had never heard of the battle of New Orleans, and that their elders had either forgotten it altogether or contrived to misre- member and twist it wrong end foremost into some- thing like an English victory. They have caught from the old Romans (whom they resemble in so many other characteristics) this excellent method of keeping the national glory intact by sweeping all defeats and humiliations clean out of their memory. Nevertheless my patriotism forbade me to take down either the bust or the pictures, both because it seemed no more than right that an American consulate (being a little patch of our nationality imbedded into the soil and institu- tions of England) should fairly represent the Ameri- 274 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY can taste in the fine arts, and because these decorations reminded me so delightfully of an old-fashioned American barber's shop." The sea monsters, more particularly described, were a "set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels purporting to belong to our mer- cantile marine and chiefly composed of Liver- pool Blackballers and the scum of every maritime nation on the earth, such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. These specimens of a most un- fortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board and clothing, invalids asking per- mits for the hospital, bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill treatment by their officers, drunk- ards, desperadoes, vagabonds and cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reason- ably honest men. All of them (save here and there a kidnapped landsman in his shore-going rags) wore red flannel shirts in which they had sweltered or shiv- ered throughout the voyage." Among strange cases of Yankee vagabondism he tells of an old man who had been wandering about England for twenty-seven years and all the while doing his utmost to get home again. "The individual now in question was a mild and patient, but very ragged and pitiable old fellow, shabby beyond description, lean and hungry looking, but with a large and somewhat red nose. He made no complaint of his ill fortune, but only repeated in a quiet voice with a pathos of which he was himself evi- dently unconscious, 'I want to get home to Ninety- second Street, Philadelphia.' He described himself ENGLISH EPISODES 275 as a printer by trade and said that he had come over when he was a younger man, in the hope of bettering himself and for the sake of seeing the old country, but had never since been rich enough to pay his homeward passage. His manner and accent did not quite con- vince me that he was an American and I told him so, but he steadfastly affirmed, 'Sir, I was born and have lived in Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia,' and then went on to describe some public edifices and other local objects with which he used to be familiar, adding with a simplicity that touched me very closely: 'Sir, I had rather be there than here.' Though I still manifested a lingering doubt, he took no offense, replying with the same mild depression as at first and insisting again and again on Ninety-second Street. . . . Pos- sibly he was an impostor, one of the multitudinous shapes of English vagabondism, and told his false- hood with such powerful simplicity, because, by many repetitions, he had convinced himself of its truth. But if, as I believe, the tale was fact, how very strange and sad was this old man's fate! Homeless on a foreign shore, looking always toward his country, coming again and again to the point whence so many were setting sail for it so many who would soon tread in Ninety-second Street losing in this long series of years some of the distinctive characteristics of an American, and at last dying and surrendering his clay to be a portion of the soil whence he could not escape in his lifetime. "He appeared to see that he had moved me, but did not attempt to press his advantage with any new ar- gument or any varied form of entreaty. He had but scanty and scattered thoughts in his gray head, and 276 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY in the intervals of those, like the refrain of an old ballad, came in the monotonous burden of his appeal: *If I could only find myself in Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia!' " The name of the street, unless Hawthorne made a mistake in it, is enough to prove the interesting old vagabond a fraud, for at that date there could not possibly have been a Ninety-second Street in Phila- delphia; nor, unless I am very much mistaken, do the numbered streets in Philadelphia now run up as high as Ninety-second Street. It is needless to say that when the time came Haw- thorne retired from the position of Consul with the unmeasured delight with which he invariably left such posts. He is perfectly frank in expressing his dislike of it, and seems really to have gotten less from it than he did from his early experiences in Boston and Salem. "I disliked my office from the first, and never came into any good accordance with it. Its dignity, so far as it had any, was an incumbrance; the attentions it drew upon me (such as invitations to mayors' ban- quets and public celebrations of all kinds, where, to my horror, I found myself expected to stand up and speak) were as I may say, without incivility or in- gratitude, because there is nothing personal in that sort of hospitality a bore. The official business was irksome and often painful. There was nothing pleas- ant about the whole affair except the emoluments, and even those, never too bountifully reaped, were dimin- ished by more than half in the second or third year of my incumbency." As soon as he was out of office the whole thing began to have an unreal aspect to him. "My real self had lain, as regarded my proper mode ENGLISH EPISODES 277 of being and acting, in a state of suspended anima- tion. "The same sense of illusion still pursues me. There is some mistake in this matter. I have been writing about another man's Consular experiences, with which, through some mysterious medium of transmitted ideas, I find myself intimately acquainted, but in which I cannot possibly have had a personal interest. Is it not a dream altogether? The figure of that poor doc- tor of divinity looks wonderfully lifelike, so do those of the Oriental adventurer with the visionary coronet above his brow, and the moonstruck visitor of the Queen, and the poor old wanderer seeking his native country through English highways and byways for almost thirty years, and so would a hundred others that I might summon up with similar distinctness. But were they more than shadows? Surely I think not. Nor are these present pages a bit of intrusive autobiography. Let not the reader wrong me by sup- posing it. I never should have written with half such unreserve had it been a portion of this life congenial with my nature, which I am living now, instead of a series of incidents and characters entirely apart from my own concerns, and on which the qualities person- ally proper to me could have had no bearing." So ended Hawthorne's official life. Considering how great was his detestation of it, when once he had plunged into its intricacies, it is much to his credit that he invariably discharged his duties with great conscientiousness and efficiency, though not always with the suavity that insures popularity. Such re- marks as the foregoing, spread broadcast in print, 278 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY would not be exactly helpful in the event of his wish- ing to take another public office. In his excursions about England Hawthorne found the English cathedrals of especial interest. In the "English Note Books" he speaks enthusiastically of the impression made upon him by Chester Cathedral, though his feelings in regard to this cathedral have not been incorporated in any of the essays in "Our Old Home." The value of his descriptions lies in their emotional content, so to speak. Many times have these wonders of Gothic architecture been described, but rarely with so sympathetic a perception of the inspirational power latent within and even more won- derful than the beauty of their external form. His description of the Cathedral of Lichfield is a good example of the intensity of his appreciation. "I know not what rank the Cathedral of Lichfield holds among her sister edifices in England as a piece of magnificent architecture. Except that of Chester (the grim and simple nave of which stands yet un- rivaled in my memory) , and one or two small ones in North Wales hardly worthy of the name of cathedrals, it was the first that I had seen. To my uninstructed vision it seemed the object best worth gazing at in the whole world, and now, after beholding a great many more, I remember it with less prodigal admira- tion only because others are as magnificent as itself. The traces remaining in my memory represent it as airy rather than massive. A multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be comprehended within its single outline ; it was a kind of kaleidoscopic mystery, so rich a variety of aspects did it assume from each altered point of view, through the presentation of a different ENGLISH EPISODES 279 face and the rearrangement of its peaks and pinnacles and the three battlemented towers, with the spires that shot heavenward from all three, but one loftier than its fellows. Thus it impressed you, at every change, as a newly created structure of the passing moment, in which yet you lovingly recognized the half -vanished structure of the instant before and felt, moreover, a joyful faith in the indestructible existence of all this cloud-like vicissitude. A Gothic cathedral is merely the most wonderful work which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate and so profoundly sim- ple, with such strange, delightful recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend within one idea, and yet all so consonant that it ultimately draws the be- holder and his universe into its harmony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast enough and rich enough. "Not that I felt or was worthy to feel an unmingled enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I could not ele- vate myself to its spiritual height any more than I could have climbed from the ground to the summit of one of its pinnacles. Ascending but a little way, I continually fell back and lay in a kind of despair, con- scious that a flood of uncomprehended beauty was pouring down upon me, of which I could appropriate only the minutest portion. After a hundred years, in- calculably as my higher sympathies might be invigo- rated by so divine an employment, I should still be a gazer from below and at an awful distance as yet re- motely excluded from the interior mystery. But it was something gained even to have that painful sense of my own limitations and that half-smothered yearn- ing to soar beyond them. The cathedral showed me 280 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY how earthly I was, but yet whispered deeply of im- mortality. After all, this was probably the best les- son that it could bestow, and, taking it as thoroughly as possible home to my heart, I was fain to be content." He records here, as upon other occasions, the con- flict in his nature between his artistic consciousness and the reality he afterward sinks into. He dressed out a cathedral or natural scenery in his imagination just as he frequently did human beings and the reaction against his enthusiastic, artistic mood was apt to take him to an opposite extreme of doubt in regard to the reality of his impressions. In the present instance .he goes on: "If the truth must be told, my ill-trained en- thusiasm soon flagged, and I began to lose the vision of a spiritual or ideal edifice behind the time-worn and weather-stained front of the actual structure. When- ever that is the case, it is most reverential to look an- other way, but the mood disposes one to minute inves- tigation, and I took advantage of it to examine the intricate and multitudinous adornment that was lav- ished on the exterior wall of this great church." The Lincoln Cathedral takes such possession of his spirit that he declares : "I would gladly have felt myself released from further thraldom to the cathedral, but it had taken possession of me and would not let me be at rest, so at length I found myself compelled to climb the hill again between daylight and dark. A mist was now hovering about the upper height of the great cen- tral tower, so as to dim and half obliterate its battle- ments and pinnacles even while I stood in the close beneath it. It was the most impressive view that I had had. The whole lower part of the structure was seen 282 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY him and kindred to human nature. In short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense when I try to express my inner sense of this and other cathedrals." Westminster Abbey awakens in him quite a differ- ent sort of mood with its array of tombs commemorat- ing the illustrious dead. He apologizes for his half- jocose criticism in describing his first visit there, the spot which he had dreamed about more reverentially from his childhood upward than any other in the world, but which, when he sees it, instead of impress- ing him deeply, arouses enthusiasm of, to say the least, a lukewarm description. He beholds it with profound gratitude to the men who built it and a kindly interest in the humble personage that has contributed his little all to its impressiveness by depositing his dust or his memory there. He continues : "But it is a characteris- tic of this grand edifice that it permits you to smile as freely under the roof of its central nave as if you stood beneath the yet grander canopy of heaven. Break into laughter, if you feel inclined, provided the vergers do not hear it echoing among the arches. In an ordi- nary church you would keep your countenance for fear of disturbing the sanctities or proprieties of the place, but you need leave no honest and decorous por- tion of your human nature outside of these benign and truly hospitable walls. Their mild awf ulness will take care of itself. Thus it does no harm to the general impression when you come to be sensible that many of the monuments are ridiculous and commemorate a mob of people who are mostly forgotten in their graves, and few of whom ever deserved any better boon from posterity. You acknowledge the force of Sir Godfrey Kneller's objection to being buried in ENGLISH EPISODES 283 Westminster Abbey because 'they do bury fools there!'" A better mood comes over him in the Poet's Cor- ner, whither he many times turned his steps. "It seemed to me that I had always been familiar with the spot. Enjoying a humble intimacy and how much of my life had else been a dreary solitude! with many of its inhabitants, I could not feel myself a stranger there. It was delightful to be among them. There was a genial awe, mingled with a sense of kind and friendly presences about me, and I was glad, moreover, at finding so many of them there together in fit companionship, mutually recognized and duly honored, all reconciled now, whatever distant genera- tions, whatever personal hostility or other miserable impediment had divided them far asunder while they lived. I have never felt a similar interest in any other tombstones nor have I ever been deeply moved by the imaginary presence of other famous dead people. A poet's ghost is the only one that survives for his fel- low mortals after his bones are in the dust and he not ghostly, but cherishing many hearts with his own warmth in the chillest atmosphere of life. What other fame is worth aspiring for? Or, let me speak it boldly, what other long-enduring fame can exist? We neither remember nor care anything for the past, ex- cept as the poet has made it intelligently noble and sublime to our comprehension. The shades of the mighty have no substance; they flit ineffectually about the darkened stage where they performed their mo- mentary parts, save when the poet has thrown his own creative soul into them and imparted a more vivid life than ever they were able to manifest to mankind while 284 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY they dwelt in the body. And therefore, though he cunningly disguises himself in their armor, their robes of state or kingly purple, it is not the statesman, the warrior or the monarch that survives but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs and to whom they owe all that they now are or have a name! "In the foregoing paragraph I seem to have been betrayed into a flight above or beyond the customary level that best agrees with me, but it represents fairly enough the emotions with which I passed from Poets' Corner into the chapels, which contain the sepulchers of kings and great people." Among living poets whom Hawthorne met was Leigh Hunt, and there are few more charming de- scriptions of a distinguished man in literature than that in his account of his first meeting with Hunt. "I have said that he was a beautiful old man. In truth, I never saw a finer countenance, either as to the mold of features or the expression, nor any that showed the play of feeling so perfectly without the slightest theatrical emphasis. It was like a child's face in this respect. At my first glimpse of him, when he met us in the entry, I discerned that he was old, his long hair being white and his wrinkles many; it was an aged visage, in short, such as I had not at all ex- pected to see, in spite of dates, because his books talk to the reader with the tender vivacity of youth. But when he began to speak, and as he grew more earnest in conversation I ceased to be sensible of his age; sometimes, indeed, its dusky shadow darkened through the gleam which his sprightly thoughts diffused about his face, but then another flash of youth came out of ENGLISH EPISODES 285 his eyes and made an illumination again. I never wit- nessed such a wonderfully illusive transformation be- fore or since, and to this day, trusting only to my recollection, I should find it difficult to decide which was his genuine and stable predicament youth or age. I have met no Englishman whose manners seemed to me so agreeable, soft rather than polished, wholly unconventional, the natural growth of a kindly and sensitive disposition without any reference to rule or else obedient to some rule so subtile that the nicest observer could not detect the application of it. "His eyes were dark and very fine and his delight- ful voice accompanied their visible language like music. He appeared to be exceedingly appreciative of whatever was passing among those who surrounded him and especially of the vicissitudes in the conscious- ness of the person to whom he happened to be address- ing himself at the moment. I felt that no effect upon my mind of what he uttered, no emotion, howevef- transitory, in myself escaped his notice, though not from any positive vigilance on his part, but because his faculty of observation was so penetrative and deli- cate; and, to say the truth, it a little confused me to discern always a ripple on his mobile face, responsive to any slightest breeze that passed over the inner reser- voir of my sentiments and seemed thence to extend to a similar reservoir within himself. On matters of feel- ing, and within a certain depth, you might spare your- self the trouble of utterance, because he already knew what you wanted to say and perhaps a little more than you would have spoken. His figure was full of gentle movement, though somehow without disturbing its quietude, and as he talked he kept folding his hands 286 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY nervously and betokened in many ways a fine and im- mediate sensibility, quick to feel pleasure or pain, though scarcely capable, I should imagine, of a pas- sionate experience in either direction." He was not so happy in his remarks about Shake- speare. Everything was spoiled for him by the appa- rition of the Stratford bust. He not only does not make any allowances for its being the work of a clumsy artist, but does not seem able to see the really good points the bust has. After gazing upon it for some time, he concludes that "On the whole, Shake- speare must have had a singular rather than a pre- possessing face, and it is wonderful how, with this bust before its eyes, the world has persisted in main- taining an erroneous notion of his appearance, allow- ing painters and sculptors to foist their idealized non- sense on us all instead of the genuine man. For my part, the Shakespeare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy English complexion, with a reasonably capacious brow, intelligent and quickly observant eyes, a nose curved slightly out- ward, a long, queer upper lip, with the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks considerably developed in the lower part and beneath the chin. But when Shakespeare was himself ( for nine-tenths of the time, according to all appearances, he was but the burgher of Stratford) he doubtless shone through this dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an angel." So after all, like the rest of the world, he cannot think of the man who wrote the plays as looking less than an angel when inspired. During his whole visit in Stratford Hawthorne was much more conscious of the shady myths in regard to Shakespeare's life than ENGLISH EPISODES * 287 he was of him as a poet. Yet there was a myth in his own life that so nearly paralleled some of the things said of Shakespeare that he might well have been more careful about taking the Shakespeare myth for granted. He alludes to the story that Shakespeare was the victim of convivial habits and met his death by tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a drinking bout. Hawthorne, at the time of his dis- missal from the Salem Custom House, was accused of "loafing around with hard drinkers." His faith in Shakespeare's poetic reality does not waver, however. Even his meeting with the prophe- tess of Baconianism left him untouched by the cipher disease. Though he had a "sturdy disbelief" in Miss Delia Bacon's theories, he was evidently quite im- pressed by her personality and writes of her at length in his essay, "Recollections of a Gifted Woman." Hawthorne speaks of the fact that he knew but one person who had read her book through, a curious state- ment to reflect upon now, after the spectacle of her numerous latter-day disciples and the elaborators upon her theory. Her power to make converts was greater than Hawthorne dreamed of. His impressions of her the only time he saw her are most vivid and reveal a woman of such intellectual force and earnest- ness as to explain somewhat her subsequent influence upon Shakespearean criticism. In looks "she was rather uncommonly tall and had a striking and ex- pressive face, dark hair, dark eyes which shone with an inward light as soon as she began to speak. . . . Though wholly estranged from society, there was little or no restraint or embarrassment in her manner. Lonely people are generally glad to give utterance to 288 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY their pent-up ideas, and often bubble over with them as freely as children with their new-found syllables. I cannot tell how it came about, but we immediately found ourselves taking a friendly and familiar tone together and began to talk as if we had known one another a very long while. A little preliminary cor- respondence had indeed smoothed the way, and we had a definite topic in the contemplated publication of her book. . . . The interview lasted above an hour, during which she flowed out freely as to the sole audi- tor capable of any degree of intelligent sympathy whom she had met with in a very long while. Her conversation was remarkably suggestive, alluring forth one's own ideas and fantasies from the shy places where they usually haunt. She was indeed an admir- able talker, considering how long she had held her tongue for lack of a listener pleasant, sunny and shadowy, often piquant, and giving glimpses of all a woman's various and readily changeable moods and humors, and beneath them all there ran a deep and powerful undercurrent of earnestness which did not fail to produce in the listener's mind something like a temporary faith in what she herself believed so fer- vently. But the streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasm of this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish anywhere in the English atmosphere; so that, long before reaching Paternoster Row, I felt that it would be a difficult and doubtful matter to ad- vocate the publication of Miss Bacon's book. Never- theless, it did finally get published." And many more of a like nature have since been published. Every few years a fresh book on the Ba- conian theory of the Shakespeare plays sees the light, ENGLISH EPISODES 289 and troops of people who never heard of Delia Bacon and who have never even heard there was a Baconian theory become excited over the strange and startling possibility that Shakespeare's plays were written by Lord Bacon. One who had the disease in early youth, and at that time completely recovered from it, mar- vels greatly to find one's seniors by many years taking up the idea as if it were something entirely new and regarding one as a sort of intellectual dunce because of finding the topic no longer an exciting one. The most serious thing Hawthorne did during his European sojourn was to make himself acquainted with many of the aspects of poverty in a large town. It is probable that no horror of the slums which then shocked him in England, but has since that time been paralleled in our own large cities, and, on the other hand, let us hope that through the genuine and sym- pathetic work of lovers of the unfortunate in both countries such horrors are becoming less and less pos- sible. His reflections upon what he had seen are not profound, though they are full of the deepest de- pression, especially in relation to the miserable little children he saw in the almshouse. "Depressed by the sight of so much misery and un- inventive of remedies for the evils that force them- selves on my perception, I can do little more than recur to the idea already hinted at in the early part of this article regarding the speedy necessity of a new deluge if every one of them could be drowned to- night by their best friends instead of being put ten- derly to bed." He concludes, however, that such discretionary powers are beyond the scope of man's prerogatives and will probably not be adopted by Di- 290 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY vine Providence "until the opportunity of milder reformation shall have been offered us again and again, through a series of future ages." His really gentle spirit comes out in opposition to this impracticable remedy in the episode he relates ( as if of one of his party) of one of the most wretched and repellent of the small children who took a violent fancy to him. "It prowled about him like a pet kitten, rubbing against his legs, following everywhere at his heels, pulling at his coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all the speed that its poor limbs were capable of, got directly before him and held forth its arms, mutely insisting on being taken up. It said not a word, being perhaps underwitted and incapable of prattle. But it smiled up in his face a sort of woeful gleam was that smile, through the sickly blotches that covered its features and found means to express such a perfect confidence that it was going to be fondled and made much of that there was no possibility in a human heart of balking its expectation. It was as if God had promised the poor child this favor on behalf of that individual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract or else no longer call himself a man among men." Hawthorne sketches very amusingly in his chapter on civic banquets his trepidation whenever he was called upon to make a speech. At a banquet of the Lord Mayor's in London he tells how out of a serene sky came a thunderbolt. His Lordship got up and proceeded to make some very eulogistic remarks upon "the literary and commercial attainments of an emi- nent gentleman there present." After the Lord Mayor finished his speech, which seems to have been of the usual hackneyed description appropriate to such ENGLISH EPISODES 291 occasions, "the herald sonorously announced that Mr. So-and-so would now respond to his Right Honorable Lordship's toast and speech, the trumpets sounded the customary flourish for the onset, there was a thunder- ous rumble of anticipatory applause and finally a deep silence sank upon the festive hall." As soon as the Lord Mayor had begun to speak, he declares, "I rapped upon my mind, and it gave forth a hollow sound, being absolutely empty of appropriate ideas. I never thought of listening to the speech, because I knew it all beforehand in twenty repetitions from other lips, and was aware that it would not offer a single suggestive point. In this dilemma I turned to one of my three friends, a gentleman whom I knew to possess an enviable flow of silver speech, and obtested him, by whatever he deemed holiest, to give me at least an available thought or two to start with, and, once afloat, I would trust to my guardian angel for enabling me to flounder ashore again. He advised me to begin with some remarks complimentary to the Lord Mayor and expressive of the hereditary rever- ence in which his office was held at least my friend thought that there would be no harm in giving his Lordship this little sugar plum, whether quite the fact or no by the descendants of the Puritan forefathers. Thence, if I like, getting flexible with the oil of my own eloquence, I might easily slide off into the mo- mentous subject of the relations between England and America, to which his Lordship had made such weighty allusion. "Seizing this handful of straw with a death grip, and bidding my three friends bury me honorably, I got upon my legs to save both countries or perish in 292 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY the attempt. The tables roared and thundered at me, and suddenly were silent again. But, as I have never happened to stand in a position of greater dignity and peril, I deem it a stratagem of sage policy here to close these sketches, leaving myself still erect in so heroic an attitude." So ends a delightful book upon his English experi- ences. It is not in any way a remarkable book intel- lectually. It is rather a record of moods and impres- sions and emotions which brings one very close to the man's personality or perhaps one might say his earthly semblance Mercury, with folded wings, both those of his imaginative cap and his ethical sandals. ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 293 "The artist has portrayed four characters, and sur- rounded them with an ornamental frame of Roman scenes. If the whiteness of one requires a very dark background, the pigment is supplied, whether ground from a mummy or a murdered monk. Hilda must be too pure for friendship with an accomplice of homicide; Miriam too noble to be an accomplice in any but transcendental homicide, by which the reader is relieved, and then only by an unconscious look. Donatella must be heroic, as if, summoned by the appealing look, lie had slain a dragon about to devour the maiden. An original crime so dark, so continuous and all-pervading as to supply such various artistic requirements is unknown to history and consequently incommunicable." MONCURE D. CONWAY. 294 VIII ALINE of Clough's, "Rome disappoints me much," recurs to one when reading in Haw- thorne's "Italian Note Books" his first impres- sions of Rome. After execrations upon the climate, which he found in February most disagreeable, the atmosphere having a peculiar quality of malignity, he continues : "If my wits had not been too much congealed and my fingers too numb, I should like to have kept a minute journal of my feelings and impressions during the past fortnight. It would have shown modern Rome in an aspect in which it has never yet been de- picted. But I have now grown somewhat acclimated, and the first freshness of my discomfort has worn off, so that I shall never be able to express how I dislike the place and how wretched I have been in it, and soon, I suppose, warmer weather will come and perhaps reconcile me to Rome against my will. Cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ugly, mean-looking, whitewashed houses, sour bread, pavements most uncomfortable to the feet, enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monuments and clothes hanging to dry about them; French sol- diers, monks and priests of every degree; a shabby population smoking bad cigars these would have been some of the points of my description. Of course there are better and truer things to be said." 295 296 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY During his stay he gradually inoculates himself with a becoming sense of wonder at Rome's great art treasures, as well as a considerable appreciation of its ruins, yet his love of the beautiful is constantly being wounded in its purism by some trivial aspect of the environment or limitation in the expression of an ideal. When he is gazing at ruins or old palaces he is ever conscious of dirt and narrow streets. "During the past week I have plodded daily, for an hour or two, through the narrow, stony streets that look worse than the worst backside lanes of any other city. Indescrib- ably ugly and disagreeable they are, without side- walks, but provided with a line of larger square stones, set crosswise to each other, along which there is some- what less uneasy walking. Ever and anon, even in the meanest streets though, generally speaking, one can hardly be called meaner than another we pass a palace, extending far along the narrow way on a line with the other houses, but distinguished by its archi- tectural windows, iron-barred on the basement story, and by its portal arch, through which we have glimpses, sometimes of a dirty courtyard or perhaps of a clean, ornamental one, with trees, a colonnade, a fountain and a statue in the vista, though, more likely, it resembles the entrance to a stable and may perhaps really be one." The Roman ruins do not impress him with their beauty as the English ruins do, nor are Roman pal- aces so situated as to arouse in him much enthusiasm. "Whatever beauty there may be in a Roman ruin is the remnant of what was beautiful originally, whereas an English ruin is more beautiful often in its decay than ever it was in its primal strength. If we ever ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 297 build such noble structures as these Roman ones, we can have just as good ruins, after two thousand years, in the United States ; but we never can have a Furness Abbey or a Kenilworth. The Corso (and perhaps some other streets) does not deserve all the vituperation which I have bestowed on the generality of Roman vias, though the Corso is narrow, not averaging more than nine paces, if so much, from sidewalk to side- walk. But palace after palace stands along almost its whole extent not, however, that they make such architectural show on the street as palaces should. There was never any idea of domestic comfort, or of what we include in the name of home, at all impli- cated in such structures, they being generally built by wifeless and childless churchmen for the display of pictures and statuary in galleries and long suites of rooms." St. Peter's awakens none of the rhapsodies which he felt upon his first visits to the English cathedrals. Its comfortable atmosphere in contrast to his chilly lodgings make the chief impression. "I have been four or five times to St. Peter's, and always with pleas- ure, because there is such a delightful, summer-like warmth the moment we pass beneath the heavy padded leather curtains that protect the entrances. It is al- most impossible not to believe that this genial temper- ature is the result of furnace heat, but really it is the warmth of last summer, which will be included within those massive walls and in that vast immensity of space, till six months hence this winter's chill will just have made its way thither. It would be an excellent plan for a valetudinarian to lodge during the winter in St. Peter's, perhaps establishing his household in 298 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY one of the papal tombs. I become, I think, more sen- sible of the size of St. Peter's, but am as yet far from being overwhelmed by it. It is not as one expects so big as all out o' doors, nor is its dome so immense as that of the firmanent." Gradually, however, he comes more into the spirit of the place. He finds as he strolls around the church that it continues to grow upon him both in magnitude and beauty. "At times a single, casual, momentary glimpse of its magnificence gleams upon my soul, as it were, when I happen to glance at arch opening be- yond arch, and I am surprised into admiration. I have experienced that a landscape and the sky unfold the deepest beauty in a similar way, not when they are gazed at of set purpose, but when the spectator looks suddenly through a vista among a crowd of other thoughts." At last genuine enthusiasm breaks out over Guido's Archangel Michael overcoming Lucifer, which he con- siders is "simply one of the most beautiful things in the world, one of the human conceptions that are im- bued most deeply with the celestial," and finally upon his last visits he reaches the point where he can con- scientiously say, "I have been twice to St. Peter's and was impressed more than at any former visit by a sense of breadth and loftiness, and, as it were, a vision- ary splendor and magnificence." The Museum of the Capitol also, by the time of his departure from Rome, has had its effect upon him, for he records, "I also went to the Museum of the Capitol and the statues seemed to me more beautiful than formerly, and I was not sensible of the cold despondency with which I have so often viewed them." He speaks later in a reminis- ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 299 cent mood of this museum, showing what its total effect had been upon him. "These halls of the Capitol have always had a dreary and depressing effect upon me, very different from those of the Vatican. I know not why, except that the rooms of the Capitol have a dingy, shabby and neglected look, and that the statues are dusty, and all the arrangements less mag- nificent than at the Vatican. The crowded and dis- colored surfaces of the statues take away from the impression of immortal youth and turn Apollo him- self into an old stone; unless at rare intervals, when he appears transfigured by a light gleaming from within." In the Vatican Hawthorne found the conditions most conducive to his highest enjoyment of the art treasures of Rome. Yet even here his appreciation has that fluctuating quality which always seemed to beset him in connection with objects which he knew to be supremely beautiful or wonderful, a sort of con- sciousness that his human limitations prevented him from grasping the whole of any beauty. He writes : "There were a few things which I really enjoyed and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them, but it is in vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art and most in vain when we see them best. They are a language in them- selves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular ideas and sentiments by sculpture. I saw the Apollo Belvidere as something ethereal and god-like, only for a flitting moment, how- ever, and as if he had alighted from heaven or shone suddenly out of the sunlight and then had withdrawn 300 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY himself again. I felt the Laocoon very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it re- sembles the vast rage of the sea, calm on account of its immensity, or the tumult of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on forever and ever. I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we came to Rome, and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the arrange- ments of the Vatican its long vistas and beautiful courts, and the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free from dust." Again he writes of the Vatican sculpture galleries: "I think I enjoy these noble galleries and their contents and beautiful arrangement better than anything else in the way of art, and often I seem to have a deep feeling of something wonderful in what I look at." Yet it was the faun of Praxiteles in the Museum of the Capitol which gave him his inspiration for "The Marble Faun." He saw first a copy of it in the Villa Borghese and remarked upon this and a dancing faun, "I like these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, linked so prettily without monstrosity to the lower tribes. . . . Their character has never, that I know of, been wrought out in literature, and some- thing quite good, funny and philosophical, as well as poetic, might very likely be educed from them. The faun is a natural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with something of a divine character intermingled." When he sees the original in the Museum of the Capitol his thoughts again recur to it as a center around which a romance might be woven. "I looked at the faun of Praxiteles and was sensible ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 301 of a peculiar charm in it, a sylvan beauty and home- liness, friendly and wild at once; the lengthened but not preposterous ears and the little tail, which we infer have an exquisite effect and make the spectator smile in his very heart. This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race, a family with the faun blood in them having prolonged itself from the classic era till our own days. The tail might have disappeared by dint of constant intermarriage with ordinary mortals, but the pretty hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the family, and the moral instincts and intellectual characteristics of the faun might be most picturesquely brought out without detriment to the human interest of the story. Fancy this combination in the person of a young lady." He went again in the spring to the museum and took particular note of the faun, because the idea kept recurring to him of writing a little romance about it. "I shall endeavor to set down a somewhat minutely itemized detail of the statue and its surroundings." In the novel we get this itemized account as Ken- yon, Hilda, Miriam and the human counterpart of the faun, Donatello, stand gazing at it in the gallery of the Capitol. "The Faun is the marble image of a young man leaning his right arm on the trunk or stump of a tree. One hand hangs carelessly by his side, in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe or some such sylvan in- strument of music. His only garment a lion's skin, 302 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY with the claws upon his shoulder falls half way down his back, leaving the limbs and entire front of the figure nude. The form thus displayed is marvelously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more flesh and less of heroic muscle than the old sculp- tors were wont to assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face corresponds with the figure ; it is most agreeable in outline and feature, but rounded and somewhat voluptuously developed, especially about the throat and chin ; the nose is almost straight, but very slightly curves inward, thereby ac- quiring an indescribable charm of geniality and humor. The mouth, with its full yet delicate lips, seems so nearly to smile outright that it calls forth a responsive smile. The whole statue unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe material of marble conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not in- capable of being touched by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without conceiving a kindly sentiment toward it, as if its substance were warm to the touch and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some of our pleasant sympathies." As Hawthorne was in the habit of doing with any real personage who appealed to his artistic need, he imagines the nature and temperament which should belong to this agreeable exterior, and makes that the keynote of his development of Donatello's character. "Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human heart. The being here represented is endowed with no principle of ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 303 virtue and would be incapable of comprehending such, but he would be true and honest by dint of his sim- plicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that softened marble, but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment and might act devotedly through its impulse and even die for it at need. It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the medium of his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature might even- tually be thrown into the background, though never utterly expelled." He remarks of his last days in Rome: "I am weary of Rome, without having seen and known it as I ought, and I shall be glad to get away from it, though no doubt there will be many yearnings to return here- after and many regrets that I did not make better use of the opportunities within my grasp. Still I have been in Rome long enough to be imbued with its at- mosphere, and this is the essential condition of know- ing a place, for such knowledge does not consist in having seen every particular object it contains. In the state of mind in which I now stand toward Rome there is very little advantage to be gained by staying here longer." Hawthorne liked Florence better than Rome, the Duomo better than St. Peter's and the Uffizzi better than even the Vatican. "I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake than here," he writes of Florence, and of the Duomo: "Indeed, it is but a twilight region that is enclosed within the firmament of this great dome, which is actually larger than that of St. Peter's, 304 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY though not lifted so high from the pavement. But looking at the painted windows, I little cared what dimness there might be elsewhere, for certainly the art of man has never contrived any other beauty and glory at all to be compared to this. . ... It is greatly more satisfactory than St. Peter's in any view I ever had of it striking in its outline, with a mystery, yet not a bewilderment, in its masses and curves and angles, and wrought out with a richness of detail that gives the eyes new arches, new galleries, new niches, new pinnacles, new beauties, great and small, to play with when wearied with the vast whole. The hue, black and white marbles, like the Baptistery, turned also yellow and brown, is greatly preferable to the buff travestine of St. Peter's." He finds that he enjoys looking at pictures while in Florence more than he ever did before, and comes to the conclusion, after having conscientiously spent many days at it, that in a year's time, with the advan- tage of access to the Uffizzi gallery, he might come to have some little knowledge of pictures. He shows a lamentable lack of appreciation in regard to the Pre- Raphaelites, which were at this same epoch filling Robert Browning with the admiration to which he gave expression in his "Old Pictures in Florence." But, as Hawthorne says, he was becoming capable, at least, of loving one picture better than another. He still continues, however, to be troubled with great ups and downs in his appreciation. He declares: "I can- not always 'keep the heights I gain,' . . . after admiring and being moved by a picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as little moved as if it were a tavern sign." ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 305 The most exaggerated instance of a change of mood occurs in relation to the Venus di Medici, which, when he first came upon it in the Uffizzi, called forth his finest raptures. He had been almost afraid to see it lest it might result in "the extinction of another of those lights that shine along a man's pathway and go out in a snuff the instant he comes within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes." More appreciative and beautiful words of the Venus di Medici have never been written than those inspired by Hawthorne's first and second views of the statue. "The Venus stands somewhat aside from the center of the room and is surrounded by an iron railing a pace or two from her pedestal in front and less behind. I think she might safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win without any other protection. She is very beautiful, very satisfactory and has a fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy. The hue of the marble is just so much mellowed by time as to do for her all that Gibson tries or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an in- mate of the heart, as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her, an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one. Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her, I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess and softens her into woman. There is a slight degree of alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind and startled her a little. Her face is so beautiful and intellectual that it is not dazzled 306 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY out of sight by her form. Methinks this was a tri- umph for the sculptor to achieve. I may as well stop here. It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her, for they all fall away and leave her standing in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I be- gan." And at his next visit he writes: "I paid another visit to the Uffizzi gallery this morning and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better ac- quaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages, and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treas- ures of spiritual existence hereafter. Surely it makes me more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race to think that this beautiful form is but Nature's plan for all womankind, and that the nearer the actual woman approaches it the more natural she is. I do not and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death, as young and fair to-day as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physical embodiment." After these raptures it is something of a shock to come upon the following mood in regard to it: "We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus di Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecog- nized, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine ! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 307 becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the old same- ness and see the statue forever new and immortally young." At last the Duomo and even Florence lose their charm. "I looked into the Duomo, too, and was pretty well content to leave it," and "I am not loath to go away, impatient rather, for, taking no root, I soon weary of any soil in which I may be tempo- rarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes feel or conceive of as regards this earthly life." From these glimpses at his impressions of art, it will be seen that Hawthorne's judgment had little positive value, because so dependent upon his mood at the time. Even if he at one time expressed a pene- trating or appreciative view, it might be entirely re- versed at another. If space permitted, a careful weighing of his criticisms of Italian art in relation to expert criticisms would be both interesting and in- structive, for the impressions of a man with his intense appreciation of beauty, however uninstructed in the principles of art criticism, are apt to have gleams of genuine truth in them, which might well give points to the critic whose perceptions become more or less dead- ened by too strict adherence to prescribed canons of taste. The chief good of Hawthorne's Italian art experi- ences came out in his romantic handling of the impres- sions he had received. Though he never succeeded in cultivating a boundless admiration for the Eternal 308 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY City, there were many individual objects and special localities that took strong hold upon his imagination, and like the faun of Praxiteles, furnished the realistic details and atmosphere of his romance. He introduces the four chief characters of the "Marble Faun" sightseeing together in the sculpture gallery of the Capitol, weaving into the artistic talk of the three artists of the group his own moods and impression. For example, Hilda experiences a reac- tion against the statue of the faun and exclaims : "I have been looking at him too long, and now, instead of a beautiful statue, immortally young, I see only a cor- roded and discolored stone. This change is very apt to occur in statues." Similarly every chapter has for its setting some spe- cial spot which Hawthorne has described more or less fully in his Notes, while the whole story is pervaded with artistic moods and emotions and criticisms which are reflections from Hawthorne's own as he records them. Intertwined with these descriptions and criti- cisms is the double thread of the plot, one peaceful, the other tragic, thus with each actual place described is connected some vivid episode which carries the action forward. The four friends in the second chapter visit the Cata- comb of St. Calixtus ,which is mentioned in the Notes. A much fuller description is given of this grewsome place in the novel, and its horror increased by the ap- pearance upon the scene of the specter of the Cata- comb a human fiend possessed of a most uncomfort- able flesh-and-blood reality who exercises his fatal spell over Miriam and Donatello. In Miriam's studio we are introduced to a typical ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 309 Roman studio in an old palace. Hither Donatello comes to call upon her, and the setting falls into the background because of the intense human interest which begins to gather around the characters of the story from this time. The next picture shows us Hilda in her tower studio. "At one of the angles of the battlements stood a shrine of the Virgin, such as we see everywhere at the street corners of Rome, but seldom or never, ex- cept in this solitary instance, at a height above the ordinary level of men's views and aspirations. Con- nected with this old tower and its lofty shrine there is a legend which we cannot here pause to tell, but for centuries a lamp has been burning before the Virgin's image at noon, at midnight and at all hours of the twenty-four, and must be kept burning forever as long as the tower shall stand, or else the tower itself, the palace and whatever estate belongs to it shall pass from? its hereditary possessor, in accordance with an ancient vow, and become the property of the Church." The legend of the tower "della Scimmia" is told in the Notes. "Mr. Thompson took me into the Via Portoghese and showed me an old palace, above which rose not a very customary feature of the architecture of Rome a tall battlemented tower. At one angle of the tower we saw a shrine of the Virgin with a lamp and all the appendages of these numerous shrines which we see at the street corners and in hundreds of places about the city. Three or four centuries ago this palace was inhabited by a nobleman who had an only son and a large pet monkey, and one day the monkey caught the infant up and clambered to this lofty turret and 810 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY sat there with him in his arms, grinning and chattering like the devil himself. The father was in despair, but was afraid to pursue the monkey, lest he should fling down the child from the height of the tower and make his escape. At last he vowed that if the boy were safely restored to him he would build a shrine at the summit of the tower and cause it to be kept as a sacred place forever. By and by the monkey came down and deposited the child on the ground. The father ful- filled his vow, built the shrine and made it obligatory on all future possessors of the palace to keep the lamp burning before it. Centuries have passed, the prop- erty has changed hands, but still there is the shrine on the giddy top of the tower, far along over the street, on the very spot where the monkey sat, and there burns the lamp in memory of the father's vow. This being the tenure by which the estate is held, the extin- guishment of that flame might yet turn the present owner out of the palace." Hawthorne passes over the legend of the ape and makes the tower the haunt of white doves, which are fed by the hand of Hilda. Moncure D. Conway remarks, referring to a fresco he observed in the tower, painted since the appearance of the "Marble Faun," wherein an ape has a comical suggestion of trying to reclaim his legendary rights from a dove just alight- ing on the opposite wall, "The painted ape will never recover his legend; it is no longer the tower 'della Scimmia,' but Hilda's Tower. Even Clelia, the Countess Marone's pretty maid, who guided me to the tower, had but hazy ideas of the ape legend, but evinced a blushing pride at being Hilda's successor in keeping the lamp burning." ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 311 One of the pictures which aroused Hawthorne's pro- found emotions was Guide's Beatrice Cenci. Upon first seeing it he had written, "As regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything, for its spell is indefinable," and again: "It is the most pro- foundly wrought picture in the world. No artist did it nor could do it again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted better than he knew." Yet he makes his Hilda accomplish this impossible feat, not directly copying it, but painting it from the image of it that had sunk into her heart. The mysterious effect of this picture upon Miriam, as she gazes upon it in Hilda's tower studio, is the first hint of the tragedy of Miriam's life suggested to the reader. The next chapter gives a glowing description of the Villa Borghese, whither Miriam had told Donatello he might come and walk with her. Hawthorne's im- pressions of the gardens are merely hinted at in the Notes, where he speaks of them as very beautiful, but in the novel he breaks forth in an ecstasy of delight over their beauty. Even English park scenery sinks into insignificance. "These wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest of English park scenery, more touching, more impressive through the neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true, be- stowed, long ago and still bestowed, to prevent wild- ness from growing into deformity, and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene that seems to have been projected out of the poet's mind." He even finds a charm in the fact that it is the home of malaria. 312 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY "There is a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of re- gret in the idea of so much beauty thrown away or only enjoyable at its half development in winter and early spring and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human being. For if you come hither in summer and stray through these glades in the golden sunset fever walks arm and arm with you and death awaits you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the scope of man's actual possessions." Tragedy lurks in its purlieus for Miriam and Dona- tello. Here Donatello tells his love so sincere, so constant, and the specter of the Catacombs forges one more link in the chain of destiny which is to overwhelm those three. The more salubrious Pincian Hill, where Haw- thorne often walked, is a fitting meeting place for Hilda and Kenyon. Looking down from this height, Kenyon perceives Miriam kneeling to the "specter" and receives his first glimpse of the tragic realities of Miriam's existence. Kenyon's studio is, of course, modeled upon those Hawthorne visited in Rome, and Kenyon's statue of Cleopatra was transferred bodily from the real studio of William Story, who was working on his Cleopatra at the time Hawthorne was in Rome. Of this Haw- thorne says it is a "a work of genuine thought and energy, representing a terribly dangerous woman; quiet enough for the moment, but very likely to spring upon you like a tigress." Kenyon's Cleopatra is prac- tically the same "fierce, voluptuous, passionate, ten- HILDA'S TOWER ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 313 der, wicked, terrible and full of poisonous and raptur- ous enchantment." Hawthorne had the opportunity of meeting many distinguished and agreeable people both in Rome and Florence. Accordingly in the chapter, "An ^Esthetic Company," he gives a glimpse of his own social ex- periences while in Italy. It may be remembered that he is not altogether complimentary in his remarks upon the jealousies and petty animosities which ani- mated the gentlemen of the brush and chisel at that time. Therefore he refrains from bringing forth any of these celebrities by name in this chapter lest his ink might "chance to raise a blister instead of any more agreeable titillation on skins so sensitive as those of artists." He continues : "Otherwise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with such tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to reproduce her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth, and yet are but the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the painter's insight and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic the moon throws her light far out of the picture and the crimson of the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face. Or we might indicate a poet-painter, whose song has the vividness of picture and whose canvas is peo- pled with angels, fairies and water sprites, done to the ethereal life, because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood. Or we might bow before an artist who has wrought too sincerely, too religiously with too earnest a feeling and too delicate a touch for the world at once to recognize how much toil and thought are compressed into the stately brow of Prospero and 314 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Miranda's maiden loveliness, or from what a depth within this painter's heart the angel is leading forth St. Peter. "Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little epigrammatical allusions like the above, all kindly meant, but none of them quite hitting the mark and often striking where they were not aimed." A discussion over Guido's Archangel one of the pictures especially loved by Hawthorne in the Church of the Capuchins gives rise to a determination to visit this church. Before the visit to the church the next morning the tragedy of the book has occurred. The moonlight ramble about Rome, with which the merry company decides to conclude the evening, serves the double purpose of a description of Rome by moon- light and of taking the story on toward the catas- trophe at the Tarpeian Rock, which Hawthorne him- self first saw by moonlight. He describes it more par- ticularly in the novel. "They all bent over and saw that the cliff fell perpendicularly downward to about the depth, or rather more, at which the tall palace rose in height above their heads. Not that it was still the natural, shaggy front of the original precipice, for it appeared to be cased in ancient stone work, through which the primeval rock showed its face here and there grimly and doubtfully. Mosses grew on the slight projections and little shrubs sprouted out of the crev- ices, but could not much soften the stern aspect of the cliff. Brightly as the Italian moonlight fell a-down the height, it scarcely showed what portion of it was man's work and what was Nature's, but left it all in very much the same kind of ambiguity and half knowl- - A 3 fc o ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 315 edge in which antiquarians generally leave the identity of Roman remains. "The roofs of some poor-looking houses, which had been built against the base and sides of the cliff, rose nearly midway to the top, but from an angle of the parapet there was a precipitous plunge straight down- ward into a stone-paved court." This is the spot where Donatello flung down the specter of the Catacomb and worked thereby a miracle in his own development. Through his consciousness of sin he is transformed from a faun-like being to a man. In the Church of the Capuchins, where the four friends meet as arranged the next morning to look at Guide's picture, the effects of the tragedy are intensi- fied by the discovery that the dead monk lying there awaiting the last offices of the Church is the murdered specter. What more horrible ordeal could have been imagined for the tortured spirits of Donatello and Mi- riam! Shirking no least detail of the ordeal, Miriam descends into the cemetery under the church to inspect the grave which has been prepared for the dead monk. Here follows a detailed description of the cemetery, which is mentioned in the Notes. "As the ceme- tery is small and it is a precious privilege to sleep in holy ground, the brotherhood are immemorially ac- customed, when one of their number dies, to take the longest buried skeleton out of the oldest grave and lay the new slumberer there instead. "The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of 316 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY thigh bones and skulls. The whole material of the structure appears to be of a similar kind, and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange archi- tecture are represented by the joints of the spine and the more delicate tracery by the smaller bones of the human frame. The summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skilfully in bas-relief." The description of this dismal place adds a fitting touch of horror to the agony of the scene. The scene of the story after the tragedy is trans- ferred to the Villa Montauto, the suburban residence outside of Florence occupied by Hawthorne during two months and which he describes at full length in the Notes. Here Kenyon comes to visit Donatello, the Count of Monte Beni, after he has parted from Miriam on account of the terrible reaction in his feel- ings consequent upon the crime committed for her sake. The Owl Tower is the counterpart of the one in which Una Hawthorne had her chamber and was the first part of the villa explored by the Hawthornes. Imagination has added many a touch to this tower in the novel, though the oratory is almost as it actually was, even to the image of the sacred Bambino inside of a glass case, "in the guise of a little waxen boy, very prettily made, reclining among flowers like a Cupid and holding up a heart that resembled a bit of red sealing-wax." Hawthorne's imagination has full play in this part of the story in working out his mythical pedigree of the Monte Beni family, as well as in the other myths which are the inheritance of Donatello's family. His descriptive powers also continue to be exerted, and we ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 317 get many a glimpse of distant scenery, including mountains and cities, and of sylvan customs nearer at hand. One day in the Owl Tower they look out upon an approaching thunderstorm. "All round the majestic landscape the bald-peaked or forest-crowned mountains descended boldly upon the plain. On many of their spurs and midway de- clivities, and even on their summits, stood cities, some of them famous of old, for these had been the seats and nurseries of early art, where the flower of beauty sprang out of a rocky soil and in a high, keen atmos- phere, where the richest and most sheltered gardens failed to nourish it." Again it is a vintage scene. Unexpectedly Kenyon happens upon a spot where the vintage had actually commenced. "A great heap of early ripened grapes had been gathered and thrown into a mighty tub. In the middle of it stood a lusty and jolly contadino, nor stood merely, but stamped with all his might and danced amain, while the red juice bathed his feet and threw its foam midway up his brown and shaggy legs. Here, then, was the very process that shows so pic- turesquely in Scripture and in poetry of treading out the wine-press and dyeing the feet and garments with the crimson effusion as with the blood of a battle- field." The thread of the story is carried on amid all these glowing descriptions. Donatello develops toward the return and strengthening of his love for Miriam, while Kenyon plays the part of friend and helps to bring the lovers together. He arranges that the meeting shall be at Perugia by the bronze statue of Pope Julius. The travels of Kenyon and Donatello together give 318 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY opportunity for more descriptions of Italian scenes and more talks on art, the most vivid of which is market-day in Perugia. Hawthorne found this one of the most picturesque towns that he visited in Italy and speaks of it with enthusiasm in the Notes. More defi- nite are the descriptions in the novel, culminating with those of the great square on market-day and of the statue of Pope Julius, which seems to bless the re- union of Miriam and Donatello. "He sat in a bronze chair, elevated high above the pavement, and seemed to take kindly yet authoritative cognizance of the busy scene which was at that moment passing before his eye. His right hand was raised and spread abroad, as if in the act of shedding forth a benediction, which every man so broad, so wise and so serenely affec- tionate was the bronze pope's regard might hope to feel quickly descending upon the need or the distress that he had closest at his heart." When Donatello and Miriam have made their sol- emn vow of eternal, self-sacrificing friendship "it so chanced that all the three friends by one impulse glanced upward at the statue of Pope Julius, and there was the majestic figure stretching out the hand of benediction over them and bending down upon this guilty and repentant pair its visage of grand be- nignity. There is a singular effect oftentimes when, out of the midst of engrossing thought and deep ab- sorption, we suddenly look up and catch a glimpse of external objects. We seem at such moments to look farther and deeper into them than by any premedi- tated observation; it is as if they met our eyes alive and with all their hidden meaning on the surface, but grew again inanimate and inscrutable the instant that ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 319 they became aware of our glances. So now, at that unexpected glimpse, Miriam, Donatello and the sculp- tor all three imagined that they beheld the bronze pon- tiff endowed with spiritual life. A blessing was felt descending upon them from his outstretched hand ; he approved by look and gesture the pledge of a deep union that had passed under his auspices." The Carnival at Rome furnishes the setting for the last tragic scene in the story. Hawthorne and his family, according to the Notes, made a point of seeing the Carnival in all its phases. Of his first experience of the Carnival he writes: "Little as I have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch of it without very widely departing from truth." He appears to have enjoyed rather more his second Car- nival and entered into the fun sufficiently to "pelt all the people in cylinder hats with confetti." He writes : "I, as well as the rest of the family, have followed up the Carnival pretty faithfully, and enjoyed it as well or rather better than could have been expected, prin- cipally in the street as a mere looker on which does not let one into the mystery of the fun and twice from a balcony, where I threw confetti, and partly understood why the young people like it so much. Certainly there cannot well be a more picturesque spectacle in human life than that stately, palatial ave- nue of the Corso, the more picturesque because so nar- row, all hung with carpets and Gobelin tapestry, and the whole palace heights alive with faces, and all the capacity of the street thronged with the most fantastic figures that either the fancies of folks alive at this day are able to continue or that live traditionally from year to year." 320 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Upon this last impression he builds in the novel and succeeds in giving as brilliant a sketch of the scene as he had imagined he might. In this gay frolic Donatello and Miriam see their last of each other, for Donatello, the innocent, lithesome faun, has decided to give himself up to the authorities for his crime. Hawthorne's powers of description are shown at their highest in this book, partly because he found in Italy the varied combinations of art and nature which were bound to call out his utmost efforts in that direction. Consequently there is great richness of impression and mood. Every scene is aglow with the author's own emotions. But like records of the "Italian Note Books," there is the same fluctuation in intellectual grasp, often brought out by discussions in which different points of view are given. Donatello, for example, does not like Fra Angelico, but can see how his pictures with their sky-born saints might appeal to Hilda. Hawthorne was capable of feeling at one time like Donatello, at another like Hilda. Again in this book he treats his favorite problem of the effect of sin upon the soul. His attitude toward the problem has progressed since the days of Dimmes- dale, for he portrays the regeneration of a soul through a sin that has been committed in a moment of pardonable rage to save the woman he loves from an unbearable thraldom. No mitigation of the sinfulness of the act under such conditions seems to occur to him. In his eyes it is just as much sin as if Donatello and Miriam had not had the utmost provocation for the act, but he makes Kenyon ask a question which must have been the author's own undercurrent of thought ITALY AS HAWTHORNE SAW IT 321 while writing. "Sin has educated Donatello and ele- vated him. Is sin, then, which we deem such a dread- ful blackness in the universe is it, like sorrow, merely an element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?" Unfortunately, he makes this enlightened re- mark to Hilda, whose conventional goodness from first to last is an irritating element in the book. She is shocked beyond words and exclaims: "This is terrible, and I could weep for you, if you indeed be- lieve it. Do not you perceive what a mockery your creed makes, not only of all religious sentiments, but of moral law? and how it annuls and obliterates what- ever precepts of Heaven are written deepest within us ?" Kenyon cannot stand up against this appeal and asks Hilda henceforth to guide him home. Thus once more Hawthorne's Puritan conscience veils his broader vision. There are people of realistic intensity who never cease to worry as to whether Donatello's ears were really furry and pointed and who feel cheated because every detail of Miriam's life and Hilda's disappear- ance has not been elucidated, even in the face of Haw- thorne's whimsical meeting of these objections in the conclusion. To the imaginative, however, these mys- teries but add to the fascination of the story. It is truly in keeping with the origin of his charac- ters that these beings of older lands, who still are con- scious of their relation to human histories stretching far back into the mythical past, should be surrounded by mysteries more or less unfathomable in the eyes of 322 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY such paragons of mid-nineteenth century American perfection as Kenyon and Hilda. And if some of the mystery twines itself about even the little Puritan maiden tending the Virgin's shrine in a lonely tower of the enchanted land, what wonder! THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 323 "The hill-top is clothed with a tangled growth of trees which hides it from the lower world and renders it a fitting try sting-place for the wizard romancer and the mystic figures which abound in his tales. . . . Walking here with Fields he unfolded his design of the 'Dolliver' tale, which lie left half told. Here he composed the weird story of 'Septimus Felton, 9 while trudging on the very path he describes as hav- ing been worn by his hero, Hawthorne himself habitually walking, with hands clasped behind him and with eyes bent on the ground, in the very attitude he ascribes to Septimus as Rose saw him, 'treading, treading, treading, many a year/ on this foot-path by the grave of the officer he had slain." THEODOBE F. WOLFE. 324 IX THE elements which entered into the making of Hawthorne's final literary work were princi- pally four, and upon these four strings he played in a variety of ways, never wholly to his satis- faction. The combined results of these attempts were the two imperfectly constructed romances, "Septimius Felton" and the one known as "Dr. Grimshawe's Se- cret," both published after his death, and the two frag- ments, "The Ancestral Footstep" and "The Dolliver Romance." The romance which he was striving for was to have an environment partly English and partly American; its romantic element was to be the legend of the bloody footstep which he had heard in England and its moral element a search for the elixir of life. The English legend was told to Hawthorne in con- nection with Smithell's Hall, in Bolton la Moors, and seized upon his imagination so strongly that from that time on it seems to have associated itself inextricably with a romance in which an American, descended from the family with the legend, was to return to the old country and seek substantiation of his claim to the in- heritance. "The Ancestral Footstep" is a mere fragment con- sisting of sketches possible developments of such a plot, together with a number of scenes in the story, and is interesting as an example of the tentative strug- gles of a genius to bring order out of a somewhat 325 326 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY chaotic mass of ideas. As the fragment stands, there are no American scenes. The reader's first introduc- tion to the American heir is after his arrival in Eng- land. The plot as finally left by Hawthorne makes the young American, Middleton, the descendant of a family long settled in the United States, his ancestor having emigrated to New England with the Pilgrims, or, perhaps, at a still earlier date to Virginia with Raleigh's colonists. There had been a family dissen- sion, a bitter hostility between two brothers in Eng- land, on account, probably, of a love affair, the two both being attached to the same lady. By the in- fluence of the family on both sides the young lady had formed an engagement with the elder brother, al- though her affections had settled on the younger. The marriage was about to take place when the younger brother and the bride both disappeared and were never heard of with any certainty afterward, but it was be- lieved at the time that he had been killed, and in proof of it a bloody footstep remained on the threshold of the ancestral mansion. There were rumors afterward, traditionally continued to the present day, that the younger brother and the bride were seen and together in England, and that some voyager across the sea had found them living together, husband and wife, on the other side of the Atlantic. But the elder brother be- came a moody and reserved man, never married and left the inheritance to the children of a third brother, who then became the representative of the family in England. The better authenticated version of the story, however, was that the second brother had really been slain and the young lady had gone to the Conti- nent and taken the veil there. THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 327 What actually happened was that the second brother and the young lady had been married and be- came the parents of a posterity of which the Middle- ton of the romance is the surviving male. The second brother is to be made more or less conscience-haunted by his own guilt in the matter, for he had stabbed his elder brother in the emergency of being discovered in the act of escaping with the bride. Of course there are to be some documents in the family, and Middleton finds one relating the above incidents, which had come down in a vague, wild way traditionally in the Ameri- can family. It formed a wondrous and incredible legend, which Middleton had often laughed at, yet been greatly interested in, and the discovery of this document seemed to give a certain aspect of veracity and reality to the tradition. In the legend there must be an account of a certain magnificent, almost palatial, residence, which Middleton shall presume to be the ancestral home, and in this palace there shall be said to be a certain secret chamber or receptacle, where is reposited a document that shall complete the evidence of the genealogical descent. When Middleton goes to the Midland Counties of England to seek his ancestral home, he comes to a town where there is an old charitable institution bear- ing the name of his family. Naturally he is interested and becomes acquainted with an old man, one of its in- mates, who was previously an American, a speculator. The ruin of this speculator's schemes had crushed Mid- dleton's father among others. Middleton, not knowing who he is, confides in him, and learns that the ancestral mansion is in the neighborhood. To take possession of his estate and title is, of course, not an easy matter, 328 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY for it has come into the hands of a member of the fam- ily determined that it shall not revert to Middleton, even if he has to go to the extremity of murdering him. This sketch of the plot of "The Ancestral Footstep" is of interest chiefly in connection with "Dr. Grim- shawe's Secret." If Hawthorne had retained this plot he might have worked out an artistic romance that fell within the bounds of possibility. As it is, he has complicated it so with impossible entanglings of the characters that one loses all sense of reality in connec- tion with the story. The latter half of it is modified and developed in various ways from "The Ancestral Footstep," but a first half has been added, the scene of which is laid in Salem. The Grimshawe home and the neighboring graveyard in which Ned and Elsie played is still to be seen not far from the railroad sta- tion. It was a house with which Hawthorne was prob- ably as familiar as he had been earlier with the house of seven gables, for it was the home of Sophia Pea- body. One wonders a little how he could have ten- anted the house which must have been full* of delight- ful memories to him with so peculiar a personage as Dr. Grimshawe, with his unpleasant fad for pet spiders. These spiders spin their webs not only in Dr. Grimshawe's study, but the whole story seems to be snared in the intricate meshes of spider-like traps. Dr. Grimshawe's favorite monster, which let itself down to dangle in front of his eyes with a knowing expression upon its countenance, has its counterpart in the ancestral mansion in England, both of them de- scendants of an ancestral spider that lived in the days of him of the bloody footstep. According to a note of the author, which throws more light upon the bear- THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 329 ing of these spiders than comes out in the story as it stands, all science, in the opinion of Dr. Grimshawe, was to be renewed and established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its errors and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders above all things and kept them spinning, spinning away. He had for years been en- gaged in writing a work on this new discovery. With this suggestive subject he interwove all imaginable learning collected from his own library. He had projects for the cultivation of cobwebs to which a cer- tain part of the national income was to be devoted. The intention seems to be a satire upon reformers who think to remake the world and bring about the millen- nium with an elaboration of some single and to them all-embracing theory. There is a hint in the Notes that the Doctor is to be made inwardly to laugh at his own cobweb theories. The genuine descendant, Middleton, of "The An- cestral Footstep," becomes the charming child "Ned," whom Dr. Grimshawe has rescued from an almshouse and is bent upon proving the heir to the English estate. The genuine heir, however, turns out to be an American Quaker, so that the various struggles be- tween loyalty to the ideals of America and a haunting desire to become the lord of the English manor, which distracts the spirit of Middleton and of Ned grown up to be a young man on the Middleton model really tend nowhere, for in the end he is relieved of the neces- sity of making a choice. The legend connected with the bloody footstep in "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" is quite a different one 330 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY from that elaborated in "The Ancestral Footstep." Dr. Grimshawe relates the tale to the children: "A long time ago a war broke out in the old coun- try between King and Parliament. At that period there were several brothers of the old family (which had adhered to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King instead of that of the Puritan Parliament, all but one, whom the family hated be- cause he took the Parliament side, and he became a soldier and fought against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate was he, he went on the scaffold masked and was the very man who struck off the King's head, and that his foot trod in the King's blood, and that always afterward he made a bloody track wherever he went. And there was a legend that his brethren once caught the rene- gade and imprisoned him in his own birthplace, . . . but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning his prison place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold of the door of the old manor house there was the print of a bloody footstep, and no trouble that the house-maids took, no rain of all the years that have since passed, no sunshine has made it fade; nor have all the wear and tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to erase it." The legend is told in a form closely resembling that in "The Ancestral Footstep" by the genuine heir, the Quaker descendant. According to this version the second son of the family of three brothers had been a Quaker and in love with a great beauty, an heiress whom the eldest son had designed to make his wife. He and his youngest brother caught the innocent, good Quaker brother and kept him in confinement THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 331 long in his own native home, and there he was forgot- ten. Then there seems to have been an attempt to wrest the estate and the lady from the fortunate heir, and he and his brothers in consequence tortured the Quaker brother, but one night, when they left him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home, and his foot, which had been crushed, bled as he went, and the blood had never been staunched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings and much track of blood along rough ways to New England. His Beloved died in England, but before doing so had sent him a child, for they had been privately married. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in which was locked up a great treasure. The story is worked up to its denoue- ment around this last version. Into the English half of this story Hawthorne has put a local color derived from his own English experiences. We recognize in the hospital for old men, first de- scribed by Dr. Grimshawe to the children, afterward playing an important part in the story, Leicester Hos- pital, described at length in "Our Old Home." This hospital has existed since the days of Elizabeth and was founded by the Earl of Leicester, brother of the Earl of Warwick. It was endowed with an ample revenue for making a home for twelve poor, honest and war-broken soldiers, mostly his own retainers and natives of either Warwickshire or Gloucestershire. "These veterans, or others wonderfully like them, still occupy their monkish dormitories and haunt the time- darkened corridors and galleries of the hospital, lead- ing a life of old-fashioned comfort, wearing the old- 332 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY fashioned cloaks and burnishing the identical silver badges which the Earl of Leicester gave to the origi- nal twelve. He is said to have been a bad man in his day, but he has succeeded in prolonging one good deed into what was to him a distant future." Of course this hospital in the story was founded by an ancestor of the English family which figures therein. The de- scription of the edifice in the story is not nearly so minute as that in "Our Old Home," and may well be supplemented by the latter. "It presents a curious and venerable specimen of the timber-and-plaster style of building, in which some of the finest old houses in England are constructed; the front projects into porticos and vestibules and rises into many gables, some in a row and others crowning semi-detached portions of the structure ; the windows mostly open on hinges, but show a delightful irregularity of shape and position; a multiplicity of chimneys break through the roof at their own will, or, at least, without any settled purpose of the architec- ture. The whole affairs looks very old so old, in- deed, that the front bulges forth, as if the timber framework were a little weary at last of standing erect so long, but the state of repair is so perfect and there is such an indescribable aspect of continuous vitality within the system of this aged house that you feel con- fident that there may be safe shelter yet, and perhaps for centuries to come, under its time-honored roof." And on a bench, sluggishly enjoying the sunshine and looking into the street of Warwick as from a life apart, a few old men are generally to be seen, wrapped in long cloaks, on which you may detect the glistening THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 333 of a silver badge representing the Bear and Ragged Staff." This charming description of the reality has been curtailed in the story to make room for the description of the statue of the imaginary founder of the institu- tion, Sir Edward Redclyife. Ned in his contact with English life has experiences very similar to Hawthorne's own, especially in relation to after-dinner speaking. Being an ambassador to a foreign court, he is always in demand for a speech, and evidently rises to the occasion with a readiness which, according to Hawthorne's own account of himself, would have been impossible to him. Yet in the criti- cism of English speech-making and the rule Ned Red- clyffe prescribed for himself in speaking there is doubtless genuine reminiscence. "His quick apprehending had taught him some- thing of the difference of taste between an English and an American audience at a dinner-table; he felt that there must be a certain looseness, and careless- ness, and roughness, and yet a certain restraint; that he must not seem to aim at speaking well, although, for his own ambition, he was not content to speak ill ; that, somehow or other, he must get a heartiness into his speech ; that he must not polish nor be too neat, and must come with a certain rudeness to his good points, as if he blundered on them and were surprised into them. Above all, he must let the good wine and cheer, and all that he knew and really felt of English hos- pitality as represented by the Kind Warden, do its work upon his heart, and speak up to the extent of what he felt and if a little more, then no great harm about his own love for the fatherland and the 334. HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY broader grounds of the relations between the two coun- tries. On this system Redclyffe began to speak, and being naturally and habitually eloquent and of mobile and ready sensibilities, he succeeded between art and nature in making a speech that absolutely delighted the company, who made the old hall echo, and the banners wave and tremble, and the board shake, and the glasses jingle with their rapturous applause." It is also an evident intention in this story to depict the feelings of the American who believes in the insti- tutions of his own country when he comes in contact with those of the old country. There is a pull between long-inherited instincts and the new ideals which have taken hoFd upon the intellect. Hawthorne often touches upon this feeling, and the attempt is made in "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" to put it into comprehen- sive form. Redclyffe's struggles to decide whether he will remain an American citizen or claim his ancestral manor give a glimpse of Hawthorne's feelings in re- gard to this aspect of the relations between American and English ideals. " 'But what do I mean to do?' said he to himself, stopping short and still looking at the old house. 'Am I ready to give up all the actual life before me for the sake of taking up with what I feel to be a less devel- oped state of human life? Would it not be better for me to depart now, to turn my back on this flattering prospect? I am not fit to be here I, so strongly sus- ceptible of a newer, more stirring life than these men lead; I, who felt that, whatever the thought and culti- vation of England may be, my own countrymen have gone forward a long, long march beyond them, not intellectually, but in a way that gives them a far-start. THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 335 If I come back hither, with the purpose to make my- self an Englishman, especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary estate then for me America has been discovered in vain, and the great spirit that has been breathed into us is in vain, and I am false to it all!' "But again came silently swelling over him like a flood all that ancient peace, and quietude, and dignity which looked so stately and beautiful as brooding rotind the old house; all that blessed order of ranks, that sweet superiority, and yet with no disclaimer of common brotherhood that existed between the Eng- lish gentleman and his inferiors; all that delightful intercourse, so sure of pleasure, so safe from rudeness, lowness, unpleasant rubs that exists between gentle- man and gentleman, where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind or seem so to an American politician accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our em- bittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life and all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill-conducted American approach to civilization which could compare with this? What to compare with this juiciness and richness? What other men had ever got so much out of life as the polished and wealthy Englishman of to-day? What higher part was to be acted than seemed to be before him if he wished to accept it?" This is not a profound treatment of the point, and had Hawthorne rewritten the story in this form, he would doubtless have deepened and amplified his ex- 336 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY cursions upon the subject of the relative merits of Americans and English institutions, as well as his criticisms of English characteristics. His judgments were apt to be too much a matter of spontaneous feel- ing to be very sound. However, out of a series of im- pressions, mutually corrective of each other, he often arrived at an opinion as weighty as if it had been the product of a logical process of thought. In "Septimius Felton," another manuscript found after Hawthorne's death, the legend of the bloody footstep is developed in an entirely different fashion and is mingled with the idea of the elixir of life. The scene of the story is laid at Concord. Haw- thorne makes the hill behind his last home there, The Wayside, the setting of the most important epi- sodes in the story. Here Septimius Felton was wont to pace up and down, pondering upon the secret of immortal life which he would fain discover. Here Septimius fell in with the young English offi- cer on the day of the battle of Lexington, and feeling no ill will to him, yet was forced into killing him by the Englishman's challenge. He died in the arms of the American, the two expressing perfect friendliness for each other. But the important outcome of the epi- sode is that from the young soldier Septimius receives a learned recipe inherited from his ancestors, by which may be prepared the elixir of life. Here, too, he meets with the Englishman, Dr. Portsoaken, a personage strongly resembling Dr. Grimshawe, with similar hab- its and a belief in spider webs as the panacea for all ills. Here he finds Sibyl Dacy, the mysterious girl, who tells him the legend of the bloody footstep, which she had known from childhood, and here he finds HILL BEHIND WAYSIDE, WHERE SEPTIMIUS FELTON WALKED THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 337 growing upon the grave of the English soldier the flower which he thinks the missing one needed to render his elixir of life efficacious. Although Sep- timius does not appear in the story as having gone to England to seek his inheritance, it turns out that the young man he slew was the only person between him and an English inheritance. His greater schemes for finding immortality were of more importance to him than his inheritance. The theme is complicated by his possession of a recipe for an immortal drink from an Indian ancestor. This also lacks one ingredient to make it perfect. The English recipe has combined with it certain ascetic rules of living which must be observed. This accounts for the fact that the mem- bers of the family had always preferred an ordinary term of life to an eternity of existence with none of the joys of living. Septimius finally succeeds in concocting the drink of immortality by the aid of the rare flower which he finds growing upon the grave of the sol- dier. When he comes to face the thought of im- mortality it occurs to him that it would be a solace to him to have a companion with him on his endless jour- ney, and he persuades Sibyl Dacy to share it with him. Walking together on the hilltop, they talk over the prospects which immortality opens out for them. "I would fain if I might," says Septimius, "live everybody's life at once, or, since that may not be, each in succession. I would try the life of power, ruling men; but that might come later, after I had had long experience of men and had lived through much history, and had seen, as a disinterested observer, how men might best be influenced for their own good. I 338 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY would be a great traveler at first, and as a man newly coming into possession of an estate goes over it, and views each separate field and woodlot, and whatever features it contains, so will I, whose the world is, be- cause I possess it forever; whereas all others are but transitory guests. So will I wander over this world of mine, and be acquainted with all its shores, seas, rivers, mountains, fields and the various peoples who inhabit them, and to whom it is my purpose to be a benefactor, for think not, dear Sibyl, that I suppose this great lot of mine to have devolved upon me without great duties heavy and difficult to fulfil, though glorious in their adequate fulfilment. But for all this there will be time. In a century I shall partially have seen this earth and known at least its boundaries have gotten for myself the outline, to be filled up hereafter.' " 'And I, too,' said Sibyl, 'will have my duties and labors, for while you are wandering about among men, I will go among women and observe and converse with them, from the princess to the peasant girl, and will find out what is the matter, that woman gets so large a share of human misery laid on her weak shoulders. I will see why it is that, whether she be a royal prin- cess, she has to be sacrificed to matters of state, or a cottage girl, still somehow the thing not fit for her is done ; and whether there is or no some deadly curse on woman, so that she has nothing to do, and nothing to enjoy, but only to be wronged by man, and still to love him and despise herself for it, to be shaky in her revenges. And then if, after all this investigation, it turns out as I suspect that woman is not capable of being helped, that there is something inherent in her- self that makes it hopeless to struggle for her redemp- THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 339 tion, then what shall I do? Nay, I know not, unless to preach to the sisterhood that they all kill their female children as fast as they are born, and then let the generations of men manage as they can! Woman, so feeble and crazy in body, fair enough sometimes, but full of infirmities; not strong, with nerves prone to every pain; ailing, full of little weaknesses, more contemptible than great ones!' 1 'That would be a dreary end, Sibyl,' said Sep- timius. 'But I trust that we shall be able to hush up this weary and perpetual wail of womankind on easier terms than that. Well, dearest Sibyl, after we have spent a hundred years in examining into the real state of mankind and another century in devising and put- ting in execution remedies for his ills, until our ma- turer thought has time to perfect his cure, we shall then have earned a little play time a century of pastime, in which we will search out whatever joy can be had by thoughtful people, and that childlike spor- tiveness which comes out of growing wisdom and en- joyment of every kind. We will gather about us everything beautiful and stately, a great palace, for we shall then be so experienced that all riches will be easy for us to get; with rich furniture, pictures, statues and all royal ornaments ; and side by side with this life we will have a little cottage and see which is the happiest, for this has always been a dispute. For this century we will neither toil, nor spin, nor think of anything beyond the day that is passing over us. There is time enough to do all that we have to do.' ' Among other experiences they are to reign as king and queen for a hundred years, during which they will have time to extinguish all errors and make the "world 340 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY see the absurdity of them; to substitute other methods of government for the old, bad ones ; to fit the people to govern itself, to do with little government, to do with none; and, when this is effected, we will vanish from our loving people and be seen no more, but be reverenced as gods we meanwhile being overlooked and smiling to ourselves amid the very crowd that is looking for us." And after hundreds of years of ex- periences Septimius thinks he will be ready to become a religious teacher and promulgate a faith which he will be able to prove by prophecies and miracles. But alas! for the realization of his dreams, his be- loved Sibyl has played him false. She sowed the bane- ful fungus upon the soldier's grave which resembled the crimson flower of immortality. It is a deadly poison. But at last she weakens in her scheme of re- venge for the English soldier had been her lover and she saves Septimius from his own dire concoction. The scene is a tragic one, showing an intensity of dramatic power rarely if ever surpassed by Haw- thorne. " 'I came here in hatred,' she exclaims, 'and desire of revenge, meaning to lie in wait and turn your dear- est desire against you, to eat into your life and distil poison into it, I sitting on this grave and drawing fresh hatred from it; and at last, in the hour of your triumph, I meant to make the triumph mine.' ' 'Is this still so?' asked Septimius with pale lips, 'or did your fell purpose change?' c 'Septimius, I am weak a weak, weak girl only a girl, Septimius ; only eighteen yet,' exclaimed Sibyl. 'It is young, is it not? I might be forgiven much. You know not how bitter my purpose was to you. THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 341 But look, Septimius could it be worse than this? Hush, be still! Do not stir!' "She lifted the beautiful goblet from the table, put it to her lips and drank a deep draught from it. Then, smiling mockingly, she held it toward him. " 'See. I have made myself immortal before you. Will you drink?' "He eagerly held out his hand to receive the goblet, but Sibyl, holding it beyond his reach a moment, de- liberately let it fall upon the hearth, where it shivered into fragments, and the bright, cold water of immor- tality was all spilt, shedding its strange fragrance around. ' 'Sibyl, what have you done?' cried Septimius in rage and horror. " 'Be quiet! See what sort of immortality I win by it. Then, if you like, distil your drink of eternity again and quaff it.' ' She tells him there were two recipes, one of which was said to be the secret of immortal life. Its essence lay in a certain rare flower. Septimius exclaims that he had the flower, which he found in a grave. 'You had a flower or what you called a flower. But, Septimius, there was yet another drink, in which the same potent ingredients were used ; all but the last. In this, instead of the beautiful flower, was mingled the semblance of a flower, but really a baneful growth out of a grave. This I sowed there, and it converted the drink into a poison, famous in old science a poi- son which the Borgias used and Mary de Medicis, and which has brought to death many a famous person when it was desirable to his enemies. This is the drink I helped you to distil. It brings on death with pleas- 342 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY ant and delightful thrills of the nerves. Oh, Sep~ timius, Septimius, it is worth while to die, to be so blest, so exhilarated as I am now.' ' She goes on: "'It was that old physician, Dr. Portsoaken, who, with some private purpose of his own, taught me what to do, for he w r as skilled in all the mysteries of those old physicians, and knew that their poisons, at least, were efficacious, whatever their drinks of immortality might be. But the end has not turned out as I meant. A girl's fancy is so shifting, Septimius. I thought I loved that youth in the grave yonder, but it was you I loved and I am dying. Forgive me for my evil purposes, for I am dying.' " 'Why hast thou spilt the drink?' said Septimius, bending his dark brows upon her and frowning over her. 'We might have died together.' " 'No, live, Septimius,' said the girl, whose face ap- peared to grow bright and joyous, as if the drink of death exhilarated her like an intoxicating fluid. 'I would not let you have it, not one drop. But to think' and here she laughed 'what a penance what months of wearisome labor thou hast had, and what thoughts, what dreams, and how I laughed in my sleeve at them all the time! Ha, ha, ha! Then thou didst plant out future ages and talk poetry and prose to me. Did I not take it very demurely and answer thee in the same style? and so thou didst love me, and kindly didst wish to take me with thee in thy immor- tality. Oh, Septimius, I should have liked it well! Yes, latterly only I knew how the case stood. Oh, how I surrounded thee with dreams, and instead of giving thee immortal life, so kneaded up the little life allotted thee with dreams and vaporing stuff that thou o p I THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 343 didst not really live even that. Ah, it was a pleasant pastime, and pleasant is now the end of it. Kiss me, thou poor Septimius one kiss!' ' With the house at the foot of the hill where Sep- timius lived, the Wayside, was connected a legend of a man who lived there a generation or two ago, and who believed he should never die. Hawthorne wrote to George William Curtis that this legend told him by Thoreau was all he knew of the history of the house. Very fitting, therefore, was it for him to place the scene of his "Elixir of Life" story in this spot. The house was an ordinary farmhouse belong- ing to Mr. Alcott, from whom Hawthorne bought it. He occupied it for a time before going abroad and upon his return he made some improvements. A tower was built which rose above the irregular roofs of the older and newer portions. Here he had his simply furnished study, which, being in a tower, re- minded him pleasantly of his Italian tower at the Villa Montauto. The house faces on the Lexington road and is next door to Bronson Alcott's, with the little building of the School of Philosophy back a little way from the road. The associations with the spot are in consequence most varied, touching history, thought and romance. The hill behind the house is terraced and was originally grassy and planted with fruit trees. Hawthorne later had evergreens planted on the terraces, which look now much as they did in his day. Robert Hayburn's house was the Alcott house, while Rose Garfield's house is represented to- day by a cellar site near the boundary of the Haw- thorne property. We may climb the hilltop and see the same view 344 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY that Septimius saw as he paced here year in and year out until "it was worn deep with his footsteps and trodden down hard, and it was believed by some of his superstitious neighbors that the grass and little shrubs shrank away from his path and made it wider on that account." Far out he gazed, "over the wide plain, the valley and the long, tame ridge of hills on the other side, shutting it in like human life." And we reecho the sentiments of Septimius to-day as we linger over the charm of this quiet idyllic stretch of country. "It is a landscape that never tires, though it has nothing striking about it, and I am glad that there are no great hills to be thrusting themselves into my thoughts and crowding out better things." There is so much good material in "Septimius Fel- ton" that one can but regret its unfinished state. Its ending is perfunctory and in many places the conduct of the story needs strengthening. However, to its author it must have been wholly unsatisfactory, since he threw it aside and tried the theme of the elixir of life in another and what he meant to be its final form. This was to have appeared in the Atlantic., but was unfinished at his death. During these last days, when he was struggling over the new version of the romance of the elixir of life, he was growing weaker and weaker. "He had little strength," writes Mr. Lathrop, "for any employment more arduous than reading or than walking his accustomed path among the pines and sweet fern on the hill behind the Way- side, known to his family as the Mount of Vision." As he walked in the footsteps of the imaginary Sep- THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 345 timius he doubtless pondered over Dr. Dolliver, his new seeker for the life-giving potion. He goes back to Salem for his setting in this ro- mance and places the dear old great-grandfather and the little Pansie in the house next the graveyard which Dr. Grimshawe had inhabited. As if to make amends for domiciling that most unlovely specimen of human- ity in the home of his lady love, he portrays in Dr. Dolliver a lovable old man of a very different type upon whom his little great-granddaughter Pansie dotes. The story does not proceed far enough for one to judge of its artistic merits in comparison with his other imperfectly finished works, nor have we any sat- isfactory inklings of the manner in which the story was to continue. Mr. Lathrop supposes that it "would doubtless have become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic drama, based on the instinctive yearning of man for an immortal existence, the attempted gratifi- cation of which would have been set forth in a variety of ways: First, through the selfish old sensualist, Colonel Dabney, who greedily seized the mysterious elixir and took such a draught of it that he perished on the spot, then through the simple old grandsire, anxious to live for Pansie's sake, and perhaps through Pansie herself, who, coming into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so that she might always keep the perfection of her mun- dane happiness all these forms of striving to be made the admiration of a higher one, the shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true immortality be- yond this world." With these conjectures we must be satisfied. The elixir of life was a theme always fascinating to 346 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY Hawthorne. In 1837 he treated it in a short story, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," showing then as al- ways its futility. Dr. Heidegger tried his elixir upon four old friends, who all immediately became young and made egregious fools of themselves. The effect of the drink is only transient, however, and in a short time they were four miserable old people again. Dr. Heidegger alone refrained from taking the drink and learned so deep a lesson from watching his experiment upon the others that he declared he would not stop to bathe his lips in it, though the fountain gushed at his very doorstep. Hawthorne's dwelling upon this subject was a natu- ral outcome of his temperament. He seems to have had a Greek's detestation of old age. One is con- stantly impressed in reading his books by what we should call his immature attitude toward age. An illustration of this appears in his portrayal of Hepzibah, whom he makes almost ridiculous on ac- count of her age at the start. But a curious thing happens. He becomes so much interested in her fine qualities of character that he himself forgets to dwell upon the external aspects of her age. At first we feel indignant at his merciless and unsympathetic por- trayal of the poor woman, but his perception of the spiritual finally gets the better of his pagan love of mere beauty in form, and he brings us to love Hep- zibah. Again, in Zenobia he portrays a woman probably in the early thirties, but he is unable to take it for granted that she is charming without constantly making refer- ences to the fact that she is certainly still young enough to be admired. These are survivals from the THE ELIXIR OF LIFE days when heroines were always in their 'teens and heroes in the twenties. It is the same attitude of mind that would cause a widow to isolate herself for the remainder of her life from the world upon her hus- band's death. These old-fashioned conventions were really intensi- fied in Hawthorne by his love of beauty, and he there- fore has moods in which he would fain do away with the ephemeralness of earthly beauty. Add to this feeling, the artist desire to enter into sympathy with all phases of life and we get such an ideal of what immortal life might mean as that expressed by Sep- timius Felton. In the case of Ethan Brand, who had committed the unpardonable sin of using life for experimenta- tion, we saw that Hawthorne had a keen perception of this sin, amounting doubtless to a temptation to fall into it, but he is yet saved from it by his belief in love. So he has a sympathy with the thought of an immortal earthly life, amounting almost to a desire for it, but here again is saved by his perception of the need of the human spirit for a higher form of existence than can be realized upon earth. His statements upon this theme are explicit. In his story of the "Virtuoso's Collection" the speaker says in connection with the elixir vital in an antique sepulchral urn included in the collection: " 'No, I desire not an earthly immortality,' said I. 'Were man to live longer on earth, the spiri- tual would die out of him. . . . There is a celes- tial something within us that requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it from ruin.' ' And again in his English journal he writes: "God Himself cannot compensate us for being born 348 HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY for any period short of eternity. All the misery en- dured here constitutes a claim for another life, and still more all the happiness, because all true happiness involves something more than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment of it." Nothing could better prove than this statement how deep and pure and spiritual his love was a flower whose full fruition could be possible only in a sphere where spirit beauty cannot be obscured by ephemeral forms of loveliness such as deck human life with in- tense but unreal garments of joy. One is sometimes tempted to imagine toward the end that his spirit was anxious to take flight, lest it might, during a longer life on earth, suffer an eclipse of spiritual vision. It certainly seems peculiarly fitting that a man whose art expression is so closely linked with his ex- periences should have ceased to work only as life's experiences ended. And that his theme, present in his mind from the beginning of his literary life, and now on the verge of attaining its completest expression, as other themes and tendencies in his art had attained to theirs from time to time, was the sublime one of im- mortality. While seeking inspiration for a treatment of the subject wholly worthy of its greatness, his own spirit was called to join the immortals. THE END (ClTOos 6160 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY