A Study of Hawthorne | Page 3

at any other time, and would surely
have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared in any

other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato;
Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris
secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled
expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the
eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the
capital of the Anglo-Saxon race today. In like manner the sober little
New England town which has played a so much more obscure, though
in its way hardly less significant part, sits quietly enshrined and
preserved in Hawthorne's singularly imperishable prose.
Of course, Salem is not to be compared with Florence otherwise than
remotely or partially. Florence was naturally the City of Flowers, in a
figurative sense as well as in the common meaning. Its splendid,
various, and full-pulsed life found spontaneous issue in magnificent
works of art, in architecture, painting, poetry, and sculpture,--things in
which New England was quite sterile. Salem evolved the artistic spirit
indirectly, and embodied itself in Hawthorne by the force of contrast:
the weariness of unadorned life which must have oppressed many a
silent soul before him at last gathered force for a revolt in his person,
and the very dearth which had previously reigned was made to
contribute to the beauty of his achievement. The unique and delicate
perfume of surprise with which his genius issued from its crevice still
haunts his romances. A quality of homeliness dwells in their very
strangeness and rarity which endears them to us unspeakably, and
captivates the foreign sense as well; so that one of Hawthorne's chief
and most enduring charms is in a measure due to that very barrenness
of his native earth which would at first seem to offer only denial to his
development. It is in this direction that we catch sight of the analogy
between his intellectual unfolding and that of the great Florentines. It
consists in his drawing up into himself the nourishment furnished by
the ground upon which he was born, and making the more and the less
productive elements reach a climax of characteristic beauty. One
marked difference, however, is that there was no abundant and
inspiriting municipal life of his own time which could enter into his
genius: it was the consciousness of the past of the place that affected
him. He himself has expressed as much: "This old town of Salem--my
native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood

and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections,
the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual
residence here.... And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there
is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I
must be content to call affection.... But the sentiment has likewise its
moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family
tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish
imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and
induces a kind of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in
reference to the present phase of the town."
It is by briefly reviewing that past, then trying to reproduce in
imagination the immediate atmosphere of Hawthorne's youth, and
comparing the two, that we shall best arrive at the completion of our
proposed portrait. We have first to study the dim perspective and the
suggestive coloring of that historic background from which the author
emerges, and then to define clearly his own individual traits as they
appear in his published works and Note-Books.
The eagerness which admirers of such a genius show, to learn all
permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the
vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that
it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose
winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and
touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two
objections may be urged against giving such details here: one is, that
Hawthorne especially disapproved the writing of a Life of himself; the
other, that the history of Salem and the works of Hawthorne are easily
accessible to any one, without intervention.
Of the first it may frankly be said, indeed, that Hawthorne alone could
have adequately portrayed his life for us; though in the same breath it
should be added that the idea of his undertaking to do it is almost
preposterous. To such a spirit as his, the plan would have had an
exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of imposition.
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