Hawthorne

Hawthorne

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Title: Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series)
Author: Henry James, Junr.
Release Date: June 12, 2006 [EBook #18566]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY

HAWTHORNE
BY
Henry James, JUNR.

London MACMILLAN AND CO 1879
* * * * *

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS
CHAPTER II.
EARLY MANHOOD
CHAPTER III.
EARLY WRITINGS
CHAPTER IV.
BROOK FARM AND CONCORD
CHAPTER V.
THE THREE AMERICAN NOVELS
CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND AND ITALY
CHAPTER VII.
LAST YEARS
* * * * *

HAWTHORNE.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS.
It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch the form rather of a
critical essay than of a biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the
reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited
measure the purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil and
uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly
deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal
genius and of equal eminence can have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes

of Note-Books illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an unagitated
fortune. Hawthorne's career had few vicissitudes or variations; it was passed for the most
part in a small and homogeneous society, in a provincial, rural community; it had few
perceptible points of contact with what is called the world, with public events, with the
manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours. Its literary incidents are not
numerous. He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and the
fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of
story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth
giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance of being
the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the
literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most
valuable example of the American genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary;
but Hawthorne was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to whom
his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a claim to have enriched
the mother-tongue, and, judging from present appearances, he will long occupy this
honourable position. If there is something very fortunate for him in the way that he
borrows an added relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the
general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator,
something almost touching in his situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that
we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honour of a representative
attitude--perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and
the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender
and unpretending, and the American world on the other is so vast and various and
substantial, that it might seem to the author of The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from an
Old Manse, that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of
a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side
of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the
flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to
produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in
motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers,
and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something
for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the
sum of what the world usually recognises, and in this modest nosegay the genius of
Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance.
His very simplicity has