A Study of Hawthorne | Page 5

be harmonized upon. If this can be supplied, there
will be less waste of time in future studies of the same subject.
It will be seen, therefore, that my book makes no pretension to the
character of a Life. The wish of Hawthorne on this point would alone
be enough, to prevent that. If such a work is to be undertaken, it should

be by another hand, in which the right to set aside this wish is much
more certainly vested than in mine. But I have thought that an earnest
sympathy with the subject might sanction the present essay. Sympathy,
after all, is the talisman which may preserve even the formal biographer
from giving that injury to his theme just spoken of. And if the insight
which guides me has any worth, it will present whatever material has
already been made public with a selection and shaping which all
researchers might not have time to bestow.
Still, I am quite alive to the difficulties of my task; and I am conscious
that the work may to some appear supererogatory. Stricture and praise
are, it will perhaps be said, equally impertinent to a fame so well
established. Neither have I any rash hope of adding a single ray to the
light of Hawthorne's high standing. But I do not fear the charge of
presumption. Time, if not the present reader, will supply the right
perspective and proportion.
On the ground of critical duty there is surely defence enough for such
an attempt as the one now offered; the relative rank of Hawthorne, and
other distinctions touching him, seem to call for a fuller discussion than
has been given them. I hope to prove, however, that my aim is in no
wise a partisan one. Criticism is appreciative estimation. It is inevitable
that the judgments of competent and cultivated persons should flatly
contradict each other, as well as those of incompetent persons; and this
whether they are coeval or of different dates. At the last, it is in many
respects matter of simple individual impression; and there will always
be persons of high intelligence whom it will be impossible to make
coincide with us entirely, touching even a single author. So that the best
we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of our diverse
admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way, everything
good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become catholic.
Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it?
But there are two ways in which he may express himself,--through
speech and through silence,--both of them sacred alike. Which of these
we will use on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too
surely fraught with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of

arbitrary prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that
I have adopted only another kind of silence.
[Illustration]

II.
SALEM.
Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand
Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once
transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different
kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers, that
an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a man
who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he
died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years
before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of
the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects;
almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations,
opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action, these
changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold
between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable
space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne
then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of Parnell
which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: "A poet
while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much
attention.... When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to
investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning are
past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian splendor."
The bustle of American life certainly does away with "the dews of
morning" very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to
reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the century.
But there are resources for doing so. To begin with, we shall view
Salem as it is. Vigorous and thriving still, the place has fortunately not
drifted so far from its moorings of seventy