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I remain very sincerely yours, Of the discussions about "Monte Beni" I remember hearing a good deal, as my mother laughingly rehearsed passages in letters and reviews which scolded about Hawthorne's tantalizing vagueness and conscienceless Catholicity.
Beside the few chance visitors there were city friends occasionally, figures quite unknown to the village, who came preceded by the steam shriek of the locomotive, were dropped at the gate-posts, and were seen no more. The owner was as much a vague name to me as any one. "During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord, I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's.
Garland's literary work, and he told me how he was first led to write by reading Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse. This book so delighted him that he wanted to write essays like it for a living, and he practised at this during the intervals of his school-teaching and studying for years. It was not until he was older that he attempted fiction or poetry.
I need not enlarge upon the similar drift of these two extracts; still less mark the matured, detailed, and vividly human and dramatic superiority of Hawthorne's use of the element common to both. The incident of Dr. Perhaps Dr. Worcester made the book known to him; and he would not be at a loss to find endless entertainment there. It was in November, 1813, that the accident at ball disabled him.
Studies in American Literature, Charles Noble. Introduction to American Literature, Brander Matthews. "Gloom and Cheer in Hawthorne," Critic, 45: 28-36. "Hawthorne and his Circle," Nation, 77: 410-411. "Hawthorne as seen by his Publisher," Critic, 45: 51-55. "Hawthorne from an English Point of View." Critic, 45: 60-66. "Hawthorne's Last Years," Critic, 45: 67-71.
Who, then, had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the crassness, of Mrs. Hawthorne's determination to leave the ball early.
In spite of its unpleasant associations with spiders and blood-stains, "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret" is one of the most interesting of Hawthorne's works, containing much of his finest thought and most characteristic description.
If there is this amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished woman of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady of eminence whom there is any sign of his having known, that she was proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook Farm sprung, and that she had a miserable end and a watery grave if these are facts to be noted on one side, I say; on the other, the beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and picturesque temperament and physical aspects, offers many points of divergence from the plain and strenuous invalid who represented feminine culture in the suburbs of the New England metropolis.
It is commonly true of Hawthorne's romances that the interest centres in one strongly defined protagonist, to whom the other characters are accessory and subordinate, perhaps we should rather say a ruling Idea, of which all the characters are fragmentary embodiments.
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.
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