A Study of Hawthorne | Page 8

either haunted or sober.
Thus, all through Salem, you encounter a perverse fate which will not
let you be alone with the elusive spirit of the past. Yet, on reflection,
why should it? This perverse fate is simply the life of to-day, which has
certainly an equal right to the soil with that of our dreams and
memories. And before long the conflict of past and present thus
occasioned leads to a discovery.
In the first place, it transpires that the atmosphere is more favorable

than at first appears for backward-reaching revery. The town holds its
history in reverence, and a good many slight traces of antiquity, with
the quiet respect maintained for them in the minds of the inhabitants,
finally make a strong cumulative attack on the imagination. The very
meagreness and minuteness of the physical witnesses to a former
condition of things cease to discourage, and actually become an
incitement more effective than bulkier relics might impart. The
delicacy of suggestion lends a zest to your dream; and the sober streets
open out before you into vistas of austere reminiscence. The first night
that I passed in Salem, I heard a church-bell ringing loudly, and asked
what it was. It was the nine-o'clock bell; and it had been appointed to
ring thus every night, a hundred years ago or more. How it reverberated
through my mind, till every brain-cell seemed like the empty chamber
of a vanished year! Then, in the room where I slept, there was rich and
ponderous furniture of the fashion of eld; the bed was draped and
canopied with hangings that seemed full of spells and dreamery; and
there was a mirror, tall, and swung between stately mahogany posts
spreading their feet out on the floor, which recalled that fancy of
Hawthorne's, in the tale of "Old Esther Dudley," [Footnote: See also
American Note-Books, Vol. I.; and the first chapter of The House of
the Seven Gables.] about perished dames and grandees made to sweep
in procession through "the inner world" of a glass. Such small matters
as these engage the fancy, and lead it back through a systematic review
of local history with unlooked-for nimbleness. Gradually the mind gets
to roving among scenes imaged as if by memory, and bearing some
strangely intimate relation to the actual scenes before one. The drift of
clouds, the sifting of sudden light from the sky, acquire the import of
historic changes of adversity and prosperity. The spires of Salem, seen
one day through a semi-shrouding rain, appeared to loom up through
the mist of centuries; and the real antiquity of sunlight shone out upon
me, at other times, with cunning quietude, from the weather-worn
wood of old, unpainted houses. Every hour was full of yesterdays.
Something of primitive strangeness and adventure seemed to settle into
my mood, and the air teemed with anticipation of a startling event; as if
the deeds of the past were continually on the eve of returning. With all
this, too, a certain gray shadow of unreality stole over everything.

Then one becomes aware that this frame of mind, produced by actual
contact with Salem, is subtly akin to the mood from which so many of
Hawthorne's visions were projected. A flickering semblance, perhaps,
of what to him must have been a constant though subdued and dreamy
flame summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but
from this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a
hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence
itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If
you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and
the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate
suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts of
the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly from
the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the founders
themselves.
John White, the English Puritan divine, who, with the "Dorchester
Adventurers," established the first colony at Cape Ann, was moved to
this by the wish to establish in Massachusetts Bay a resting-place for
the fishermen who came over from Dorchester in England, so that they
might be kept under religious influences. This was the origin of Salem;
for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called
Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they
supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it
"proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by
interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem,
"for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in
it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond,