A Study of Hawthorne | Page 2

New England
civilization. The settlers in this region, in addition to the burdens and
obstacles proper to pioneers, had to deal with the cares of forming a
model state and of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path in
which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an ample
enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were
enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and
exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm
Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's
Saint's Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would suffice to
appease whatever yearnings the immense experiment of their lives
failed to satisfy. Gradually, of course, the native press and new-comers
from England multiplied books in a community which held letters in
unusual reverence. But the continuous work of subduing a new country,
the dependence upon the mother-land for general literature, and finally
the excitements of the Revolutionary period, deferred the opportunity
for any aesthetic expression of the forces that had been at work here
ever since Winthrop stepped from the Arbella on to the shore of the
New World, with noble manliness and sturdy statesmanship enough in
him to uphold the whole future of a great people. When Hawthorne
came, therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding
centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which
we owe the high qualities of New England,--a nature which is often so
easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,--this side, long
suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found
expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various
elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's
genius revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England
character had piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion
and prudence imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all
this part of Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance
glimpses through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it
has been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through
Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration
of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he
himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the interior,
to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's breasts and

set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person and his
own blood the same elements, the same capabilities still existed,
however modified or differently ordered. The records of Massachusetts
Bay are full of suggestive incongruities between the ideal,
single-souled life which its founders hoped to lead, and the jealousies,
the opposing opinions, or the intervolved passions of individuals and of
parties, which sometimes unwittingly cloaked themselves in religious
tenets. Placing himself in the position of these beings, then, and
conscious of all the strong and various potencies of emotion which his
own nature, inherited from them, held in curb, it was natural that
Hawthorne should give weight to this contrast between the intense,
prisoned life of shut sensibilities and the formal outward appearance to
which it was moulded. This, indeed, is the source of motive in much of
his writing; notably so in "The Scarlet Letter." It is thus that his figures
get their tremendous and often terrible relief. They are seen as close as
we see our faces in a glass, and brought so intimately into our
consciousness that the throbbing of their passions sounds like the
mysterious, internal beating of our own hearts in our own ears. And
even when he is not dealing directly with themes or situations closely
related to that life, there may be felt in his style, I think,--particularly in
that of the "Twice-Told Tales,"--a union of vigorous freedom, and
graceful, shy restraint, a mingling of guardedness which verges on
severity with a quick and delicately thrilled sensibility for all that is
rich and beautiful and generous, which is his by right of inheritance
from the race of Non-conformist colonizers. How subtile and various
this sympathy is, between himself and the past of his people, we shall
see more clearly as we go on.
Salem was, in fact, Hawthorne's native soil, in all senses; as intimately
and perfectly so as Florence was the only soil in which Dante and
Michael Angelo could have had their growth. It is endlessly suggestive,
this way that historic cities have of expressing themselves for all time
in the persons of one or two men. Silently and with mysterious
precision, the genius comes to birth and ripens--sometimes despite all
sorts of discouragement--into a full bloom which we afterward see
could not have reached its maturity