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American Literature, William P. Trent. Makers of English Fiction, W.J. Dawson. Leading American Novelists, J. Erskine. Studies and Appreciations, L.E. Gates. "An Estimate," Scribner's Magazine, 43: 69-84. "Unknown Quantity in Hawthorne's Personality," Current Literature, 42: 517-518. Biographical Stories for Children, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old Manse, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
He loved to avoid the great world when it was inconvenient, and to get a certain freedom outside of it; but once in the current, the manners of the Romans were his own. He reminded one sometimes of Hawthorne's saying that "in these days men are born in their clothes," although Dr. Holmes's conventions were more easily shuffled off than a casual observer would believe.
The latter had become conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a professional showman; and this malice-prepense sort of interest and picturesqueness always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the heart.
There was "Respect for the Sabbath Rewarded," in which a barber of Bath had become so poor because he would not shave his customers on Sunday, that he borrowed a half-penny to buy a candle Saturday night to give light for a late customer, and was thus discovered to be the long-lost William Reed of Taunton, heir to many thousand pounds; "The Just Judge," who disguised himself as a miller and, obtaining a place on the jury, received only five guineas as a bribe when the others got ten, and who revealed himself as Lord Chief Justice Hale and tried the case over in his miller's clothing; Hawthorne's "The Town Pump;" Mrs.
We recognize the same style with which we are familiar in "The Scarlet Letter," but influenced by a change in Hawthorne's external impressions. It is a rare opportunity when the work of a great writer can be traced back to its first nebulous conception, as we trace the design of a pictorial artist to the first drawing that he made for his subject.
But Hawthorne's look was different from that of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means troubled; it was full of a dark repose.
Hawthorne is, like the presence of a few persons in this world, precious to me as an assurance of the good we all long for. I do not know your husband personally, but I care for him so much that I could well do the thought of him a passing reverence, like the young man who, I was told, uncovered his head as he passed Mr. Hawthorne's house.
It is unique; and if one were to choose a single tale, best representing Hawthorne's powers, methods, and successes, technically and temperamentally as well as in imaginative reach and spiritual appeal, it is by this he should be known.
He cannot expand without it." The success of "The Scarlet Letter" proved that all Hawthorne's genius required was a little moderate encouragement, not industry but opportunity. His pen, no longer slow and hesitating, moved freer and easier; the long pent-up flood of thoughts, emotions, and experiences had at length found an outlet; and the next three years were the most productive of his life.
We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his rather contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon Shelley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's work is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the truth, I think.
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