A Study of Hawthorne | Page 4

of trivial details essential to the accurate and consecutive
account of an entire life could never have gained his serious attention:

his modesty would have made as little of them as of boyish
slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to observers,
but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer. There is
something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the spectacle
presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of his
childhood with senile vanity and persistence, and fashioning with
avaricious care the silver shrine and crystal case in which--like a very
different sort of Saint Charles Borromeo--he hopes to have the reverent
ages view him, is one which increases my sense of his defective though
splendid personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling,
that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with
him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In
the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good.
His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of
biography is in these somewhat abated, so that they have been of
incalculable use in assisting the popular eye to see him as he really was.
Other material for illustration of his daily life is somewhat meagre; and
yet, on one account, this is perhaps a cause for rejoicing. There is a halo
about every man of large poetic genius which it is difficult for the
world to wholly miss seeing, while he is alive. Afterward, when the
biographer comes, we find the actual dimensions, the physical outline,
more insisted upon. That is the biographer's business; and it is not
altogether his fault, though partly so, that the public regard is thus
turned away from the peculiar but impalpable sign that floats above the
poet's actual stature. But, under this subtile influence, forgetting that
old, luminous hallucination (if it be one), we suddenly feel the want of
it, are dissatisfied; and, not perceiving that the cause lies largely with us,
we fall to detracting from the subject. Thus it is fortunate that we have
no regular biography of Shakespere authoritative enough to fade our
own private conceptions of him; and it is not an unmixed ill that some
degree of similar mystery should soften and give tone to the life of
Hawthorne. Not that Hawthorne could ever be seriously disadvantaged
by a complete record; for behind the greatness of the writer, in this case,
there stands a person eminent for strength and loveliness as few men
are eminent in their private lives. But it is with dead authors somewhat
as it proved with those Etruscan warriors, who, seen through an eyehole
lying in perfect state within their tombs, crumbled to a powder when

the sepulchres were opened. The contact of life and death is too
unsympathetic. Whatever stuff the writer be made of, it seems
inevitable that he should suffer injury from exposure to the busy and
prying light of subsequent life, after his so deep repose in death.
"Would you have me a damned author?" exclaims Oberon, in "The
Devil in Manuscript," [Footnote: See the Snow Image, and other
Twice-Told Tales.] "to undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect,
and faint praise bestowed against the giver's conscience!... An outlaw
from the protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot
might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death!"
This, to be sure, is a heated statement, in the mouth of a young author
who is about to cast his unpublished works into the fire; but the dread
expressed here is by no means unfounded. Even the publication of
Hawthorne's Note-Books has put it in the power of various writers of
the day to assume an omniscience not altogether just, and far from
acceptable. Why, then, should further risk of this be incurred, by
issuing the present work?
It is precisely to put a limit to misconstructions, as well as to
meet--however imperfectly--the desire of genuine appreciators, that it
has been written. If this study for a portrait fulfils its aim, it will at least
furnish an outline, fix a definite shape, within which whatever is
observed by others may find its place with a truer effect and more
fitting relation. The mistakes that have been made, indeed, are in no
wise alarming ones; and it would be difficult to find any author who
has been more carefully considered, on the whole, or with such
generally fair conclusions, as Hawthorne. Still, if one sees even minor
distortions current, it can do no harm to correct them. Besides, there
has as yet been no thorough attempt at a consistent synthetic portraiture;
and the differences of different critics' estimates need some common
ground to meet and