Hawthorne | Page 5

would perhaps be rather a dead-weight for any family to carry, and we venture to
imagine that the Hathornes were dull and depressed. They did what they could, however,
to improve their situation; they trod the Salem streets as little as possible. They went to
sea, and made long voyages; seamanship became the regular profession of the family.
Hawthorne has said it in charming language. "From father to son, for above a hundred
years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from
the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place
before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his
sire and grandsire. The boy also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin,
spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings to grow old and
die and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's grandfather, Daniel Hathorne,
is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer during
the war of Independence. His father, from whom he was named, was also a shipmaster,
and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise of his profession. He was carried off by a
fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy.
The boy's mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock almost
as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by our author's biographer as
a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an authority whom he quotes, as being "a minute
observer of religious festivals," of "feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the
poor lady in her Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number to celebrate; but
of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed the usual, and of Sabbaths even
more than the usual, proportion.
In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part of his boyhood,
as well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop has much to say about the ancient
picturesqueness of the place, and about the mystic influences it would project upon such
a mind and character as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and in
appreciating them everything depends upon the point of view. Mr. Lathrop writes for
American readers, who in such a matter as this are very easy to please. Americans have

as a general thing a hungry passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local
colour that they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of other
countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as yet, has left in the United
States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum
of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming rather
crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light of the sun seems fresh
and innocent, as if it knew as yet but few of the secrets of the world and none of the
weariness of shining; the vegetation has the appearance of not having reached its majority.
A large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things, and in the vividness of the present,
the past, which died so young and had time to produce so little, attracts but scanty
attention. I doubt whether English observers would discover any very striking trace of it
in the ancient town of Salem. Still, with all respect to a York and a Shrewsbury, to a
Toledo and a Verona, Salem has a physiognomy in which the past plays a more important
part than the present. It is of course a very recent past; but one must remember that the
dead of yesterday are not more alive than those of a century ago. I know not of what
picturesqueness Hawthorne was conscious in his respectable birthplace; I suspect his
perception of it was less keen than his biographer assumes it to have been; but he must
have felt at least that of whatever complexity of earlier life there had been in the country,
the elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a recognisable memento. He has made
considerable mention of the place, here and there, in his tales; but he has nowhere dilated
upon it very lovingly, and it is noteworthy that in The House of the Seven Gables, the
only one of his novels of which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed himself
of the opportunity to give a description of it. He had of course a filial fondness for it--a
deep-seated sense of connection with it; but he must have spent some very dreary years
there, and the two feelings, the