A Study of Hawthorne Part 2

"Certainly," the sister of Hawthorne writes to me of him, "no man ever needed less a formal biography." But the earlier portion of his life, of which so little record has been made public, must needs bear so interesting a relation to his later career, that I shall examine it with as much care as I may.

Very few details of his early boyhood have been preserved; but these go to show that his individuality soon appeared. "He was a pleasant child, quite handsome, with golden curls," is almost the first news we have of him; but his mastering sense of beauty soon made itself known. While quite a little fellow, he is reported to have said of a woman who was trying to be kind to him, "Take her away! She is ugly and fat, and has a loud voice!" When still a very young school-boy, he was fond of taking long walks entirely by himself; was seldom or never known to have a companion; and in especial, haunted Legg's Hill, a place some miles from his home. The impression of his mother's loss and loneliness must have taken deep and irremovable hold upon his heart; the wide, bleak, uncomprehended fact that his father would never return, that he should never see him, seems to have sunk into his childish reveries like a cabalistic spell, turning thought and feeling and imagination toward mournful and mysterious things. Before he had pa.s.sed from his mother's care to that of the schoolmaster, it is known that he would break out from the midst of childish broodings, and exclaim, "There, mother! I is going away to sea, some time"; then, with an ominous shaking of the head, "and I'll never come back again!" The same refrain lurked in his mind when, a little older, he would tell his sisters fantastic tales, and give them imaginary accounts of long journeys, which he should take in future, in the course of which he flew at will through the air; on these occasions he always ended with the same hopeless prophecy of his failing to return. No doubt, also, there was a little spice of boyish mischief in this; and something of the fictionist, for it enabled him to make a strong impression on his audience. He brought out the _denouement_ in such a way as to seem--so one of those who heard him has written--to enjoin upon them "the advice to value him the more while he stayed with" them. This choice of the lugubrious, however, seems to have been native to him; for almost before he could speak distinctly he is reported to have caught up certain lines of "Richard III." which he had heard read; and his favorite among them, always declaimed on the most unexpected occasions and in his loudest tone, was,--

"Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pa.s.s!"

Though he has nowhere made allusion to the distant and sudden death of his father, Hawthorne has mentioned an uncle lost at sea, in the "English Notes," [Footnote: June 30, 1854]--a startling pa.s.sage. "If it is not known how and when a man dies," he says "it makes a ghost of him for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries. King Arthur is an example; also the Emperor Frederic [Barbarossa] and other famous men who were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons whose descriptions answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that this may be the lost uncle." At the time of that loss Hawthorne was but eight years old; he wrote this memorandum at fifty; and all that time the early impression had remained intact, and the old semi-hallucination about the uncle's being still alive hung about his mind through forty years. When we change the case, and replace the uncle in whom he had no very distinct interest with the father whose decease had so overclouded his mother's life, and thwarted the deep yearnings of his own young heart, we may begin to guess the depth and persistence of the emotions which must have been awakened in him by this awful silence and absence of death, so early thrown across the track of his childish life. I conceive those lonely school-boy walks, overblown by shadow-freighting murmurs of the pine and accompanied by the far-off, m.u.f.fled roll of the sea, to have been full of questionings too deep for words, too sacred for other companions.h.i.+p than that of uninquisitive Nature;--questionings not even shaped and articulated to his own inner sense.

Yet, whatever half-created, formless world of profound and tender speculations and sad reflections the boy was moulding within himself, this did not master him. The seed, as time went on, came to miraculous issue; but as yet the boy remained, healthily and for the most part happily, a boy still. A lady who, as a child, lived in a house which looked upon the garden of the widow's new abiding-place, used to see him at play there with his sisters, a graceful but st.u.r.dy little figure; and a little incident of his school-days, at the same time that it shows how soon he began to take a philosophical view of things, gives a hint of his physical powers. He was put to study under Dr. J. E. Worcester, the famous lexicographer, (who, on graduating at Yale, in 1811, had come to Salem and taken a school there for a few years;) and it is told of him at this time, on the best authority, that he frequently came home with accounts of having fought with a comrade named John Knights.

"But why do you fight with him so often?" asked one of his sisters.

"I can't help it," he said. "John Knights is a boy of very quarrelsome disposition."

Something in the judicial, reproving tone of the reply seems to hint that Hawthorne had taken the measure of his rival, physically as well as mentally, and had found himself more than a match for the poor fellow.

All that is known of his bodily strength in maturer boyhood and at college weighs on this side; and Horatio Bridge, [Footnote: See Prefatory Note to The Snow Image.] his cla.s.smate and most intimate friend at Bowdoin College, tells me that, though remarkably calm-tempered, any suspicion of disrespect roused him into readiness to give the sort of punishment that his athletic frame warranted.

But one of the most powerful influences acting on this healthy, unsuspected, un-self-suspecting genius must have been that of books. The house in Herbert Street was well provided with them, and he was allowed to make free choice. His selection was seldom, if ever, questioned; and this was well, for he thus drew to himself the mysterious aliment on which his genius throve. Shakespere, Milton, Pope, and Thomson are mentioned among the first authors with whom he made acquaintance on first beginning to read; and "The Castle of Indolence" seems to have been one of his favorite poems while a boy. He is also known to have read, before fourteen, more or less of Rousseau's works, and to have gone through, with great diligence, the whole of "The Newgate Calendar,"

which latter selection excited a good deal of comment among his family and relatives, but no decisive opposition. A remark of his has come down from that time, that he cared "very little for the history of the world before the fourteenth century"; and he had a judicious shyness of what was considered useful reading. Of the four poets there is of course but little trace in his works; Rousseau, with his love of nature and impressive abundance of emotion, seems to stand more directly related to the future author's development, and "The Newgate Calendar" must have supplied him with the most weighty suggestions for those deep ponderings on sin and crime which almost from the first tinged the pellucid current of his imagination. There is another book, however, early and familiarly known to him, which indisputably affected the bent of his genius in an important degree. This is Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him by inheritance from his seafaring sire, it might have been that he would not have been brought so early to an intimacy with books, but for an accident similar to that which played a part in the boyhoods of Scott and d.i.c.kens. When he was nine years old he was struck on the foot by a ball, and made seriously lame. The earliest fragment of his writing now extant is a letter to his uncle Robert Manning, at that time in Raymond, Maine, written from Salem, December 9, 1813. It announces that his foot is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. "May be," the boy writes, "he will do me some good, for Dr. B---- has not, and I don't know as Dr. K---- will." He adds that it is now four weeks since he has been to school, "and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer."

This weighing of possibilities, and this sense of the uncertain future, already quaintly show the disposition of the man he is to grow into; though the writing is as characterless as extreme youth, exaggerated distinctness, and copy-books could make it. The little invalid has not yet quite succ.u.mbed, however, for the same letter details that he has hopped out into the street once since his lameness began, and been "out in the office and had four cakes." But the trouble was destined to last much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that he became quite well. Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester (at whose sessions it may have been that Hawthorne read Enfield's "Speaker,"

the name of which had "a cla.s.sical sound in his ears," long, long afterward, when he saw the author's tombstone in Liverpool), came to hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after this in Hawthorne's boyish history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing on the fly-leaf the legend: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., with the respects of J. E. Worcester." For a long time, in the worst of his lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely fond of cats,--a taste which he kept through life; and during this illness, forced to odd resorts for amus.e.m.e.nt, he knitted a pair of stockings for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When tired of reading, he diverted himself with constructing houses of books for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps erecting triumphal arches for her to pa.s.s under. In this period he must have taken a considerable range in literature, for his age; and one would almost say that Nature, seeing so rare a spirit in a sound body that kept him sporting and away from reading, had devised a seemingly harsh plan of luring him into his proper element.

It was more likely after this episode than before, that Bunyan took that hold upon him so fraught with consequences. He went every Sunday to his grandmother Hathorne's, and every Sunday he would lay hands upon the book; then, going to a particular three-cornered chair in a particular corner of the room, "he would read it by the hour, without once speaking." I have already suggested the relations of the three minds, Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne. The more obvious effect of this reading is the allegorical turn which it gave the boy's thoughts, manifest in many of his shorter productions while a young man; the most curious and complete issue being that of "The Celestial Railroad," in the "Mosses,"

where Christian's pilgrimage is so deftly parodied in a railroad route to the heavenly goal. Full of keen satire, it does not, as it might at first seem, tend to diminish Bunyan's dignity, but inspires one with a novel sense of it, as one is made to gradually pierce the shams of certain modern cant. But a more profound consequence was the direction of Hawthorne's expanding thought toward sin and its various and occult manifestations. Imagine the impression upon a mind so fine, so exquisitely responsive, and so well prepared for grave revery as Hawthorne's, which a pa.s.sage like the following would make. In his discourse with Talkative, Faithful says: "A man may cry out against sin, of policy; but he cannot abhor it but by virtue of a G.o.dly antipathy. I have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, who can abide it well enough in the heart, house, and conversation."

Here is almost the motive and the moral of "The Scarlet Letter." But Hawthorne refined upon it unspeakably, and probed many fathoms deeper, when he perceived that there might be motives far more complex than that of policy, a condition much more subtly counterfeiting the mien of goodness and spirituality. Talkative replies, "You lie at a catch, I perceive,"--meaning that he is sophistical. "No, not I," says Faithful; "I am only for setting things right." Did not this desire of setting things right stir ever afterward in Hawthorne's consciousness? It is not a little singular to trace in Bunyan two or three much more direct links with some of Hawthorne's work. When Christiana at the Palace Beautiful is shown one of the apples that Eve ate of, and Jacob's ladder with some angels ascending upon it, it incites one to turn to that marvellously complete "Virtuoso's Collection," [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] where Hawthorne has preserved Sh.e.l.ley's skylark and the steed Rosinante, with Hebe's cup and many another impalpable marvel, in the warden-s.h.i.+p of the Wandering Jew. So, too, when we read Great-Heart's a.n.a.lysis of Mr. Fearing, this expression, "He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him," we can detect the root of symbolical conceptions like that of "The Bosom Serpent." [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] I cannot refrain from copying here some pa.s.sages from this same portion which recall in an exceptional way some of the traits of Hawthorne, enough, at least, to have given them a partially prophetic power over his character. Mr. Great-Heart says of Mr. Fearing: "He desired much to be alone; yet he always loved good talk, and often would get behind the screen to hear it." (So Hawthorne screened himself behind his genial reserve.) "He also loved much to see ancient things, and to be pondering them in his mind." What follows is not so strictly a.n.a.logous throughout.

Mr. Honest asks Great-Heart why so good a man as Fearing "should be all his days so much in the dark." And he answers, "There are two sorts of reasons for it. One is, the wise G.o.d will have it so: some must pipe, and some must weep.... And for my part, I care not at all for that profession which begins not in heaviness of mind. The first string that the musician usually touches is the ba.s.s, when he intends to put all in tune. G.o.d also plays upon this string first, when he sets the soul in tune for himself. Only there was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing; he could play upon no other music but this, till towards his latter end."

Let the reader by no means imagine a moral comparison between Hawthorne and Bunyan's Mr. Fearing. The latter, as his creator says, "was a good man, though much down in spirit"; and Hawthorne, eminent in uprightness, was also overcast by a behest to look for the most part at the darker phases of human thinking and feeling; yet there could not have been the slightest real similarity between him and the excellent but weak-kneed Mr. Fearing, whose life is made heavy by the doubt of his inheritance in the next world. Still, though the causes differ, it could be said of Hawthorne, as of Master Fearing, "Difficulties, lions, or Vanity Fair, he feared not at all; it was only sin, death, and h.e.l.l that were to him a terror." I mean merely that Hawthorne may have found in this character-sketch--Bunyan's most elaborate one, for the typical subject of which he shows an evident fondness and leniency--something peculiarly fascinating, which may not have been without its shaping influence for him. But the intimate, affectionate, and lasting relation between Bunyan's allegory and our romancer is something to be perfectly a.s.sured of. The affinity at once suggests itself, and there are allusions in the "Note-Books" and the works of Hawthorne which recall and sustain it. So late as 1854, he notes that "an American would never understand the pa.s.sage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country." Rarely, too, as Hawthorne quotes from or alludes to other authors, there is a reference to Bunyan in "The Blithedale Romance," and several are found in "The Scarlet Letter": it is in that romance that the most powerful suggestion of kins.h.i.+p between the two imaginations occurs. After Mr. Dimmesdale's interview with Hester, in the wood, he suffers the most freakish temptations to various blasphemy on returning to the town: he meets a deacon, and desires to utter evil suggestions concerning the communion-supper; then a pious and exemplary old dame, fortunately deaf, into whose ear a mad impulse urges him to whisper what then seemed to him an "unanswerable argument against the immortality of the soul," and after muttering some incoherent words, he sees "an expression of divine grat.i.tude and ecstasy that seemed like the _s.h.i.+ne of the celestial city_ on her face." Then comes the most frightful temptation of all, as he sees approaching him a maiden newly won into his flock. "She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that he himself was enshrined within the stainless sanct.i.ty of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered to him to condense into small compa.s.s and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes." Now, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, "poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice.... Just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him and stepped up softly to him, and, whisperingly, suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind." I need not enlarge upon the similar drift of these two extracts; still less mark the matured, detailed, and vividly human and dramatic superiority of Hawthorne's use of the element common to both.

For other reading in early boyhood he had Spenser (it is said that the first book which he bought with his own money was "The Faery Queen," for which he kept a fondness all his life), Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." The incident of Dr. Johnson's penance in Uttoxeter Market dwelt so intimately in Hawthorne's mind (he has treated it in the "True Stories," and touches very tenderly upon it in "Our Old Home," where he says that he "has always been profoundly impressed" by it), that I fancy a childish impression must have endeared it to him; and Boswell may have been one of his acquisitions at this time. Perhaps Dr. Worcester made the book known to him; and he would not be at a loss to find endless entertainment there.

It was in November, 1813, that the accident at ball disabled him. In June of the same year an event had taken place which must have entered strongly into his heart, as into that of many another Salem boy. Young Lawrence, of the American navy,--who had won honors for himself at Tripoli and in the then prevailing war with Great Britain,--had just been promoted, for gallant achievements off the coast of Brazil, to a captaincy, and put in command of the frigate "Chesapeake," at Boston. A British frigate, the "Shannon," had been cruising for some time in the neighborhood, seeking an encounter with the "Chesapeake," and the valiant Lawrence felt compelled to go out and meet her, though he had only just a.s.sumed command, had had no time to discipline his crew (some of whom were disaffected), and was without the proper complement of commissioned officers. Americans know the result; how the "Chesapeake"

was shattered and taken in a fifteen minutes' fight off Marblehead, and how Lawrence fell with a mortal wound, uttering those unforgotten words, "Don't give up the s.h.i.+p." The battle was watched by crowds of people from Salem, who swarmed upon the hillsides to get a glimpse of the result.

When the details at last reached the town, many days afterward, Captain George Crownins.h.i.+eld fitted out a flag of truce, sailed for Halifax with ten s.h.i.+pmasters on board, and obtained the bodies of Lawrence and his lieutenant, Ludlow. Late in August they returned, and the city gave itself to solemnities in honor of the lost heroes, with the martial dignity of processions and the sorrowing sound of dirges. Cannon reverberated around them, and flags drooped above them at half-mast, shorn of their splendor. Joseph Story delivered an eloquent oration over them, and there was mourning in the hearts of every one, mixed with that spiritualized sense of national grandeur and human worth that comes at hours like this. Among the throngs upon the streets that day must have stood the boy Nathaniel Hawthorne; not too young to understand, and imbibing from this spectacle, as from many other sources, that profound love of country, that ingrained, ineradicable American quality, which marked his whole maturity.

I have not found any distinct corroboration of the report that Nathaniel again lost the use of his limbs, before going to Maine to live. In another brief, boyish letter dated "Salem, Monday, July 21, 1818" (all these doc.u.ments are short, and allude to the writer's inability to find anything more to say), he speaks of wanting to "go to dancing-school a little longer" before removing with his mother to the house which his uncle is building at Raymond. He has also, he says, been to Nahant, which he likes, because "fish are very thick there"; both items seeming to show a proper degree of activity. There has been a tendency among persons who have found nothing to obstruct the play of their fancies, to establish a notion of almost ill-balanced mental precocity in this powerful young genius, who seems to have advanced as well in muscular as in intellectual development.

It was in October, 1818, that Mrs. Hathorne carried her family to Raymond, to occupy the new house, a dwelling so ambitious, gauged by the primitive community thereabouts, that it gained the t.i.tle of "Manning's Folly." Raymond is in c.u.mberland County, a little east of Sebago Lake, and the house, which is still standing, mossy and dismantled, is near what has since been called Radoux's Mills. Though built by Robert Manning, it was purchased afterward by his brother Richard, whose widow married Mr. Radoux, the owner of these mills. Richard Manning's will provided for the establis.h.i.+ng of a meeting-house in the neighborhood, and his widow transformed the Folly into a Tabernacle; but, the community ceasing to use it after a few years, it has remained untenanted and decaying ever since, enjoying now the fame of being haunted. Lonely as was the region then, it perhaps had a more lively aspect than at present: A clearing probably gave the inmates of the Folly a clear sweep of vision to the lake; and to the northwest, beyond the open fields that still lie there, frown dark pine slopes, ranging and rising away into "forest-crowned hills; while in the far distance every hue of rock and tree, of field and grove, melts into the soft blue of Mount Was.h.i.+ngton." This weird and woodsy ground of c.u.mberland became the nurturing soil of Hawthorne for some years. He stayed only one twelvemonth at Sebago Lake, returning to Salem after that for college preparation. But Brunswick, where his academic years were pa.s.sed, lies less than thirty miles from the home in the woods, and within the same county: doubtless, also, he spent some of his summer vacations at Raymond. The brooding spell of his mother's sorrow was perhaps even deepened in this favorable solitude. I know not whether the faith of women's hearts really finds an easier avenue to such consecration as this of Mrs. Hathorne's, in Salem, than elsewhere. I happen lately to have heard of a widow in that same neighborhood who has remained bereaved and uncomforted for more than seventeen years. With pathetic energy she spends the long days of summer, in long, incessant walks, sorrow-pursued, away from the dwellings of men. But, however this be, I think this divine and pure devotion to a first love, though it may have impregnated Hawthorne's mind too keenly with the mournfulness of mortality, was yet one of the most cogent means of entirely clarifying the fine spirit which he inherited, and that he in part owes to this exquisite example his marvellous, unsurpa.s.sed spirituality. A woman thus true to her highest experience and her purest memories, by living in a sacred communion with the dead, annihilates time and is already set in an atmosphere of eternity. Ah, strong and simple soul that knew not how to hide your grief under specious self-comfortings and maxims of convenience, and so bowed in lifelong prostration before the knowledge of your first, unsullied love, be sure the world will sooner or later know how much it owes to such as you!

More than once has Nathaniel Hawthorne touched the delicate fibres of the heart that thrill again in this memorial grief of his mother's; and, incongruous as is the connection of the following pa.s.sage out of one of the Twice-Told Tales, it is not hard to trace the origin of the sensibility and insight which prompted it: "It is more probably the fact," so it runs, "that while men are able to reflect upon their lost companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other hand, are _conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed, whithersoever he has gone_" [Footnote: "drippings with a Chisel," in Vol. II. of the Twice-Told Tales.] But the most perfect example of his sympathy with this sorrow of widowhood is that brief, concentrated, and seemingly slight tale, "The Wives of the Dead,"

[Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] than which I know of nothing more touching and true, more exquisitely proportioned and dramatically wrought out among all English tales of the same scope and length. It pictures the emotions of "two young and comely women,"

the "recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman; and two successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic." The action occupies the night after the news, and turns upon the fact that each sister is roused, unknown to the other, at different hours, to be told that the report about her husband is false. One cannot give its beauty without the whole, more than one can separate the dewdrop from the morning-glory without losing the effect they make together. It is a complete presentment, in little, of all that dwells in widowhood. One sentence I may remind the reader of, nevertheless: "Her face was turned partly inward to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake, had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within it." Even as his widowed mother's face looked, to the true-souled boy, when they dwelt there together in the forest of pines, beside the placid lake!

Yet clear and searching as must then have been his perceptions, he had not always formulated them or made them his chief concern. On May 16, 1819 (the first spring after coming to the new abode), he writes to his uncle Robert that "we are all very well"; and "the gra.s.s and some of the trees look very green, the roads are very good, there is no snow on Lymington mountains. The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brooke. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again." Happy boy! he thinks he has found his vocation: it is, to shoot henhawks and catch trout. But his uncle, fortunately, is otherwise minded, though Nathaniel writes, in the same note: "Mother says she can hardly spare me." The sway of outdoor life must have been very strong over this stalwart boy's temperament. One who saw a great deal of him has related how in the very last year of his life Hawthorne reverted with fondness, perhaps with something of a sick and sinking man's longing for youthful scenes, to these early days at Sebago Lake; "Though it was there," he confessed, "I first got my cursed habits of solitude." "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. "Ah," he said, "how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!... Everything is beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!" The same writer mentions the author's pa.s.sion for the sea, telling how, on the return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way: "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never touch the sh.o.r.e again." I have it from his sister that he used to declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the salt spray in his blood.

Still it is difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if it does not find the right influences at first, presses forth, breaks out to right and left and keeps on pus.h.i.+ng, until it feels itself at ease. It cannot wholly _make_ its own influences, but it fights to the death before it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it must seek other and more fertile conditions. Hawthorne had an ancestry behind him connected with a singular and impressive history, had remarkable parents, and especially a mother pure and lofty in spirit; lived in a suggestive atmosphere of private sorrow and amid a community of much quaintness; he was also enabled to know books at an early age; yet these things only helped, and not produced, his genius. Sometimes they helped by repression, for there was much that was uncongenial in his early life; yet the clairvoyance, the unconscious wisdom, of that interior quality, _genius_, made him feel that the adjustment of his outer and his inner life was such as to give him a chance of unfolding. Had he gone to sea, his awaking power would have come violently into contact with the hostile conditions of sailor-life: he would have revolted against them, and have made his way into literature against head-wind or reluctant tiller-rope alike. It may, of course, be said that this prediction is too easy. But there are evidences of the mastering bent of Hawthorne's mind, which show that it would have ruled in any case.

As we have seen, he returned to Salem in 1819, to school; and on March 7, 1820, he wrote thus to his mother:--

"I have left school, and have begun to fit for College under Benjm. L.

Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in your family. Mr. Oliver thought I could enter College next commencement, but Uncle Robert is afraid I should have to study too hard. I get my lessons at home, and recite them to him [Mr. Oliver] at 7 o'clock in the morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A minister I will not be." This is the first dawn of the question of a career, apparently. Yet he still has a yearning to escape the solution.

"I am extremely homesick," he says, in one part of the letter; and at the close he gives way to the sentiment entirely: "O how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a gunning. But the happiest days of my life are gone.... After I have got through college, I will come down to learn E---- Latin and Greek." (Is it too fanciful to note that at this stage of the epistle "college" is no longer spelt with a large C?) The signature to this letter shows the boy so amiably that I append it.

"I remain," he says, "Your Affectionate and Dutiful son, and Most Obedient and Most Humble Servant, and Most Respectful and Most Hearty Well-wisher, NATHANIEL HATHORNE."

A jesting device this, which the writer, were he now living, would perhaps think too trivial to make known; yet why should we not recall with pleasure the fact that in his boyish days he could make this harmless little play, to throw an unexpected ray of humor and gladness into the lonely heart of his mother, far away in the Maine woods? And with this pleasure, let there be something of honor and reverence for his pure young heart.

In another letter of this period [Footnote: This letter, long in the possession of Miss E. P. Peabody, Mr. Hawthorne's sister-in-law, unfortunately does not exist any longer. The date has thus been forgotten, but the pa.s.sage is clear in Miss Peabody's recollection.] he had made a long stride towards the final choice, as witness this extract:--

"I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an author. How would you like some day to see a whole shelf full of books, written by your son, with 'Hawthorne's Works' printed on their backs?"

But, before going further, it will be well to look at certain "Early Notes," purporting to be Hawthorne's, and published in the Portland "Transcript" at different times in 1871 and 1873. A mystery overhangs them; [Footnote: See Appendix I.] and it has been impossible, up to this time, to procure proof of their genuineness. Most of the persons named in them have, nevertheless, been identified by residents of c.u.mberland County, who knew them in boyhood, and the internal evidence of authors.h.i.+p seems to make at least some of them Hawthorne's. On the first leaf of the ma.n.u.script book, said to contain them, was written (as reported by the discoverer) an inscription, to the effect that the book had been given to Nathaniel Hawthorne by his uncle Richard Manning, "with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can, upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language"; and this was dated at Raymond, June 1, 1816. This account, if true, puts the book into the boy's hands at the age of twelve. He did not go to Raymond to live until two years later, but had certainly been there, before, and his Uncle Richard was already living there in 1816.

So that the entries may have begun soon after June, of that year, though their mature character makes this improbable. In this case, they must cover more than a year's time. The dates were not given by the furnisher of the extracts, and only one item can be definitely provided with a date. This must have been penned in or after 1819; and yet it seems also probable that the whole series was written before the author's college days. If genuine, then, they hint the scope and quality of Hawthorne's perceptions during a few years antecedent to his college-course, and--whether his own work or not--they picture the sort of life which he must have seen at Raymond.

"Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that flies from one to the other, over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be miserable cowards, to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet seen one turn to defend himself.

"Swapped pocket knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fis.h.i.+ng pole this morning, and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never cheat."

Richard Manning had married Susan Dingley; this Jacob was probably her nephew. In this allusion to Quakers one might fancy a germ of tolerance which ripened into "The Gentle Boy."

"Captain Britton from Otisfield was at Uncle Richard's today. Not long ago, uncle brought here from Salem a new kind of potatoes called 'Long Reds.' Captain Britton had some for seed, and uncle asked how he liked them. He answered, 'They yield well, grow very long,--one end is very poor, and the other good for nothing.' I laughed about it after he was gone, but uncle looked sour and said there was no wit in his answer, and that the saying was 'stale.' It was new to me, and his way of saying it very funny. Perhaps uncle did not like to hear his favorite potato spoken of in that way, and that if the captain had praised it he would have been called witty."

"Captain Britton promised to bring 'Gulliver's Travels' for me to read, the next time he comes this way, which is every time he goes to Portland. Uncle Richard has not the book in his library.

"This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not consent, for fear the wall might cave in, but hired Samuel Shane to go down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs.

Shane not quite so valuable as the son of the Widow Hawthorne. G.o.d bless her for all her love for me, though it may be some selfish. We are to have a pump in the well, after this mishap.

"Was.h.i.+ngton Longley has been taking lessons of a drumming master. He was in the grist-mill to day, and practised with two sticks on the half-bushel. I was astonished at the great number of strokes in a second, and if I had not seen that he had but two sticks, should have supposed that he was drumming with twenty."

"Major Berry went past our house with a large drove of sheep yesterday.

One, a last spring's lamb, gave out; could go no farther. I saw him down near the bridge. The poor dumb creature looked into my eyes, and I thought I knew just what he would say if he could speak, and so asked Mr. Berry what he would sell him for. 'Just the price of his pelt, and that will bring sixty-five cents,' was the answer. I ran and pet.i.tioned mother for the money, which she soon gave me, saying with a smile that she tried to make severe, but could not, that I was 'a great spendthrift.' The lamb is in our orchard now, and he made a bow (without taking off his hat) and thanked me this morning for saving him from the butcher.

"Went yesterday in a sail-boat on the Great Pond, with Mr. Peter White of Windham. He sailed up here from White's Bridge to see Captain Dingley, and invited Joseph Dingley and Mr. Ring to take a boat-ride out to the Dingley Islands and to the Images. He was also kind enough to say that I might go (with my mother's consent), which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water. It is strange that this beautiful body of water is called a 'Pond.' The geography tells of many in Scotland and Ireland not near so large that are called 'Lakes.' It is not respectful to speak of so n.o.ble, deep, and broad a collection of clear water as a 'Pond'; it makes a stranger think of geese, and then of goose-pond. Mr. White, who knows all this region, told us that the streams from thirty-five ponds, large and small, flow into this, and he calls it Great Basin. We landed on one of the small islands that Captain Dingley cleared for a sheep pasture when he first came to Raymond. Mr.

Ring said that he had to do it to keep his sheep from the bears and wolves. A growth of trees has started on the island, and makes a grove so fine and pleasant, that I wish almost that our house was there. On the way from the island to the Images Mr. Ring caught a black spotted trout that was almost a whale, and weighed before it was cut open, after we got back to Uncle Richard's store, eighteen and a half pounds. The men said that if it had been weighed as soon as it came out of the water it would have been nineteen pounds. This trout had a droll-looking hooked nose, and they tried to make me believe, that if the line had been in my hands, that I should have been obliged to let go, or have been pulled out of the boat. They were men, and had a right to say so. I am a boy, and have a right to think differently. We landed at the Images, when I crept into the cave and got a drink of cool water. In coming home we sailed over a place, not far from the Images, where Mr.

White has, at some time, let down a line four hundred feet without finding bottom. This seems strange, for he told us, too, that his boat, as it floated, was only two hundred and fifty feet higher than the boats in Portland Harbor, and that if the Great Pond was pumped dry, a man standing on its bottom, just under where we then were, would be more than one hundred and fifty feet lower than the surface of the water at the Portland wharves. Coming up the Dingley Bay, had a good view of Rattlesnake Mountain, and it seemed to me wonderfully beautiful as the almost setting sun threw over its western crags streams of fiery light.

If the Indians were very fond of this part of the country, it is easy to see why; beavers, otters, and the finest fish were abundant, and the hills and streams furnished constant variety. I should have made a good Indian, if I had been born in a wigwam. To talk like sailors, we made the old hemlock-stub at the mouth of the Dingley Mill Brook just before sunset, and sent a _boy_ ash.o.r.e with a hawser, and was soon safely moored to a bunch of alders. After we got ash.o.r.e Mr. White allowed me to fire his long gun at a mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not sure that I saw it at the time the gun went off, but believe, rather, that I was watching for the noise that I was about to make. Mr. Ring said that with practice I could be a gunner, and that now, with a very heavy charge, he thought I could kill a horse at eight paces. Mr. White went to Uncle Richard's for the night, and I went home and amused my mother with telling how pleasantly the day had pa.s.sed. When I told her what Mr.

Ring said about my killing a horse, she said he was making fun of me. I had found that out before.

"Mr. March Gay killed a rattlesnake yesterday not far from his house, that was more than six feet long and had twelve rattles. This morning Mr. Jacob Mitch.e.l.l killed another near the same place, almost as long.

It is supposed that they were a pair, and that the second one was on the track of its mate. If every rattle counts a year, the first one was twelve years old. Eliak Maxfield came down to mill to-day and told me about the snakes.

"Mr. Henry Turner of Otisfield took his axe and went out between Sat.u.r.day and Moose ponds to look at some pine-trees. A rain had just taken off enough of the snow to lay bare the roots of a part of the trees. Under a large root there seemed to be a cavity, and on examining closely something was exposed very much like long black hair. He cut off the root, saw the nose of a bear, and killed him, pulled out the body; saw another, killed that, and dragged out its carca.s.s, when he found that there was a third one in the den, and that he was thoroughly awake, too; but as soon as the head came in sight it was split open with the axe, so that Mr. Turner, alone with only an axe, killed three bears in less than half an hour, the youngest being a good-sized one, and what hunters call a yearling. This is a pretty great bear story, but probably true, and happened only a few weeks ago; for John Patch, who was here with his father Captain Levi Patch, who lives within two miles of the Sat.u.r.day Pond, told me so yesterday.

"A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr., was drowned two days ago, up in Crooked River. He and one of his friends were trying which could swim the faster. Jackson was behind but gaining; his friend kicked at him in fun, thinking to hit his shoulder and push him back, but missed, and hit his chin, which caused him to take in water and strangle, and before his friend could help or get help, poor Jackson was (Elder Leach says) beyond the reach of mercy. I read one of the Psalms to my mother this morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six times that 'G.o.d's mercy endureth forever.' I never saw Henry Jackson; he was a young man just married. Mother is sad, says that she shall not consent to my swimming any more in the mill-pond with the boys, fearing that in sport my mouth might get kicked open, and then sorrow for a dead son be added to that for a dead father, which she says would break her heart. I love to swim, but I shall not disobey my mother.