Hawthorne | Page 4

the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to
dust." Readers of The House of the Seven Gables will remember that the story concerns
itself with a family which is supposed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against
one of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the world, whom
this ill-advised ancestor had been the means of bringing to justice for the crime of
witchcraft. Hawthorne apparently found the idea of the history of the Pyncheons in his
own family annals. His witch-judging ancestor was reported to have incurred a
malediction from one of his victims, in consequence of which the prosperity of the race
faded utterly away. "I know not," the passage I have already quoted goes on, "whether
these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for
their cruelties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them
in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I have heard, and as
the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race for some time back would argue to
exist--may be now and henceforth removed." The two first American Hathornes had been
people of importance and responsibility; but with the third generation the family lapsed
into an obscurity from which it emerged in the very person of the writer who begs so
gracefully for a turn in its affairs. It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the Introduction
to The Scarlet Letter, that from the original point of view such lustre as he might have
contrived to confer upon the name would have appeared more than questionable.
"Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient
retribution for his sins that after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the family tree,
with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler
like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no
success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by
success, would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. 'What is
he?' murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. 'A writer of story-books!
What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to
mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler!' Such are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires
and myself across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits
of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine."
In this last observation we may imagine that there was not a little truth. Poet and novelist
as Hawthorne was, sceptic and dreamer and little of a man of action, late-coming fruit of
a tree which might seem to have lost the power to bloom, he was morally, in an
appreciative degree, a chip of the old block. His forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for
conscience' sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted the

imagination of their so-called degenerate successor. The Puritan strain in his blood ran
clear--there are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe, which might
almost have been written by the grimmest of the old Salem worthies. To him as to them,
the consciousness of sin was the most importunate fact of life, and if they had undertaken
to write little tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective, could hardly have
been more frequent in their pages than in those of their fanciful descendant. Hawthorne
had moreover in his composition contemplator and dreamer as he was, an element of
simplicity and rigidity, a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might have
kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms with him than he admits to be possible.
However little they might have appreciated the artist, they would have approved of the
man. The play of Hawthorne's intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was
firm and rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper was not degenerate.
The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he speaks of in regard to the fortunes of his
family is an allusion to the fact that several generations followed each other on the soil in
which they had been planted, that during the eighteenth century a succession of
Hathornes trod the simple streets of Salem without ever conferring any especial lustre
upon the town or receiving, presumably, any great delight from it. A hundred years of
Salem