Hawthorne

Hawthorne, NATHANIEL, American author, born July 4, 1804, at Salem, Massachusetts. He was descended from English Separatist stock, and the character of his ancestry seems to have made an early and enduring impression on his thoughts. This impression did not lead him to follow out and exemplify in his own career their modes of action, but rather caused him to turn and reflect upon the nature of his predecessors and the conditions amid which they lived. Probably we owe to this inclination the singular interest and penetrating quality of vividness with which he imbued his scenes from early New England life; and the intensity of concentration which he applied in dealing with moral problems in his romances reveals in him the character of the modernised Puritan. The first American Hawthorne (or, as the name was then spelled, Hathorne) was William, who migrated from England (Wiltshire?), in 1630, to Salem in New England, where he became a leader of the colonial soldiery and a magistrate, distinguished for both bravery and eloquence. 'The figure of that first ancestor,' wrote Hawthorne, in his sketch of The Custom-house, 'invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember.' William Hawthorne took part in the persecution

Copyright 1890 in U.S.
by J. B. Lippincott
Company. of the Quakers. His son John, also a military officer and magistrate, presided at the famous trials of the Salem witchcraft cases. Daniel, the author's grandfather, was a member of an American regiment, and also commanded a privateer, in the war of the Revolution against Great Britain.

Daniel's son Nathaniel, 'a silent, reserved, severe man, of an athletic and rather slender build, and habitually of a rather melancholy cast of thought,' became a captain in the merchant marine; the family having suffered a decline of fortune, and the male members mostly following the sea. He died when his son Nathaniel, the subject of this article, was but four years old. His widow, a woman of great refinement and religious sensibility, lived always afterwards in close retirement and straitened circumstances, with her two daughters and her son Nathaniel, who, from his ninth to his thirteenth year, was somewhat confined by an accidental lameness. His intense love of reading was doubtless fostered by these conditions. At fourteen he went with his mother to a lonely farm in the woods of Raymond, Maine; forming there, as he thought, that habit of solitude which became one of his permanent traits, but was probably inherited in part from his father. He was, however, a healthy, happy lad, given to outdoor sports and exercise, and quite free from morbidness in spite of his fondness for solitude. In Raymond he began to keep note-books, recording his observations; a practice which he resumed in later life and continued through the greater part of his career. At Bowdoin College, where he graduated in the class of 1825, with the poet Longfellow, he took a good rank, and gave pronounced signs of his tendency to authorship, having begun his first novel during his undergraduate course. But the conditions in the United States were at that period unfavourable to authorship as a profession, and his progress was slow. After his return to Salem he shut himself up for twelve years 'in a heavy seclusion,' writing tales and verses. Of the latter few have survived. In 1828 he published anonymously his first novel, Fanshawe, which was unsuccessful. Continuing to contribute to annuals and magazines, under various pseudonyms that made it still more difficult for him to become known, he edited in 1836 a short-lived periodical for S. G. Goodrich, for whom also he wrote Peter Parley's Universal History, an enormously profitable publication, of which Goodrich figured as the author and took the proceeds, while Hawthorne received only one hundred dollars.

Meanwhile some of his short fictions had gained such favourable notice from the London Athenæum that in 1837 a group of them, to which he gave the name Twice-told Tales, was issued in one volume, the risk of which was assumed, without the knowledge of Hawthorne, by his friend and classmate, H. N. Bridge. This book, which an impartial and competent critic has said 'marked a distinct epoch in American literature,' was reviewed with high praise by Longfellow, and substantially made the beginning of Hawthorne's fame. Yet he still had long to wait for its fulfilment. The full force of the new author's genius was by no means appreciated in his own country; and diligent though he was with his pen, he was still unable to live by it. In January 1839 the historian Bancroft, then collector of the port of Boston, appointed him weigher and gauger in the custom-house, which post he held until early in 1841. In April he allied himself with an industrial association at Brook Farm (q.v.), near Boston, founded by Dr George Ripley (afterwards a distinguished critic), with a number of highly cultivated men and women, among whom were George William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and Margaret Fuller. The object was to establish an idyllic, semi-socialistic community, in which every member should do manual labour and share profits in common, while carrying on his or her chosen intellectual work, and maintaining in the community a separate single or family life. Hawthorne, who was about to marry, had some hope of making his home here, but finding the experiment unsatisfactory he withdrew. Meanwhile he wrote and published in three parts a series of simple stories for children, from New England history—viz. Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree (1841). In July 1842 he wedded Sophia Amelia Peabody, of Salem, his union with whom became one of the rarest and most beautiful chapters in the annals of happy marriages. No account of Hawthorne would be complete which failed to lay stress upon his marriage to this lady, who, as their son Julian has written, 'was a blessing and an illumination wherever she went; and no one ever knew her without receiving from her far more than could be given in return.'

Removing to Concord, Massachusetts, he issued Biographical Stories (1842) for children, brought out an enlarged two-volume edition of the Twice-told Tales (1842), and lived for four years in the old colonial manse, previously occupied by the ancestors of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and by Emerson himself, overlooking the field of the first battle of the Revolution. Here he dwelt happily, preserving his old custom of comparative isolation, and, seeing but little of his famous neighbours Emerson and Thoreau. He wrote many sketches and studies for the Democratic Review. These formed the Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). But he was poorly paid, or not at all. The Review failed; and, as he had lost all his previous savings invested at Brook Farm, he was forced to leave this home, and accept a place in the custom-house again—this time as surveyor, in his native town, Salem. The place was uncongenial, and for nearly four years he remained silent as an author. But by the expiration of his term he had completed (February 1850) The Scarlet Letter, which at once gained great renown, and still remains perhaps the best known of his works. It did not, however, bring him pecuniary ease. Hiring a small house at Lenox, Massachusetts, he entered upon a phase of remarkable productivity, showing that he had needed only encouragement and recognition to bring his powers into full play. At Lenox he wrote The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which added to his celebrity and popularity: also The Wonder Book, a recast of classic legends for children (1851); and prepared The Snow Image, which was not published until 1852. In the winter he wrote at West Newton The Blithedale Romance, which incidentally drew colouring from the Brook Farm episode, though in no way attempting to depict it as a fact. Having bought at Concord a small house, which he christened 'The Wayside,' he settled there in the summer of 1852, and wrote a Life of General Franklin Pierce, his old college friend, who had been nominated for the presidency of the United States. Immediately afterwards he completed Tanglewood Tales, a continuation of The Wonder Book; but this appeared first in 1853.

Pierce, on his inauguration as president in March 1853, named Hawthorne to be consul at Liverpool, a lucrative office which his experience in the custom-house qualified him to fill. The appointment was confirmed by the senate; and although Hawthorne had resolved to accept nothing from the president, and much persuasion had to be used to change his mind, he finally took the appointment, and sailed for Liverpool, midsummer, 1853. He held the consulate until near the close of 1857, attending closely to his duties, but spending part of the time in London, and visiting various portions of England and Scotland. A sojourn of a year and a half in Rome and Florence, beginning January 1858, supplied him with the materials for a new romance, The Marble Faun, better known in England as Transformation, which he wrote at Redcar, Yorkshire, in the autumn of 1859, and published in 1860. In June of this year he returned to Concord, where approaching ill-health, and the mental depression caused by the outbreak of civil war in the United States, impeded his efforts at literary composition. He wrote, however, a number of brilliant papers embodying observations and experiences in England, which were printed in the Atlantic Monthly, and then issued in the volume Our Old Home (1863). He also began a new romance, founded on the idea of an elixir of immortality. It remained unfinished at his death, which occurred in the night of May 18, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire, whither he had gone on a journey in search of health, with his friend ex-president Pierce. He was buried at Concord, Massachusetts, May 24, in a spot near which are the graves of Emerson and Thoreau.

In his style he early developed that maturity of dignified composure, free from constraint or affectation, and that lucid expression, which are among its most characteristic traits. With little faculty for the harmonies of verse, he had a singular command over the musical qualities of prose, enabling him to produce periods remarkable for their sonorous richness and delicate cadences, that sometimes raise them almost to the plane of poetry, yet never destroy their character as prose by interjecting the actual rhythms of verse. Although exceptionally fitted for conveying subtleties of thought and fantasy, his style is equally adapted to the comprehension of children, being invariably clear, and strongly marked by common sense. Another noticeable peculiarity is that, in the entire range of his writings, quotation is almost never resorted to; the author's mind being apparently so self-centred that its originality felt no need of aid or illustration from other writers. The superlative merits of Hawthorne's style were but slowly recognised in his own country; but his fame has rapidly and steadily increased since his death. Several of his works have been translated into foreign languages; and he is now generally esteemed as one of the greatest imaginative minds of the century, holding a place in the first rank among masters of modern English prose.

The personal appearance of Hawthorne was tall, vigorous, and commanding. Powerful physically, and in every way a strong specimen of manhood, he yet in his manner and presence showed the gentleness of a woman. His intimates were few, but with them he was a genial comrade, as he was also a delightful companion in his household. The union in him of strength and sensitiveness has been well described by James Russell Lowell:

First, he from sympathy still held apart
By shrinking, over-eagerness of heart—
New England's poet, soul reserved and deep,
November nature with a name of May.

The best extant portraits of Hawthorne are the photographs taken by Mayall of London in May 1860. One of these was engraved in Harpers' Magazine for July 1886; another in the Century Magazine for May 1887.

A preliminary version of the unfinished romance was edited by his daughter Una, his eldest child, with the aid of Robert Browning, and was published under the title of Septimius Felton (1872). Another version, edited by his son Julian, appeared as Dr Grimshawe's Secret (1883). Both these forms had been abandoned by the author, who left in MS. portions of the work as he meant to complete it, The Dolliver Romance (1876). His widow (who died in London, February 26, 1871) edited and published his American Note-books (1868), English Note- books (1870), and French and Italian Note-books (1871); besides bringing out a volume of her own Notes in England and Italy (1868). George Parsons Lathrop, who married Hawthorne's younger daughter Rose, published A Study of Hawthorne (1876), containing many biographical details, and edited the Riverside edition of the complete works, with notes and a sketch of the author's life (11 vols. 1883). Rose, the second daughter and youngest child (born in 1851, married 1871), has also made numerous contributions to periodicals in prose and verse, and published in 1888 a volume of poems entitled Along the Shore. Una, the eldest child, born in 1844, died in London in 1877. Julian Hawthorne issued a complete memoir of his father, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife (2 vols. 1883). Henry James, junior, published a brilliant but unsympathetic monograph on Hawthorne (1879); James Russell Lowell a short life (1890); and Moncure Conway one in 1890. See also the Personal Recollections of Horatio Bridge (1893).

JULIAN HAWTHORNE, his son, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, June 22, 1846. After his studies at Harvard he devoted himself to engineering at Dresden; next worked under General McClellan in the New York Docks, returning to Dresden to pursue a life of letters, continued later in London (1875-82) and in New York. He subsequently settled on a Jamaica farm. His first novels, Bressant (1873) and Idolatry (1874), were well followed by Garth (1875), Sebastian Strome (1880), Fortune's Fool (1883), and Dust (1884); and, not so well, by an innumerable series of shorter stories, some—not over good—of the detective class, such as David Poindexter's Disappearance (1888) and Section 558; or The Fatal Letter (1888).