The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne | Page 2

OF BEATRICE
CENCI STATUE OF PRAXITELES' RESTING FAUN TORRE
MEDIAVALLE DELLA SCIMMIA (HILDA'S TOWER) IN ROME

THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

CHAPTER I
SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800
The three earliest settlements on the New England coast were Plymouth,
Boston, and Salem; but Boston soon proved its superior advantages to
the two others, not only from its more capacious harbor, but also from
the convenient waterway which the Charles River afforded to the
interior of the Colony. We find that a number of English families, and
among them the ancestors of Gen. Joseph Warren and Wendell Phillips,
who crossed the ocean in 1640 in the "good ship Arbella," soon
afterward migrated to Watertown on Charles River for the sake of the
excellent farming lands which they found there. Salem, however,
maintained its ascendency over Plymouth and other neighboring

harbors on the coast, and soon grew to be the second city of importance
in the Colony during the eighteenth century, when the only sources of
wealth were fishing, shipbuilding, and commerce. Salem nourished
remarkably. Its leading citizens became wealthy and developed a social
aristocracy as cultivated, as well educated, and, it may also be added, as
fastidious as that of Boston itself. In this respect it differed widely from
the other small cities of New England, and the exclusiveness of its first
families was more strongly marked on account of the limited size of the
place. Thus it continued down to the middle of the last century, when
railroads and the tendency to centralization began to draw away its
financial prosperity, and left the city to small manufactures and its
traditional respectability.
The finest examples of American eighteenth century architecture are
supposed to exist in and about the city of Salem, and they have the
advantage, which American architecture lacks so painfully at the
present time, of possessing a definite style and character--edifices
which are not of a single type, like most of the houses in Fifth Avenue,
but which, while differing in many respects, have a certain general
resemblance, that places them all in the same category. The small old
country churches of Essex County are not distinguished for fine carving
or other ornamentation, and still less by the costliness of their material,
for they are mostly built of white pine, but they have an indefinable air
of pleasantness about them, as if they graced the ground they stand on,
and their steeples seem to float in the air above us. If we enter them on
a Sunday forenoon--for on week-days they are like a sheepfold without
its occupants--we meet with much the same kind of pleasantness in the
assemblage there. We do not find the deep religious twilight of past
ages, or the noonday glare of a fashionable synagogue, but a neatly
attired congregation of weather-beaten farmers and mariners, and their
sensible looking wives, with something of the original Puritan hardness
in their faces, much ameliorated by the liberalism and free thinking of
the past fifty years. Among them too you will see some remarkably
pretty young women; and young men like those who dug the trenches
on Breed's Hill in the afternoon of June 16, 1775. There may be
veterans in the audience who helped Grant to go to Richmond. Withal
there is much of the spirit of the early Christians among them, and

virtue enough to save their country in any emergency.
These old churches have mostly disappeared from Salem city and have
been replaced by more aristocratic edifices, whose square or octagonal
towers are typical of their leading parishioners,--a dignified class, if
somewhat haughty and reserved; but they too will soon belong to the
past, drawn off to the great social centres in and about Boston. In the
midst of Salem there is a triangular common, "with its never-failing
elms," where the boys large and small formerly played cricket--married
men too--as they do still on the village greens of good old England, and
around this enclosure the successful merchants and navigators of the
city built their mansion houses; not half houses like those in the larger
cities, but with spacious halls and rooms on either side going up three
stories. It is in the gracefully ornamented doorways and the delicate
interior wood-work, the carving of wainscots, mantels and cornices, the
skilful adaptations of classic forms to a soft and delicate material that
the charm of this architecture chiefly consists,--especially in the
staircases, with their carved spiral posts and slender railings, rising
upward in the centre of the front hall, and turning right and left on the
story above. It is said that after the year eighteen hundred the quality of
this decoration sensibly declined; it was soon replaced by more prosaic
forms, and now the tools no longer exist that can make it. Sir