NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

INTRODUCTION.

T was Hawthorne's wont to keep note-books, in

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which he recorded his observations and reflections; sometimes he spoke in them of himself, his plans, and his prospects. He began the practice early, and continued it through life, and after his death selections from these note-books were published in six volumes, under the titles: Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In these books, and in prefaces which appear in the front of the volumes containing his collected stories, one finds many frank expressions of the interest which Hawthorne took in his work, and the author appeals very ingenuously to the reader, speaking with an almost confidential closeness of his stories and sketches. Then the Note-Books contain the unwrought material of the books which the writer put out in his lifetime. One finds there the suggestions of stories, and frequently pages of

observation and reflection, which were afterward transferred, almost as they stood, into the author's works. It is a very interesting labor to trace Hawthorne's stories and sketches back to these records in his note-books, and to compare the finished work with the rough material. It seems, also, as if each reader was admitted into the privacy of the author's mind. That is the first impression, but a closer study reveals two facts very clearly. One is stated by Hawthorne himself in his preface to The SnowImage and other Twice- Told Tales: "I have been especially careful [in my Introductions] to make no disclosures respecting myself which the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and which I was not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I have taken facts which relate to myself [when telling stories] because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And, as for egotism, a person who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance and who pursues his researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as by the light of observation will smile at in

curring such an imputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the surface. These things hide the man instead of displaying him. You must make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the

whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits."

There has rarely been a writer of fiction, then, whose personality has been so absolutely separate from that of each character created by him, and at the same time has so intimately penetrated the whole body of his writing. Of no one of his characters, male or female, is one ever tempted to say, This is Hawthorne, except in the case of Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, where the circumstances of the story tempt one into an identification; yet all of Hawthorne's work is stamped emphatically with his mark. Hawthorne wrote it, is very simple and easy to say of all but the merest trifle in his collected works; but the world has yet to learn who Hawthorne was, and even if he had not forbidden a biography of himself, it is scarcely likely that any life could have disclosed more than he has chosen himself to reveal.

The advantage of this is that it leaves the student free to concentrate his attention upon the writings rather than on the man. Hawthorne, in the passage quoted above, speaks of himself as one "who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance," and this states, as closely as so short a sentence can, the controlling purpose and end of the author. The vitality of

Hawthorne's characters is derived but little from any external description; it resides in the truthfulness with which they respond to some permanent

and controlling operation of the human soul. Looking into his own heart, and always, when studying others, in search of fundamental rather than occasional motives, he proceeded to develop these motives in conduct and life. Hence he had a leaning toward the allegory, where human figures are merely masks for spiritual activities, and sometimes he employed the simple allegory, as in The Celestial Railroad. More often in his short stories he has a spiritual truth to illustrate, and uses the simplest, most direct means, taking no pains to conceal his purpose, yet touching his characters quietly or playfully with human sensibilities, and investing them with just so much real life as answers the purpose of the story. This is exquisitely done in The Snow-Image. The consequence of this "burrowing into the depths of our common nature been to bring much of the darker and concealed life into the movement of his stories. The fact of evil is the terrible fact of life, and its workings in the human soul had more interest for Hawthorne than the obvious physical manifestations. Since his observations are less of the men and women whom everybody sees and recognizes than of the souls which are hidden from most eyes, it is not strange that his stories should often lay bare secrets of sin, and that a somewhat dusky light should seem to be the atmosphere of much of his work. Now and then, especially when dealing with childhood, a warm, sunny glow spreads over the pages of his books; but the reader must be prepared for

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the most part to read stories which lie in the shadow of life.

There was one class of subjects which had a peculiar interest for Hawthorne, and in a measure affected his work. He had a strong taste for New England history, and he found in the scenes and characters of that history favorable material for the representation of spiritual conflict. He was himself the most New English of New Englanders, and held an extraordinary sympathy with the very soil of his section of the country. By this sympathy, rather than by any painful research, he was singularly acquainted with the historic life of New England. His stories, based directly on historic facts, are true to the spirit of the times in something more than an archæological way. One is astonished at the ease with which he seized upon characteristic features, and reproduced them in a word or phrase. Merely careful and diligent research would never be adequate to give the life-likeness of the images in Howe's Masquerade.

There is, then, a second fact discovered by a study of Hawthorne, that while one finds in the Note-Books, for example, the material out of which stories and sketches seem to have been constructed, and while the facts of New England history have been used without exaggeration or distortion, the result in stories and romances is something far beyond a mere report of what has been seen and tel. The charm of a vivifying imagination is the Gowing charm of Hawthorne's stories, and its