Chapter 3

"Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those "insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not always of much moment." The suggestion of this tale we find in a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne in "The American Note Books" for 1837: "A story there passeth of an Indian King that sent unto Alexander a fair woman fed with aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally to destroy him." Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint of psychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed to fascinate Hawthorne. He let his imagination dwell upon it, and gradually evolved the story of a physician who made his own daughter the victim of a scientific experiment. In this tale, Mr. Brownell thinks, the narrative has no significance apart from the moral; and yet the moral is quite lost sight of in the development of the narrative, which might have been more attractive if told simply as a fairy tale. This is quite representative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moral to "Rappacini's Daughter." But there are a number of parallels and applications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstain from making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded of Mithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons by their daily employment. The doctor's theory, that every disease can be cured by the use of the appropriate poison, suggests the aconite and belladonna of the homeopathists and their motto, _similia similibus curantur_. Again we think of Holmes's novel "Elsie Venner," of the girl impregnated with the venom of the rattlesnake, whose life ended when the serpent nature died out of her; just as Beatrice, in Hawthorne's story, is killed by the powerful antidote which slays the poison. A very obvious incidental reflection is the cruelty of science, sacrificing its best loved object to its curiosity. And may we not turn the whole tale into a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnatural rearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfitting the victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous?

The lure of the symbolic and the marvelous tempted Hawthorne constantly to the brink of the supernatural. But here his art is delicate. The old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition for modern credulity. The modern ghost is a "clot on the brain." Recall the ghosts in Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"--just a suspicion of evil presences. The true interpretation of that story I have sometimes thought to be, that the woman who saw the phantoms was mad. Hawthorne is similarly ambiguous. His apparently preternatural phenomena always admit of a natural explanation. The water of Maule's well may have turned bitter in consequence of an ancient wrong; but also perhaps because of a disturbance in the underground springs. The sudden deaths of Colonel and Judge Pyncheon may have been due to the old wizard's curse that "God would give them blood to drink"; or simply to an inherited tendency to apoplexy. _Did_ Donatello have furry, leaf-shaped ears, or was this merely his companions' teasing? Did old Mistress Hibben, the sister of Governor Bellingham of Massachusetts, attend witch meetings in the forest, and inscribe her name in the Black Man's book? Hawthorne does not say so, but only that the people so believed; and it is historical fact that she was executed as a witch. Was a red letter A actually seen in the midnight sky, or was it a freak of the aurora borealis? What did Chillingworth see on Dimmesdale's breast? The author will not tell us. But if it was the mark of the Scarlet Letter, may we not appeal to the phenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on natural grounds--what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having become mesmerism or hypnotism in the nineteenth.

Fifty years after his death, Hawthorne is already a classic. For even Mr. Brownell allows him one masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter" is his _chef-d'oeuvre_. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some of his inferior works; and I think he was right in preferring "The House of the Seven Gables," as more fully representing all sides of his genius. The difference between the two is the difference between tragedy and romance. While we are riding the high horse of criticism and feeling virtuous, we will concede the superiority of the former _genre_; but when we give our literary conscience the slip, we yield ourselves again to the fascination of the haunted twilight.

The antique gabled mansion in its quiet back street has the charm of the still-life sketches in the early books, such as "Sights from a Steeple," "A Rill from the Town Pump," "Sunday at Home," and "The Toll-gatherer's Day." All manner of quaint figures, known to childhood, pass along that visionary street: the scissors grinder, town crier, baker's cart, lumbering stage-coach, charcoal vender, hand-organ man and monkey, a drove of cattle, a military parade--the "trainers," as we used to call them. Hawthorne had no love for his fellow citizens and took little part in the modern society of Salem. But he had struck deep roots into the soil of the old witch town, his birthplace and the home of generations of his ancestors. Does the reader know this ancient seaport, with its decayed shipping and mouldering wharves, its silted up harbor and idle custom-house, where Hawthorne served three years as surveyor of the port? Imposing still are the great houses around the square, built by retired merchants and shipmasters whose fortunes were made in the East India trade: with dark old drawing-rooms smelling of sandalwood and filled with cabinets of Oriental curiosities. Hawthorne had little to do with the aristocracy of Salem. But something of the life of these old families may be read in Mrs. Stoddard's novel "The Morgesons,"--a book which I am perpetually recommending to my friends, and they as perpetually refusing to read, returning my copy after a superficial perusal, with uncomplimentary comments upon my taste in fiction.

Hawthorne's academic connections are of particular interest. It is wonderful that he and Longfellow should have been classmates at Bowdoin. Equally wonderful that Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Mosses" should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse at Concord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and in how narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was a little country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twenty years old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among the pine stumps. Hawthorne's class--1825--graduated but thirty-seven strong. And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college but belonged to different sets. And twelve years afterward, when Longfellow wrote a friendly review of "Twice-Told Tales" in _The North American Review_, his quondam classmate addressed him in a somewhat formal letter of thanks as "Dear Sir." Later the relations of the two became closer, though never perhaps intimate. It was Hawthorne who handed over to Longfellow that story of the dispersion of the Acadian exiles of Grandpré, which became "Evangeline": a story which his friend Conolly had suggested to Hawthorne, as mentioned in "The American Note Books." The point which arrested Hawthorne's attention was the incident in the Bayou Teche, where Gabriel's boat passes in the night within a few feet of the bank on which Evangeline and her company are sleeping.

This was one of those tricks of destiny that so often engaged Hawthorne's imagination: like the tale of "David Swan" the farmer's boy who, on his way to try his fortune in the city, falls asleep by a wayside spring. A rich and childless old couple stop to water their horse, are taken by his appearance and talk of adopting him, but drive away on hearing someone approaching. A young girl comes by and falls so much in love with his handsome face that she is tempted to waken him with a kiss, but she too is startled and goes on. Then a pair of tramps arrive and are about to murder him for his money, when they in turn are frightened off. Thus riches and love and death have passed him in his sleep; and he, all unconscious of the brush of the wings of fate, awakens and goes his way. Again, our romancer had read the common historical accounts of the great landslide which buried the inn in the Notch of the White Mountains. The names were known of all who had been there that night and had consequently perished--with one exception. One stranger had been present, who was never identified: Hawthorne's fancy played with this curious problem, and he made out of it his story of "The Ambitious Guest," a youth just starting on a brilliant career, entertaining the company around the fire, with excited descriptions of his hopes and plans; and then snuffed out utterly by ironic fate, and not even numbered among the missing.

Tales like these are among the most characteristic and original of the author's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we call it Hawthornish. "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," is Hawthornish; so is "Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow"; or Balzac's "Peau de Chagrin"; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne, like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; or Edward Bellamy's "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"--a process for ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things--a modern water of Lethe. Even some of James's early stories like "The Madonna of the Future" and "The Last of the Valerii," as well as Mr. Howells's "Undiscovered Country," have touches of Hawthorne.

Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow townsmen for some years at Concord, and held each other in high regard. One was a philosophical idealist: the other, an artist of the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank, or its image in the stream was the more real. But they took no impress from one another's minds. Emerson could not read his neighbor's romances. Their morbid absorption in the problem of evil repelled the resolute optimist. He thought the best thing Hawthorne ever wrote was his "Recollections of a Gifted Woman," the chapter in "Our Old Home" concerning Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare, whom Hawthorne befriended with unfailing patience and courtesy during his Liverpool consulship.

Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emerson in the introduction to "Mosses from an Old Manse," and even paid him the honor of quotation, contrary to his almost invariable practice. I cannot recall a half dozen quotations in all his works. I think he must have been principled against them. But he said he had come too late to Concord to fall under Emerson's influence. No risk of that, had he come earlier. There was a jealous independence in Hawthorne which resented the too close approach of an alien mind: a species of perversity even, that set him in contradiction to his environment. He always fought shy of literary people. During his Liverpool consulship, he did not make--apparently did not care to make--acquaintance with his intellectual equals. He did not meet Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade, George Eliot, or any other first-class minds. He barely met the Brownings, but did not really come to know them till afterwards in Italy. Surrounded by reformers, abolitionists, vegetarians, comeouters and radicals of all gospels, he remained stubbornly conservative. He held office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaign life of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran for President. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made the gallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was a blood-stained fanatic and justly hanged.

This conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do anything directly to improve the condition of things. God will bring about amendment in his own good time. And this fatalism again is subtly connected with New England's ancestral creed--Calvinism. Hawthorne--it has been pointed out a hundred times--is the Puritan romancer. His tales are tales of the conscience: he is obsessed with the thought of sin, with the doctrines of foreordination and total depravity. In the theological library which he found stowed away in the garret of the Old Manse, he preferred the seventeenth-century folio volumes of Puritan divinity to the thin Unitarian sermons and controversial articles in the files of _The Christian Examiner_. The former, at least, had once been warm with a deep belief, however they had now "cooled down even to the freezing point." But "the frigidity of the modern productions" was "inherent." Hawthorne was never a church-goer and adhered to no particular form of creed. But speculatively he liked his religion thick.

The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan, The songs that dared to go Down searching through the abyss of man, His deeps of conscious woe--

spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberal Christianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm, not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, but attracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and by the interesting varieties of human nature there assembled: literary material which he used in "The Blithedale Romance." He complains slyly of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows (though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only a symbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of any kind).

Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irving _plus_ something of his own. The resemblances and differences between Poe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physical horror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while once only--in the story entitled "William Wilson"--Poe enters that field of ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the descriptions, cut out the reflections, _coupez vos phrases_. Hawthorne's style was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure--"fine old leisure," whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On the walls of his study at the "Wayside" was written--though not by his own hand--the motto, "There is no joy but calm."

Sentiment and humor do not lie so near the surface in Hawthorne as in Irving. He had a deep sense of the ridiculous, well shown in such sketches as "P's Correspondence" and "The Celestial Railroad"; or in the description of the absurd old chickens in the Pyncheon yard, shrunk by in-breeding to a weazened race, but retaining all their top-knotted pride of lineage. Hawthorne's humor was less genial than Irving's, and had a sharp satiric edge. There is no merriment in it. Do you remember that scene at the Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break into a dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join with them? The author meant this to be a burst of wild mænad gaiety. As such I do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it. It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible scrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler.

Henry James says that Hawthorne's stories are the only good American historical fiction; and Woodberry says that his method here is the same as Scott's. The truth of this may be admitted up to a certain point. Our Puritan romancer had certainly steeped his imagination in the annals of colonial New England, as Scott had done in his border legends. He was familiar with the documents--especially with Mather's "Magnalia," that great source book of New England poetry and romance. But it was not the history itself that interested him, the broad picture of an extinct society, the _tableau large de la vie_, which Scott delighted to paint; rather it was some adventure of the private soul. For example, Lowell had told him the tradition of the young hired man who was chopping wood at the backdoor of the Old Manse on the morning of the Concord fight; and who hurried to the battlefield in the neighboring lane, to find both armies gone and two British soldiers lying on the ground, one dead, the other wounded. As the wounded man raised himself on his knees and stared up at the lad, the latter, obeying a nervous impulse, struck him on the head with his axe and finished him. "The story," says Hawthorne, "comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain.... This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight." How different is this bit of pathology from the public feeling of Emerson's lines:

Spirit that made those heroes dare To die and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

A PILGRIM IN CONCORD

Rura quae Liris quietâ Mordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis.

The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summer of 1879. The dust of late July lay velvet soft and velvet deep on all the highways; or, stirred by the passing wheel, rose in slow clouds, not unemblematic of the transcendental haze which filled the mental atmosphere thereabout.

Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorne and Thoreau had been dead many years--I saw their graves in Sleepy Hollow;--and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on Fire Island Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and Ellery Channing--Thoreau's biographer--was alive. Above all, the sage of Concord, "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit," still walked his ancient haunts; his mind in many ways yet unimpaired, though sadly troubled by aphasia, or the failure of verbal memory. It was an instance of pathetic irony that in his lecture on "Memory," delivered in the Town Hall, he was prompted constantly by his daughter.

It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival--the Fitchburg Railroad. One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, at worst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexington pike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that April day, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand. But I remembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs of Irish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad, consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made the intruder a part of herself. The embankment runs along one end of the pond, and the hermit only said:

It fills a few hollows And makes banks for the swallows, And sets the sand a-blowing And the black-berries growing.

Afterwards I witnessed, and participated in, a more radical profanation of these crystal waters, when two hundred of the dirtiest children in Boston, South-enders, were brought down by train on a fresh-air-fund picnic and washed in the lake just in front of the spot where Thoreau's cabin stood, after having been duly swung in the swings, teetered on the see-saws, and fed with a sandwich, a slice of cake, a pint of peanuts, and a lemonade apiece, by a committee of charitable ladies--one of whom was Miss Louisa Alcott, certainly a high authority on "Little Women" and "Little Men."

Miss Alcott I had encountered on the evening of my first day in Concord, when I rang the door bell of the Alcott residence and asked if the seer was within. I fancied that there was a trace of acerbity in the manner of the tall lady who answered my ring, and told me abruptly that Mr. Alcott was not at home, and that I would probably find him at Mr. Sanborn's farther up the street. Perspiring philosophers with dusters and grip-sacks had been arriving all day and applying at the Alcott house for addresses of boarding houses and for instructions of all kinds; and Miss Louisa's patience may well have been tried. She did not take much stock in the School anyway. Her father was supremely happy. One of the dreams of his life was realized, and endless talk and soul-communion were in prospect. But his daughter's view of philosophy was tinged with irony, as was not unnatural in a high-spirited woman who had borne the burden of the family's support, and had even worked out in domestic service, while her unworldly parent was transcendentalizing about the country, holding conversation classes in western towns, from which after prolonged absences he sometimes brought home a dollar, and sometimes only himself. "Philosophy can bake no bread, but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality" read the motto--from Novalis--on the cover of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, published at Concord in those years, under the editorship of Mr. William T. Harris; but bread must be baked, for even philosophers must eat, and an occasional impatience of the merely ideal may be forgiven in the overworked practician.

On Mr. Frank Sanborn's wide, shady verandah, I found Mr. Alcott, a most quaint and venerable figure, large in frame and countenance, with beautiful, flowing white hair. He moved slowly, and spoke deliberately in a rich voice. His face had a look of mild and innocent solemnity, and he reminded me altogether of a large benignant sheep or other ruminating animal. He was benevolently interested when I introduced myself as the first fruits of the stranger and added that I was from Connecticut. He himself was a native of the little hill town of Wolcott, not many miles from New Haven, and in youth had travelled through the South as a Yankee peddler. "Connecticut gave him birth," says Thoreau; "he peddled first her wares, afterwards, he declares, his brains."