HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL American romancer, was born at Salem (Mass.) on July 4, 1804, and died at Plymouth (N.H.) on May 19, 1864. He was the most distin guished craftsman of the New England school of letters. His quiet life, wholly detached from the major activities of the times, was largely given over to brooding solitude. Brought up in the old seaport town, and returning there to live for long periods of time, he was a child of the Salem eclipse. The Salem that nourished his imagination was already living on its memories—memories that ran back to the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Col ony, and were darkened by a waning prosperity. The seat of government early passed to Boston and with its passing a deep provincialism settled on the countryside that came to sinister expression in the unhappy witch-craft persecutions. In the 18th century the town enjoyed a temporary prosperity from overseas commerce, and thrifty sea-captains built dignified houses out of the profits of the China trade. Then came a swift decline, the passing of commerce to other ports, and a musty quiet about the wharves.
Of this grim decay the Hathorne family—the "w" was in serted in the name by Nathaniel in early manhood—might well seem a striking symbol to one who inherited only the shadow of its former dignity. For a time the Hathorne family were impor tant members of the local gentry but later the family fortunes declined and the Hathornes slipped from their proud position. "From father to son, for above ioo years, they followed the sea;" but they amassed no wealth and built no great house in Salem. Capt. Nathaniel Hathorne, father of the novelist, married Elizabeth Clark Manning, daughter of a neighbour, but a few years later he died, leaving his wife and three small children in meagre circumstances. It was a strange household in which the boy was reared, a sort of Puritan nunnery with the mother and daughters slipping wraith-like from room to room, fearful of every contact, given to solitude—a household infected with gloom, the natural spirits repressed, mirthless and passionless except for the one consuming passion of renunciation, yet enjoying a certain grim Puritan culture and sustained by a deep family pride that remembered greater days and would hide its genteel poverty from a critical world.
From such an upbringing Hawthorne got those mental char acteristics that set him so completely apart from his fellows—a strong pride, a sense of aloofness and alienation from the common interests, a suspicious, defensive hostility towards a world that ignored his timid gestures of rapprochement. A barrier slowly rose about his soul over which he was never willing or able to climb, and within this barrier he dwelt alone, sceptical, critical, keenly observant, weaving the threads of fancy into fantastic shapes, discovering obscure symbolisms in every substantial fact, and investing the children of his imagination with a rare ascetic beauty. From the solitude of those early years he never escaped. At nine he injured a foot and for months was shut up in the house with only crutches to help him about. At 14 he went with the family to Raymond, a wilderness hamlet in Maine, and there by the quiet waters of Sebago lake he dreamed and played alone. Three years later, in 1821, he was sent by his uncles to Bowdoin college, a raw little school at Brunswick (Me.), where he spent four years with little other profit than the making of two friend ships that were to endure through life—with Horatio Bridge who was to push him lovingly towards public recognition, and with Franklin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States, who was to send him to the American consulate at Liverpool and make possible his European experience.
Upon his graduation in 1825 he returned to Salem, where his manner of life was already predetermined. The passion of the artist was stirring within him, a passion somewhat pale and austere as became a child of Puritanism, but infused with a fine integrity; and under the compulsions of that passion he set himself to master the craft of the short story, till then scarcely practised in America. He slipped quietly back into the shadowy existence of the Herbert street house and the grim past of Salem with its tales of his Ha thorne ancestry. It was, he said, "the sensuous sympathy of dust for dust," a "strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment," that wove about him a net too strong to break. Twelve years he spent thus, serving a laborious apprenticeship to his art, without masters, learning the secret of smooth-flowing sentences, discovering how to weave harsh words into soft tapestries and throw about them an at mosphere of dark loveliness. It was an unhappy time, harassed by pride and self-depreciation and longing; but it taught him the art of creative selection, and endowed his pen with the gift of emotional unity. From the labours of those years little was sal vaged—Fanshawe, an abortive romance he later rejected, some fugitive stories in obscure magazines, some hack work, and at last 18 stories and sketches published in 1837 under the title Twice Told Tales. The little volume thus timidly offered to an indifferent public made scarcely a ripple ; yet certain of the stories, like "The Minister's Black Veil," were finished products of the art he had been perfecting during his 'prentice years, and prophetic of the path his maturer art was to follow.
It was while he was enjoying the modest reputation that came from the publication of his volume that he found the one great contentment of his life in his love for Sophia Peabody. The Pea bodys were old Salem stock that had got on but indifferently well till the family fortunes were taken in charge by the eldest daugh ter. Elizabeth Peabody was a capable woman, responsive to all the current social enthusiasms and aflame with the New England passion for learning. She was an abolitionist, a transcendentalist, an assistant to Bronson Alcott in the Temple school, and a sym pathetic friend to every Utopian dreamer of the times. On the removal of the family to Boston she set up a book-shop that soon became the unofficial headquarters of the transcendental move ment. From it was issued The Dial, as well as three volumes of Hawthorne's children's stories. It was here that Hawthorne came into intimate contact with the vigorous intellectual life of the New England Renaissance. He was not greatly influenced by the body of transcendental thought, and even less' sympathetic with the strident reform movements. He contemplated the current en thusiasms with a cool, detached scepticism that came to expres sion later in The Blithedale Romance. His opinion of civilization is somewhat mordantly suggested in The New Adam and Eve, but he considered the expectations of the Utopians to be ill founded and in the sardonic tale of Earth's Holocaust he satirized the en thusiasm of reformers. He was more concerned in securing a com petence than in refashioning civilization and accepted a post in the Boston customs house, but after 27 months' experience measuring coal, he invested his slender savings in the communistic settle ment at Brook farm, in West Roxbury, and in April 1841 took up his residence there. But he soon found communal living uncongenial, and the following spring he withdrew and in July married Sophia Peabody and settled in the Old Manse at Con cord. There were spent the three happiest years of his life, and the fruits of his somewhat indolent labours appeared in Mosses from an Old Manse, published in 1846, a collection of short stories that made no advance over the earlier work.
But the earnings of his pen were meagre and uncertain and his friends took advantage of a new Democratic administration to secure Hawthorne a post in the Salem customs house. In spite of such tales as The Snow Image, The Great Stone Face and Ethan Brand, the three years spent there were not fruitful, and it was a stroke of good fortune to be thrown out of his place by village politics. His creative period lay just ahead. He was 45 when he sat down to write a story that had long been haunting his mind and that kindled his imagination as no other was ever to do. Written with morose intensity and great diffidence, in the midst of harassing troubles, The Scarlet Letter was issued in April 185o. Its popular success was immediate and at last Haw thorne had ceased to be "the obscurest man of letters in America." With the flowering of his creative powers a new restlessness seized upon him. He quitted Salem with its depressing memories, removed to Lenox, then to West Newton, then back to Concord, where the family established itself at The Wayside. During the winter at Lenox he wrote at high pressure The House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851, and at West Newton, close to Brook Farm, The Blithedale Romance, published the next year. In he received the appointment to the Liverpool consulate, and he set forth on his long-delayed pilgrimage to the old world—a pil grimage that was to last seven years, four of them spent at Liver pool, a year and a half in Italy, and a year again in England, at Whitby and Redcar, and finally at Leamington, where in Novem ber 1859 he completed The Marble Faun, published early the next year under the English title Transformation. In the summer of 1860 he returned to The Wayside, somewhat regretfully quitting the old home that he had come to love without quite understand ing. Four years of life remained to him, but he accomplished little. The war came on, his health was breaking, and the work of writ ing wearied and depressed him. Septimius Felton, The Dolliver Romance and Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, are only rejected frag ments from an old man's workshop. From his note-books he sal vaged enough material for an unimportant volume entitled Our Old Home; but his work was done. The world he had known was being destroyed by the Civil War and in the midst of battles he quietly faded out of life.
Hawthorne's range as a creative artist was narrow, but within the self-imposed bounds his imagination played freely. He was the romancer of a grim Puritan past that both fascinated and re pelled him. He had thrown off the last vestige of Calvinistic dog ma, but he could not free his mind from the spectre of sin that haunted the waking hours of his ancestors. His speculations took their rise from an inherited ethicism. He resented the inhibitions of Puritan Hebraism, but he was unwilling to trust a frank Hellenism. The Scarlet Letter is not a Puritan document. As he meditated on the morals of the problem of Hester and Dimmesdale his inveter ate scepticism issued in revolutionary ethics that would have scan dalized his ancestors. Hester is a triumphant protest against a false Hebraism. From the long discipline of suffering she emerges enriched and ennobled. Though Hawthorne's concern is always with the ethical, only at rare moments does his imagination fuse with creative passion; more frequently it glows with a subdued light, playing lambently about the theme, clothing it in quaint or fantastic symbolism. Not a rich nature, he was gifted nevertheless with a luminous mind and a fine seriousness, and his work is marked by a subtle and distinguished craftsmanship. Cut off by solitude from a fruitful contact with society he dwelt over much with shadows ; yet in spite of the thin and tenuous quality of his themes he was as exquisite an embodiment of the con science-ridden Puritan mind as Emerson was of Puritan idealism.