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My teaching paid my board, leaving me free to study and to write. I never did any hack-work for the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone.
He spoke no word of French, German, or Italian, but he said emphatically, 'Make a fire in Mrs. Hawthorne's room. Worn out with his efforts, he turned to me and said, 'Do, Miss Mitchell, tell the servant what I want; your French is excellent!
Hawthorne's imagination, on the other hand, plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a dance through the moonlighted air of his intellect, that the thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing effects much more exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of having handled a splendid piece of silversmith's work.
Such was Hawthorne's internal life during his first month at Florence.
"I have been spending a week at Liverpool, where I rejoiced to hear that Hawthorne's appointment was settled, and that it was a valuable post; but I hear that it lasts for three years only. This is melancholy. "I have not seen Mrs. Stowe. I shall probably meet her somewhere or other when she comes to London. "I dare not ask after Mr. Longfellow.
I confess that a large portion of the interest of Adam Blair, to my mind, when once I had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of The Scarlet Letter, lay in noting its difference of tone. It threw into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element of cold and ingenious fantasy, its elaborate imaginative delicacy.
The result is that there is spiritual tonic in Hawthorne's fiction, while something almost miasmatic rises from Poe, dropping a kind of veil between us and the salutary realities of existence. If Poe be fully as gifted, he is, for this reason, less sanely endowed.
The only one of Hawthorne's preparatory sketches given to the public in which we see his genius in the "midmost heat of composition" supposes a household in which an old man keeps a crab- spider for a pet, a deadly poisonous creature; and in the same family there is a boy whose fortunes will be mysteriously affected in some manner by this dangerous insect.
I have said that in the United States at present authorship is a pedestal, and literature is the fashion; but Hawthorne's history is a proof that it was possible, fifty years ago, to write a great many little masterpieces without becoming known. He begins the preface to the Twice-Told Tales by remarking that he was "for many years the obscurest man of letters in America."
In Bunyan, who very early laid his hand on Hawthorne's intellectual history, we find a very fountain-head of allegory.
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