Woodberry's Hawthorne

IT was no uncertain calling and election which made Mr. George Edward Woodberry the biographer of Hawthorne.¹ Fifteen years ago, in his Life of Edgar Allan Poe in the same series, Mr. Woodberry showed himself to be a skillful architect of biography, a just and singularly illuminating critic; but in the present volume there are virtues not conspicuously evident in the treatment of Poe. There is, to be sure, less fruitage here of the painstaking and happily rewarded research so notable in the Poe, but this was scarcely either possible or desirable. There was no melodramatic mystery in Hawthorne’s external life; and the journals of himself and his wife, with the ample records which have been composed by many of his friends, by his son-in-law, and by his son, leave few of the objective facts and incidents of his career unknown. Nevertheless, this latest biography has a distinction all its own, arising in part from the firm and incisive critical analysis, but yet more largely the result of a certain racy and indigenous sympathy between the moods and minds of men bred upon the same pinehung, history-haunted shore.

The account of the earlier fortunes of the Hawthorne family in America, and of the parentage and boyhood of the one great Hawthorne, is distinguished by a felicitous use of the significant detail, giving everywhere evidence of that faculty which may not improperly be termed the biographical imagination, whereby the crude actual stuff of diverse dusty records is fused into the lively image of a man. But it is in the chapter upon the Chamber under the Eaves that Mr. Woodberry first impresses the reader with a sense of the intimacy of his understanding of Hawthorne’s temperament. The part played in the development of Hawthorne’s peculiar genius by his singular sequestration throughout a dozen of his most plastic years has already been noted by many discerning critics. Hawthorne himself wrote: “ If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs.” Taking this as his text, Mr. Paul Elmer More contributed to the Atlantic not long ago ² a remarkable essay upon The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wherein the heart of his mystery narrowly escapes the plucking out; but Mr. Woodberry’s is perhaps the first formal biography to make sufficiently “greatmention ” of this quaint, chrysalitic little room.

The color and import of the level years spent in this retirement are excellently stated in the following passage:

“He had no visitors and made no friends; hardly twenty persons in the town, he thought, were aware of his existence; but he brought home hundreds of volumes from the Salem Athenæum, and knew the paths of the woods and pastures and the way along the beaches and rocky points, and he had the stuff of his fantasy with which to occupy himself when nature and books failed to satisfy him. At first there must have been great pleasure in being at home, for he had not really lived a home life since he was fifteen years old, and he was fond of home; and, too, in the young ambition to become a writer and in his efforts to achieve success, if not fame, in fiction, and in the first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind, to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances; but as youth passed and manhood came, and yet Fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence became insufficient for him, — it grew burdensome as it showed barren, and depression set in upon him like a chill and obscure fog over the marshes where he walked. This, however, year dragging after year, was a slow process; and the kind of life he led, its gray and deadening monotone, sympathetic though it was with his temperament, was seen by him better in retrospect than in its own time.”

Yet it was precisely this brooding, monotonous life — so congruous with that essential tacitness of temperament which was perhaps Hawthorne’s chief inheritance from his Puritan ancestry — that determined the true bent and idiosyncrasy of his art. It was here that the high singularity of his nature was intensified, and it was in this creative and populous solitude that he acquired that glance which, on the rare occasions when he descended to meet with his fellows, “comprehended the crowd and penetrated the breast of the solitary man.” All this is developed by Mr. Woodberry very fully and effectively. It is well to hold it clearly in mind, for it bears upon an interesting critical dictum to be noticed hereafter, wherewith many honest readers will surely wish to join issue.

It is hard to conceive a greater change than that which came in the manner of Hawthorne’s life after his fortunate union with Sophia Peabody. Mr. Woodberry writes of the Hawthorne home at Concord with discretion and delicacy, — “a home essentially not of an uncommon New England type, where refined qualities and noble behavior flourished close to the soil of homely duties and the daily happiness of natural lives under whatever hardships; a home of friendly ties, of high thoughts within, and of poverty bravely borne.”

Except in his genial Italian days, Hawthorne was probably never happier than here. After the cloistered, shadowy years in Salem, with its sombre traditions and peculiar sophisticated provinciality, feeling himself always by contradictory impulses at once an alien and a true-born child of the soil, what must have been the joy deep rooted in Hawthorne’s life during those first months of perfect domestic contentment in the green countryside of Concord! Mr. Woodberry is particularly happy in his characterization of the atmosphere of Concord in those years, and in his statement of Hawthorne’s relation as an artist to its life: —

“That part of New England was not far from being a Forest of Arden, when Emerson might be met any day with a pail berrying in the pastures, or Margaret Fuller reclining by a brook, or Hawthorne on a high rock throwing stones at his own shadow in the water. There was a Thoreau — there still is — in every New England village, usually inglorious. The lone fisherman of the Isaac Walton type had become, in the New World, the wood-walker, the flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist. Hawthorne might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type on the nature side; and Hawthorne was to village what Thoreau was to the wild wood.”

It would be pleasant to dwell longer upon this graceful narrative of Hawthorne’s external life, but the details of his later career as a custom-house official, as a consul, as a man of letters, are already so well known to most readers that it is better to advert to the criticism and appreciation of his writings and his genius as an artist, in which, after all, the chief significance of the book lies.

In closing his chapter upon The Old Manse Mr. Woodberry takes occasion, to summarize critically Hawthorne’s work in the form of the short story. The essential character of the narratives in Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse is set forth with firmness and subtlety. Hawthorne’s peculiar use of the symbol of borrowed or attributed life, his preference for the processional in the construction of a story, and the distinctive flavor and effect of the tales are especially well stated. Of them Mr. Woodberry says finely : —

“A charm, a health, even a power, comes to the surface as one gazes, the power of peace in quiet places; and even a cultivated man, if he be not callous with culture, may feel its attractiveness, a sense that the tide of life grows full in the still coves as well as on all the sounding beaches of the world.”

But throughout this part of the discussion there is, as has been hinted, one presupposition about which there is room for a very considerable difference of opinion. To put it in the fewest possible words, this is that Hawthorne’s art, particularly as it is exhibited in the earlier tales, is rather labored than spontaneous with the spontaneity of genius of the first order. But in reporting the opinion of another, the fewest words are too often misleading. Mr. Woodberry must speak to his own brief. He says of Hawthorne: —

“The most surprising thing, however, is that his genius is found to be so purely objective ; he himself emphasized the objectivity of his art. From the beginning, as has been said, he had no message, no inspiration welling up within him, no inward life of his own that sought expression. He was not even introspective. He was primarily a moralist, an observer of life, which he saw as a thing of the outside, and he was keen in observation, cool, interested. If there was any mystery in his tales, it was in the object, not in the author’s breast; he makes no confessions either direct or indirect, — he describes the thing he sees. He maintained that his tales were perfectly intelligible, and he meant this to apply not only to style but to theme. It is best to cite his own testimony. His personal temper is indicated in the fragmentary phrase in the Note-Books; ‘ not that I have any love of mystery, but because I abhor it, ' he writes; and again in the oft-quoted passage, he describes perfectly the way in which his nature coöperated with his art to give the common ground of human sympathy, but without anything peculiar to himself being called into play. ”

There is truth in all this, cogently stated. No sensitive reader is likely to maintain that there is to be felt beneath the somewhat rigid structure of Hawthorne’s tales either the irrepressible welling of inspiration or the large rhythm which he feels in the work of the greatest masters. Still, is it quite just to say that Hawthorne had no inward life of his own which sought expression ? One feels that here, perhaps, Mr. Woodberry has carried the delicate affair of rationalizing genius to a dangerous limit. There is, to be sure, small trace of “lyricism ” to be found anywhere in Hawthorne’s writings. Nevertheless, many readers will continue to believe that there was a spring of inspiration “in the author’s breast, ” and that the practice of brooding introspection was not unknown to him in the Chamber under the Eaves. Indeed, some people will like to think that there was a queer streak of mystery and supernaturalism in Hawthorne’s temperament, — perhaps too fancifully referred to his atrabilious, witch-judging ancestry, — which as much as conscious and elaborate objectivity of method affected his art. This view is sustained by several of his friends who thought that, hidden beneath his shy reserves, broken by moods almost pagan in their sunny geniality, they detected something very like a heart’s mystery, “an inward life that sought expression.” Indeed, there be some who in reading the very NoteBooks which are here put in evidence, wherein Hawthorne himself expounds the externality of his art, will find in the singular supernaturalism or spirituality of the stray, casual jottings of his fantasy, there set down, a hint of the truth. It is true that Hawthorne merely describes the things he sees, but with what eyes shall one behold the dark depths of character and the mysteries of sin in the soul? Is it not, to use a hackneyed but precise “ term of art, ” by apperception ? And in such a process is not something more than an author’s “human sympathy,” something “peculiar to himself,” called into play ? It may be that all this distorts the natural emphasis of our critic’s thought ; nevertheless, some such qualification seems not unimportant. For after all how great in biography, as in art and in life, is the import of the indefinable and the vague!

We have paused so long over this chiaroscuro of criticism that we must pass Mr. Woodberry’s remarks upon Hawthorne’s longer works rather summarily. This is the less to be regretted because of the fact that it is in dealing with the short story that he has best defined Hawthorne’s art, showing by a beautiful demonstration how it is universalized by the abstract moral element in it, the chief result alike of Hawthorne’s Puritan descent and of his long solitary brooding upon the life of men’s souls.

Yet it will not do to overlook one powerful paragraph about the Scarlet Letter, which, while it is not at all the usual thing to say about that book, is likely to win a hearty assent from the judicious reader: —

“Its truth, intense, fascinating, terrible as it is, is a half-truth, and the darker half; it is the shadow of which the other half is light; it is the wrath of which the other half is love. A book from which light and love are absent may hold us by its truth to what is dark in life, but in the highest sense it is a false book. It is a chapter in the literature of moral despair, and is perhaps most tolerated as a condemnation of the creed which, through imperfect comprehension, it travesties.”

Here is a hint which may throw a ray of light down into that “ abyss ” in him of which Hawthorne sometimes spoke. By the inherited constitution and the acquired tendency of his mind Hawthorne was prone to ponder upon the great evil of sin ; his nature was too true and high to find consolation for such evil in that recognition of its necessity which often is laid, a flattering unction, to lesser souls. Yet by the subtle constraints of his inheritance he seemed precluded from rising to a full realization of the mercy which dissolves evil, which is doubtless in the last analysis the finest justice.

This comment has been so much concerned with the more sombre aspects of Hawthorne’s professional character, that the stick needs bending the other way to straighten it. Perhaps the most veracious impression of the essential sweetness of his temperament can be conveyed by quoting Mr. Woodberry’s delightful appreciation of his children’s books, — a department of his work too often overlooked in critical estimates:

“If to wake and feed the imagination and charm it, and fill the budding mind with the true springtime of the soul’s life in beautiful images, noble thoughts, and brooding moods that have in them the infinite suggestion, be success for a writer who would minister to the childish heart, few books can be thought to equal these; and the secret of it lies in the wondering sense which Hawthorne had of the mystical in childhood, of that element of purity in being which is felt also in his reverence for womanhood, and which, whether in child or woman, was typical of the purity of the soul itself, — in a word, the spiritual sense of life. His imagination, living in the child-sphere, pure, primitive, inexperienced, found only sunshine there, the freshness of the early world ; nor are there any children’s books so dipped in morning dews.”

The architectonic of Mr. Woodberry’s book is unusual among literary biographies. We miss the customary final attempt at definitive characterization of the subject’s personality and the estimation of his “place in literature.” Yet the book is doubtless more effective — it certainly is more artistic — as it stands. Any competent reader is sure to derive a just impression from the compactly wrought narrative with its sympathetic, luminously phrased comment, whereas not rarely the set picture leaves even capable readers to deplore

The true lover of Hawthorne will not care to go beyond Mr. Woodberry’s concluding sentence, which follows immediately upon the plain account of Hawthorne’s death: —

“His wife survived him a few years and died in London in 1871; perhaps even more than his genius the sweetness of his home life with her, as it is so abundantly shown in his children’s memories, lingers in the mind that has dwelt long on the story of his life.”

F. G.