Told Tales" and in the second collection, "Mosses from an Old Manse," 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus "The Minister's Black Veil" is a sort of anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in "The Scarlet Letter." Humor. Letter." From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the position of surveyor of the custom-house of Salem. In the preface to "The Scarlet Letter" he sketched some of the government officials with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among the Berkshire Hills. Whatever obscurity may have hung over The "Scarlet Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early settlers of New England. He had always been drawn toward this part of American history, and in "Twice-Told Tales" had given some illustrations of it in "Endicott's Red Cross" and "Legends of the Province House." Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the elementary passions of human nature, and in its deep and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In "The Blithedale Romance" and "The Marble Faun" there is "The Blithe- Consulship at "The Marble Faun." "Our Old Home." the same parti carré, or group of four characters. In "The House of Seven Gables" there are five. The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued intensity than "The Scarlet Letter," but equally original, and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. "The Blithedale Romance," published in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne's "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife." In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the 'Wayside" property, which he retained until his death. But in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become president, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the romance of "The Marble Faun," 1860, the longest of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouqué's Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. "Our Old Home," a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation, had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for children, "The Wonder Book" and "Tangle- Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in a world of ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image in the stream were the more real. But this had little in common with the philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and he held kindly intercourse-albeit a silent man and easily bored-with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles of the new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among so many abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a campaign life of his friend Pierce. The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one side of the grounds of the Old Manse-which has the river at its back-runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of the Minute Man and the successor of “the rude bridge that arched the flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little Walden-" God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet Hawthorne's Hawthorne and the tran scendental ists. Service of Con cord to Amer ican letters. still their memory prevails to draw seekers after truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a few years since, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. 1. RALPH WALDO EMERSON: แ Nature"; แ "The American Scholar"; Literary Ethics"; "The Transcendentalist"; "The Over-soul"; "Address before the Cambridge Divinity School"; "English Traits"; "Representative Men"; "Poems." 2. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: "Excursions" den" "Wal ; "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers " ; แ Cape Cod"; The Maine Woods." 3. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: "Mosses from an Old Manse" ; "The Scarlet Letter"; "The House of the Seven Gables" ; "The Blithedale Romance"; "The Marble Faun"; "Our Old Home." 4. "Transcendentalism in New England." By O. B. New York: 1875. Frothingham. CHAPTER V. THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS-1837-1861. American colleges not commonly literary WITH few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small and poor, centers. and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters find little to attract them at the home of their alma mater, and seek by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performIn many cases the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of the country. The professors of literature ance. |