EARLY PERIOD OF AMERICAN LITERATURE1. EARLY PERIOD OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 2. Mather Byles; Joseph Green; Joseph Stansbury; Francis Hopkinson; John Trumbull; 3. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW; 4. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER; WALT WHITMAN; NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AMERICAN LITERATURE The Pilgrim Fathers set foot on American soil ii the seventeenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth that America could claim a place of importance in the development of English literature. The reason for this is twofold. In the first place, great literature is determined largely by a nation's leisure and. prosperity; and in studying the literature of our own country we have seen how that the great periods of our literature synchronise with our freedom from politics and international worries. While a people is fighting for its physical well-being it has no time for letters, and the old Puritan settlers were more concerned with felling trees than with making lyrics. They were content to live epics before they wrote them; for the stimulus of Art sank into insignificance before the stimulus of the encroaching Indian. In the second place, Puritanism at best is not a favourable soil for the blossoming of literary art. The Puritan did not interest himself with the sensuous manifestations of life; he shunned it. The world for him was not a place of glorious adventure, but rather a place of tribulation, a preparation for another and better world. In England there are a few names, notably Milton and Bunyan, who showed, given leisure and opportunity in the one case, and spiritual turmoil in the other, what Puritanism could do for letters. Yet Milton, after all, belonged partly to the Renascence, and Bunyan's literary work was a happy accident. So if the Puritans, as a body, in England did little, the Puritans across the Atlantic were likely to do still less, for they represented the most uncompromising of their kind. Cromwell had some feeling for the fine arts; but many of his followers hated the arts as they hated loose living, and in New England there was no Puritan reaction such as came over England at the time of the Restoration. This being the case, we need not be surprised to find that the first book to be printed in New England is a hymn book—the Bay Psalm Book; and that the first notable writers were religious, like Jonathan Edwards. Puritanism, when it does express itself in literature, instinctively does so in terms of religion; but there was another and subsidiary reason for the religious note in New England letters. Among the settlers the one class the least bound down to manual labour was the clergy. They, at any rate, enjoyed comparative immunity from the arduous work of colonisation. They, therefore, are the first to break the silence. What are the centres from which American literature has sprung? Roughly speaking, we may say two — one at Virginia, the other at Massachusetts. Virginia was the home largely of the better-bred settler, Massachusetts of the more humbly bred—or, as Professor Trent has well put it, "Virginia may be regarded as an extension of county England with its Cavalier qualities, and Massachusetts as an extension or rather a culmination of borough England with its Puritan qualities." Puritanism affected both, but it is much less marked in Virginia than in. Massachusetts. The indifferent ballads of gentlemen adventurers, and the poorer doggerel of clerical Puritans that served as somewhat doubtful diversions for the early colonists, need not detain us here. Their character may be gathered from the lines of Cotton Mather, on one of these painstaking craftsmen: "He came to guide his flock and feed his lambs By words, works, prayers, psalms, alms and. anagrams"; and their rhythmic charm and fancy from couplet of Mrs. Bradstreet (1612-1072), one of their most ambitious verse writers—intended as a tribute (?) to Queen Elizabeth: "'Mongst hundred hecatombs of roaring verse Mine bleating stands before thy royal hearse";. American humour was obviously still a thing of the future! Nor is there any material improvement in American verse during the major part of the eighteenth century. During this period New England was engaged in a fierce struggle against the Indians and the French, a struggle culminating in the success of the New Englander and the downfall of French power. The moral grit that stood its possessor in better stead as citizens than as literary artists is still undiminished, and a stern Calvinism broods over the theology. The influence of Pope percolated through during these years, and had some chastening effect upon the verse writers; but if we sample the work of two of the most illustrious names of the time—Rev. Mather Byles (1707-1788) and Joseph Green (1706-1780)—we shall see how very far behind not merely Pope, but lesser men such as Prior and Gay, these Boston worthies were. One change, however, may be noted. A lighter style is creeping unmistakably into American letters. American humour is dawning; though the dawn is somewhat grey. Yet the intense seriousness of the Puritan outlook is touched with a livelier and more flippant spirit. The satirical vigour of Benjamin Church (b. 1739), and the agreeable Odes of Nathaniel Evans (1742-1767), mark, at any rate, a progress in the art of verse. The period of the Revolution is more provocative of prose than of verse; but the verse, such as it is, exhibits a higher literary quality than had hitherto been shown. Joseph Stansbury (1760-1809), a loyalist, proved a humorous and effective singer. Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791) is a pleasant ballad writer—by fits and starts—notably his Battle of the Kings, while his son Joseph is familiar through his well-known lyric Hail, Columbia! On a higher plane is Philip Freneau (1752-1832), of Huguenot stock, a patriotic poet of genuine power, who turned his eventful and stormy life to literary account. A good illustration of his work may be found in his verses, The Indian Burying-Ground. John Trumbull (1750-1831) is another figure of note—a precocious youth of good family, who soon showed a marked aptitude for rough and ready satire in the vein of Butler, and whose poem, McFingal, with its Hudibrastic methods, proved extremely to the taste of his countrymen. With Trumbull is associated Timothy Dwight (1752— 1817), also somewhat of a youthful prodigy, but more artificial and imitative in his style, and Joel Barlow (1764-1812), who had a stirring and adventurous career; he showed skill in the treatment of the heroic couplet, and is best remembered for his mock-heroic Hasty Pudding. During the Revolutionary period Philadelphia had been the literary centre of importance, and this primacy continued down to 1809. From the little crowd of undistinguished verse writers in this early post-Revolutionary period may be excepted William Clifton (1772-1799), who continued to uphold the forceful, satirical traditions of New England, proving in addition an agreeable song writer; and that versatile Bohemian, Robebt Paime (1773-1811). The period of apprenticeship to letters was about to close, and of vital poetic literature to start in the person of William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). Bryant, the son of a physician, was brought up in quiet, rural surroundings, where he could browse to his heart's content on Cowper and Wordsworth. His father, unlike many of his kind, indulged his eon's boyish excursions into verse, even to the questionable extent of publishing his satire on Jefferies, written when he was in his early teens. After a brief college course, he studied law—thus following the true biographical tradition of poets— with the youthful poet's customary lack of enthusiasm, and wrote his first important poem, Thanatopsis, a favourable specimen of what has been called "The Churchyard School." This poem appeared in the North American Review, 1817. In 1825 Bryant took up the editorship, at 2tfew York, of the Evening Post, and journalistic duties reduced his poetic output very considerably. Yet he continued to write verse from time to time —verse invariably dignified and reflective in its character, and, like Wordsworth, concerned with Nature and the primal qualities of men and women. He exercised a considerable influence with his countrymen as a poetic moralist, and if neveran object of warm affection or enthusiasm,was regarded with respect and sober admiration. He died in 1878. Bryant's blank verse is always workmanlike, sometimes, as in Thanatopsis, finely effective. Indeed, in these lines we have Bryant's muse at its happiest, with a sober beauty and easy mastery of its material. "So live that, when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night. Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."; Some of his shorter poems, idyllic, descriptive, hortatory, like The Death of the flower, The Crowded Street, and Oh, Mother of a Mighty Race, exhibit tender sympathy and noble patriotic feeling. But his genius seems the most fully expressed in his blank verse, for most of his rhymed verse just lacks that lyric warmth and sweetness which would have transformed it from good into great. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882) On February 27, 1807, Longfellow was born at Portland, Maine. His father, Stephen Longfellow, of good Yorkshire stock, was a shrewd and capable lawyer, who died in 1849; his mother, a gentle, loving woman, of romantic temperament, died suddenly in. 1851. The future poet was their second son — an amiable, sensitive, studious boy, with no interest in sports or any kind of exercise, save walking. In a sudden burst of youthful patriotism he looked forward to shouldering a rifle and fighting on behalf of his country, but his first and last expedition with a gun was into the Maine woods, for having there shot a robin, he returned home in tears, and never afterwards pulled a trigger. Having finished his schooling at Portland Academy, Henry, accompanied by his elder brother, Stephen, entered Bowdoin College, where for three years the tall, slender, blue-eyed youth ranked high in scholarship. His father was aiming to make him a lawyer, but the youth's opinion was that" I do not, for my own part, imagine that such a coat would suit me.... I am altogether in favour of the farmer's life"; however, he shortly wrote again to his father, saying, "Of divinity, medicine, and law, I should choose the last. Whatever I do study ought to be engaged in with all my soul—for J will be eminent in something." Having graduated in 1825 and delivered s seven-minutes oration on "Native Writers," this promising young student was recommended for the proposed Chair of Modern Languages. With this end in view he studied in Europe for four years, returning to Bowdoin in 1830 to take up his duties. Another interest now enters his life. In 1831 he married Mary Storer Potter, an intelligent and beautiful girl he had known for some years; unfortunately their happiness was short-lived, for while on a Second tour in Europe in 1835 she fell ill in Holland and died. Shortly afterwards he returned to America and assumed the post of Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University in succession to Professor Ticknor, and having made his home in Craigie House, famous as the residence of George Washington, he settled down to steady, conscientious work. In 1833 he had published Coplas de Manrique, with an introductory essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain; and in 1834, OutreMer, a prose description of his European travels. His first important publication, Voices of the Night (1839), was a collection of poems several of which had made an earlier appearance in the Knickerbocker Magazine; this volume included The Psalm of Life, The Beleaguered City, and The Midnight Mass of the Dying Year. Hyperion, a prose romance, followed in the same year; the heroine Mary Ashburton, easily identified as Miss Frances Appleton, whom the author married in 1843. For eighteen years Longfellow lived a happy uneventful, busy life. He was successful and popular in his academic work, and winning fame as a poet, when his tranquil life was overshadowed by the tragic death of his second wife. Her dress of some light material, became accidentally ignited and she was burned to death. In 1868 Longfellow visited England and became the guest of Charles Dickens, and together they visited Landor at Bath. Longfellow was at all times fastidious as to his personal appearance, and Dickens in his whimsical way was unable to let an opportunity pass of making a humorous reference to the poet's weakness." McDowall the bootmaker, Beale the hosier, Laffin the trousers-maker, and Blackmore the coat-cutter," wrote Dickens tohim after his return to America," have all been at the point of death, but have slowly recovered. The medical gentlemen agreed that it was exhaustion occasioned by early rising—to wait upon you at those unholy hours!" Longfellow was a hard worker; he filled his post of professor at Harvard with honour until, finding the duties becoming irksome and wishing to devote his whole time to poetry, he resigned in 1864. He had published several volumes, among them: Poems on Slavery, written on the way home from England, and published in 1842. The world-famed Village Blacksmith had made its appearance in 1841 in Ballads and Poems. Longfellow's popularity, both in his country and others, has probably been rivalled only by that of Tennyson, and, as is the case with many very popular reputations, a reaction has set in, which threatens to do less than justice to a writer who, despite fluent mediocrities, has achieved some really fine and notable things. Many, moreover, who speak slightingly of Longfellow to-day, do so through memories of a few threadworn, hackneyed minor pieces that have been parodied to death, such as Excelsior, The Village Blacksmith, or The Psalm of Life. But it is as unfair to judge Longfellow by these as it would be to judge Tennyson by The May Queen, The Brook, or The Supposed Confession of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind. The first insistent impression conveyed to us by Longfellow's verse is its deft and delicate grace. Take, for instance, such illustrations as these: This of night: "Thou layest thy fingers on the lips of care, And they complain no more."; This of tardy inspiration: "Becalmed upon the sea of thought, / Still unattained the land it sought: My mind with loosely-hanging sails, / Lies waiting the auspicious gales."; Longfellow's briefer pieces throughout his long career ripple with graceful fancies; and if these are not always fresh enough to fill the "loosely-hanging sails," they are often sufficiently animated to give an agreeable vitality and dainty movement to the verse. After all, Longfellow's appeal lies chiefly in his intimate simplicity and tender humanity. He does not deal with recondite aspects of human life, but with the universal emotions of love, pity, faith, and hope. Whether in his domestic pictures, in his unpretentious moralities, his picturesque narratives, or his lyrics of everyday life, there is a direct and engaging friendliness and a sweet sanity of outlook that, though easily ridiculed, are matters for grateful remembrance. The very titles he gave to his collections of verse are eloquent of this homely simplicity— Voices of the Night, The Seaside and the Fireside, In the Harbour. And thus we come back to Longfellow's power of dealing with simple, human characteristics. His faults and limitations as a literary artist are clear enough —I am not concerned to dispute them. But Longfellow is emphatically not to be dismissed as some have tried to do, as merely a facile writer of commonplace sentimentalities. He was a versatile scholar who did much to develop the culture of young literary America; a vigorous ballad writer with peculiar force and charm when the sea is his subject; a narrative poet of abundant force and clarity; above all, a kindly and gracious personality, whose kindliness and graciousness diffused themselves over everything that he wrote. If not a great poet, he was a genuine one, with a power of swift and direct appeal to thousands whom our greater poets would have left cold. Longfellow had lived five years beyond the allotted span, when he was attacked by peritonitis, which hastened his death. He passed peacefully away on March 24, 1882, and was buried, amid falling snow, in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Cambridge. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892) The descendant of a long line of New England Quakers, John Greenleaf Whittier, the son of a farmer, was born on December 17, 1807, at East Haverhill, Massachusetts. His father's narrow means necessitated the boy's help inthe fields at an early age, so that his education, carried on only during the winter months, was extremely limited. Yet even at school he began to write verse, and it was a red-letter day in the history of the Whittiers when a volume of Burns' poems was brought to the farmstead, and lent to the boy, who devoured them eagerly. In 1827 he sent his first poem to the Free Press. The editor, William Lloyd Garrison, recognising that there was a future for the young poet, journeyed to Haverhill and suggested farther schooling. The farmer, however, was against “putting notions in the boy's head,” and said them was no money to spare for such a purpose. But the youth was not to be daunted. He took up shoemaking during the winter evenings, and by this means saved sufficient to pay for a six months' course at the new Haverhill Academy, where he was known by the name of "Uncle Toby." On his entrance in April 1827, which was also the inauguration of the Academy, Whittier wrote the dedicatory Ode. Following this course at the Academy, Whittier taught in the district school at Merrimac, to find the wherewithal for another six months' training at Haverhill. During these years he wrote considerably in prose and verse, then became editor of the Haverhill Gazette in succession to Mr. Thayer, and in six mouths had left the Gazette for the more important New England Review, in which were published over forty of his poems, among them The Frost Spirit, The City of the Plain, and The Vaudois Teacher. On the death of his father in 1831, Whittier was recalled to the farm, and much of his editorial work was carried on at home. But his health at this time began to give cause for anxiety, and for a time the newspaper work was abandoned. In this year (1831) was published the prose and verse Legends of New England, which he endeavoured afterwards to buy up and destroy. The subject nearest to Whittier's heart and which subsequently became his mission in life, was the crusade against the slave trade. Notwithstanding his Quaker ancestry, Whittier threw himself into the thick of the fight, but it was on the side of Freedom. It is interesting to note that although the citizens of Haverhill were opposed to his views as an Abolitionist, they nevertheless elected him as their representative in the State Legislature in 1835-36, but he declined a like honour in 1837. For twenty years Whittier, by his whole-hearted devotion to the Anti-Slavery Movement, was "shut out from the favour of booksellers and magazine editors," and the majority of his work appeared in the organs of those periodicals favourable to the Cause he had at heart, or those of which he was acting as editor. As one of the secretaries of the Philadelphia Convention in 1833 he assisted in drafting the Declaration of Principles of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and began his crusade with a pamphlet, Justice and Expediency, printed at his own expense in 1833, that made a considerable stir in political circles. He then became editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman. During the riots in Philadelphia, the pro-slavery mob burned his office and sacked the Pennsylvania Hall, a new building where the office of the paper was situated; however, Whittier managed to save some of his effects, and published his paper next day as if nothing had happened. In 1865 slavery virtually came to an end, at least so far as State recognition was concerned. Whittier had applauded or denounced every incident during the conflict; the gradual defection of Webster in 1850 from the Abolitionist party inspired his Ichabod. In 1857, at the time of the launching of the Atlantic Monthly, Whittier joined the staff, and for twenty years scarcely a number was published without a contribution from his pen. Never of robust health, overwork in youth and early manhood told its tale at the last. For years he was unable to write for even half an hour, without acute neuralgia and headache. In September 1892 he was seized with paralysis, and on December 7th he breathed his last, but conscious to the end. At his burial the greatest honour was accorded him, the City Government of Haverhill attended in a body, and many eulogistic speeches were made over his grave. WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, of yeoman stock. His father, a wood-cutter and carpenter, was a hardworking, kindly, but taciturn man, to whom theboy was a veritable thorn in the flesh, by reason of his wayward, self-willed, idle habits. His mother, of Dutch Quaker descent, was a loving, practical woman, whose unselfish disposition had a wonderful attraction, for those with whom she came into contact; to her the lad was ever affectionate and obedient. An elementary education at Brooklyn, whither the family removed about 1823, was all that could be secured for the boy; even this was brought to an end after a few years, when he was put to work in a lawyer's office; two years later the office stool was exchanged for the printing works. Having learned his trade, he started on a fresh experience. He took up teaching. In this he was both successful and popular, and a prime favourite with his scholars. In fact, his self-reliant, manly, and sunny nature was always singularly attractive to men, women, and children alike. He had ideas of his own on the subject of school punishments: his own procedure was to relate a history of the crime in the form of a story to the whole school. From teaching he turned to journalism. He had contributed to The Mirror, a high-class weekly journal, white he was at the printing works. In 1838 he started a weekly paper, the Long Islander, of which he became editor, printer, and publisher. While the paper was a novelty Whitman was an assiduous worker, but as the novelty wore off the Long Islander became more and more irregular in its appearance, until in a few months it ceased to exist so far as Walt Whitman was concerned. He then returned to teaching. In 1841 we see him in the role of compositor in the New World, and for twenty years a well-known figure among New York journalists. Until February 1849 Whitman was a stay-at-home, but a chance conversation interested him in the "magnetic South." Shortly afterwards he boarded a small steamer and journeyed as far as Mexico, to return after three months as editor of the Daily Eagle at Brooklyn. The following year he went on the staff of the Dotty Crescent in New Orleans. Here he studied the teeming life of the city as he had done in New York. He made friends with the stevedores and boatmen at tae quayside and the frequenters of the bar-room in the large hotels, while most mornings ha took his coffee and biscuit at the stall of a mulatto woman in the French market-place. Politics interested him, but never so wholeheartedly as with Whittier. Social functions took their place, and a prominent one, with Whitman. "He frequented lectures and races," says his friend. Dr. Bucks," churches and auction rooms, weddings, and clam-bakes," with strict impartiality while following the politics of the Free Soil Democrats. He gave us his political creed in Democratic Vistas (1870). In 1858 he turned to carpentering. Two years later, on the death of his father, he gave up carpentering and set to work on publishing his Song. The first edition of this characteristic work was a small volume of twelve poems that he named Leaves of Grass, bound in sea-green cloth, the type, of which he had set up himself: this appeared in July 1858. The following year he reissued the volume with thirty-two new poems. In 1883, when the country entered upon the disastrous Civil War, Whitman offered his services as nurse to the wounded; for over two years ha devoted his life, in camp and hospital, to his sick and dying countrymen. When the war was over he was offered and accepted a Government clerkship. During the "early candle-light of old age," as he so beautifully expressed his declining years, he gave us Memoranda during the War (1875), Specimen Days (1882), November Boughs (1888). On his birthdays a dinner was given in his honour, when friends from all parts of the world either wrote or journeyed to congratulate the veteran. The greetings from friends in England particularly delighted him, but, he said, "Don't let them think of me as a saint, or a finished anything." Goodbye, my Fancy —that he called his "last chirps "—appeared in l891; in December he ill with congestion of the lungs and lingered till March 26, 1892, when he passed quietly into Unknown. Perhaps the chief defect in American verse, up to Whitman, lies in its excess of culture. The majority of the poets are men of scholarly attainments, steeped in literature rather than in life and although some of them, like Whittier and Lowell, found inspiration in the social and political development of then time, they were lacking on the whole in a large, virile grasp of life, a first-hand elemental vigour that comes to those who have lived widely and deeply, and whose song is the direct product of their intimate experiences. Emerson counselled a return to Nature, but it was Nature in terms of philosophic abstraction. "I give nothing as duties. What others give as duties I give as loving impulses. (Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)"; Here is no exclusive child of Nature: I tramp a perpetual journey....My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes, and a stuff cut from the woods....I have no chair, no church, no philosophy."; MISCELLANEOUS VERSE WRITERS Meanwhile, during the time that Whitman was sounding a new note in literature, a number of lesser writers were continuing the elder tradition of verse. Among these may be mentioned Nathaniel Passer Willis (1806-1867), a facile writer whose sentimental verse, now almost forgotten, was once as popular as the verse of Tom Moore; Charles Fenno Hoffman (1800-1884), less popular and singularly unequal, but a sweet singer at his best; and Dr. Thomas William Parsons of Boston (1819-1892), who belongs to the considerable school of scholarly verse-writers; he was strongly affected by the Dante Revival, and no poem that he wrote is happier in its dignity and grace than the Lines on a Bust of Dante. Two figures of greater literary importance are Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), and Sidney Lanier (1842-1881). Taylor was an illustrious traveller who lived abroad for two years, seeing a good deal of the democratic life both of Germany and Italy. His first success was made in travel-letters, and he always excelled in these, but he was an effective ballad-writer; his Poem of the Orient (1834) being among his best. His life was one of tragic and varied interest; he essayed much, but perhaps he will best be remembered for his fine translation of Goethe's Faust (unfinished), and his delightful Travel Chat. Lanier—musician, soldier, poet, and critic— fought for the South in the American War, and emerged from his harrowing experiences broken in health. His skill as a musician is exhibited in. his verse, notably The Marshes of Glynn, Sunrise, and Corn. He died of consumption in North Carolina, after a vain search for climes to restore his health. A less considerable figure in American letters than Taylor, he is, if not a more accomplished, a more original poet. Among the ballads evoked by the Civil War, there is none better than the familiar Maryland, My Maryland, by James Rider Randall. A Canadian verse-writer of originality and power appears in William Bliss Carman (1861). His first work, Low Tide on Grand Pre, was published in 1893, and at once made its mark. He is especially happy as a song-writer, e.g. Behind the Arras, Ballads of Lost Haven. American prose was launched in the stormy waters of Puritan theology. Among the earlier New England divines, the most agreeable figure is that of Roger Williams (c. 1607-1683), the apostle of toleration, a philologist of some merit, and a vigorous controversialist, whose most famous polemic was his reply to that intolerant and arid divine, John Cotton — The Bloody Tenant (i.e. of persecution) made yet more Bloody by Mr. Cotton's endeavours to wash it White. During the seventeenth century the theocratic ascendancy of the Puritan weakened, and the religious enthusiasm, the ecclesiastic fervour of that era gave place to the political aspiration and democratic spirit of the eighteenth century. Literature then became gradually secularised. In place of The Bloody Tenant of Persecution, we have The Selling of Joseph —one of the earliest Anti-Slavery documents, by Judge Sewall: instead of Orphans well provided for in the Divine Providence, we find a History and Present State of Virginia. Yet it may be said that Puritanism, just when its theological vitality seemed flickering out, sent out a dying flame more fiery and consuming than ever before. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864) The descendant of a long line of sea-worthies, Nathaniel Hawthorne was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4, 1804, and when his father died four years later, his mother, who was but twenty-seven, became depressed and melancholy, living the life of a recluse until her death in 1849. Had it not been for his Uncle Robert, the boy's welfare and education might have fared badly. Young Hawthorne's first schoolmaster was the eminent Dr. Worcester, then a young graduate fresh from Yale, who had set up a school at Salem. By an accident that prevented him for some years from taking any part in school sports, the lad not unnaturally became a voracious reader— a mixed diet of Shakespeare, Hilton, Smollett, and Mrs. Radcliffe (en week days) gave place on Sundays to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. A shy, sensitive, dreamy boy, he lived a singularly lonely life with his mother and sisters, and seems to have had no companions of his own age. When he was fourteen the family left Salem for Raymond, where his grandfather possessed some landed property. Wild and solitary as the country was, and devoid of all society but that of his own family, Hawthorne always looked back upon his two years there as the happiest of his boyhood; "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air," he wrote fifty years later, "so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." Leaving Raymond in 1819, two years were spent with the Rev. Caleb Bradley in preparation for college. At the same time, his literary sense began to stir. In 1820 he made his first experiment in journalism: a paper for boys, entitled The Spectator —written with a pen on small note-paper, containing two characteristic essays on Solitude and Industry —four numbers of which were issued from August 21st to September 18th. But the time had arrived for him to choose a profession, and a letter to his mother revealed his opinions on the subject. The Church was regarded as "so dull a way of life"; the Law was put aside, as the multitude of lawyers revealed the fact that "one half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation"; and as a doctor, the idea of living on the diseases of his fellow-creatures did not appeal to him. "What do you think of my becoming an author?" he wrote. "Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like." In the summer of 1821, with no very definite calling in view, Hawthorne left Bowdoin, a small college presided over by a cultured and kindly staff, where Franklin Pierce and Longfellow were his companions. Notwithstanding his retiring disposition, he seems to have taken his share in the rough-and-tumble life of his college. On one occasion he was fined fifty cents for card-playing, but as Hawthorne had a hatred of debt and managed to live on three hundred dollars a year, we may presume that his convivialities were not on a very extensive scale. In 1325 he graduated, and having distinguished himself in Latin and English, returned to Salem, where for twelve years in "the monastery of Home" he lived the somewhat hermit life characteristic of the whole family. His days were spent in reading and study, he received no visitors and made no friendships, and his meals were left outside his locked door until it pleased him to take them in. An early sea bath in the summer, and long walks after dark, appear to have been his sole recreations. Hawthorne had definitely decided to earn his living by his pen if possible, but his early ventures were doomed to disappointment. Fanskawe in 1826, published anonymously and at his own expense, was a failure; he then wrote a number of short stories, but unable to find a publisher he burned them in disgust. Nothing daunted, however, he proceeded to write another collection which appeared in The Token, edited by S.C. Goodrich ("Peter Parley "), and with some measure of success these made their appearance in 1837 as Twice Told Tales. He also did much editorial work, but the remuneration was so poor that he was glad to accept a post in the Customs at Boston, which he occupied from 1839 to l841. A year later, he married Miss Sophia Peabody, and in the old dwelling at Concord to which he brought his bride was written the famous Mosses from an Old Manse. It was at this period that Hawthorne became connected with the Utopian scheme known as the Brook Farm Community, and he does not seem to have been so impressed with the experiment as he anticipated: "I went to live in Arcady," he said, "and found myself up to the chin in a barnyard." However, but for this experience we might never have had The Blithedale Romance (1853). While acting as Surveyor of the port of Salem, Hawthorne was hard at work on The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851), G randfather's Chair, and The Wonder Book. On the election of Franklin Pierce to the Presidency, he at once sought out his old friend and schoolfellow. The consulship at Liverpool was offered and accepted by Hawthorne, and in Our Old Home (1863) he gives us a vivid description of the four years spent in England. For the next three years he roamed through France and Italy; a series of Note Books and The Marble Faun being the result of his European wanderings. On Hawthorne's return to America in I860, the country was in the throes of an impending civil war, and he found it difficult to settle down, or to give his attention to any serious literary work. His health failed gradually until 1864, when it rapidly gave way, and while on a visit to his friend, ex-President Pierce, the great novelist was taken seriously ill; he died on May 18th, at Plymouth, New Hampshire, and is buried at Concord. In Hawthorne's writings there are three characteristics at impress themselves upon the reader—his sense of mystery, his gift of fantasy, his intellectual detachment. The Scarlet Letter, for instance, is only superficially a tale of sinful passion; fundamentally it is a study in the pathology of remorse. We are not called upon to assess the responsibility of the vindictive husband, the erring clergyman, or the wife false to her vows. Hawthorne asks us rather to watch the effect of remorse upon the character of the two chief actors; we find ourselves scrutinising with meticulous care the evil arising from the necessarily furtive up-bringing of the child; the corroding effects of the enforced insincerity of the man's daily life; the spiritual degradation caused by the fateful letter woven on the woman's breast. So in The House of the Seven Gables, the author is not concerned with the character of the original wrong-doing; but with the growing blight spread by this wrong-doing on future generations. It is not with the sour grapes eaten by the father that we are concerned but with the "children's teeth set on edge." His Gift of Fantasy. —Fantasy is common to two classes of writers—those who see more dimly than ordinary people, who see "men as trees walking," and who resort therefore to fantastic images and embellishments to conceal their poverty of sight, and those who see more clearly than the majority, and who use fantasy as a pictorial appeal to impress folk with dimmer power of vision than themselves. Hawthorne belongs to the latter. There is no greater mistake than to think of him as some readers do, as a vagrant dreamer who saw the world with half-closed eyes. He was a remarkably clear-sighted man, and a proof of this may be seen in the clarity and vividness with which he could, when he chose, draw everyday characters. Take as an illustration his picture of the old apple dealer—it is an amazing little vignette of delicate, detailed observation. Defoe himself could not have bettered its realism, for Hawthorne not only sees, but sees -into. And it is because he saw behind the externals of his characters, that we are often disinclined to credit him with the power of seeing externals at all. Hawthorne's fantasies are never meaningless: they are symbolic. Symbolism is a perilous weapon save in the hands of the true artist. In Hawthorne's hands, it is nearly always attractive; for it is never too obtrusive, never overcrowded. His Intellectual Detachment. —Behind the romantic idealism of Hawthorne, behind that acute sense of spiritual perspective that we call mystery, there is a cool, inquisitive intellect. There is no passion in his writing, often as he deals with passion. His imagination is fertile and exquisite, but the flowers it gives birth to are no rich, vital blooms, but delicate, faintly-tinted, faintly-scented blossoms, with a palpable yet chill beauty of their own—for the cool, bracing air of New England has helped to nurture them. He has tie hand of the artist, but the soul of the scientist. He probes, analyses, weighs dispassionately (when his prejudices are not engaged), keeping himself in detachment from his subject so as to more thoroughly rate its value.
Розробив канд.філол.н, доц. Доцент каф.фонетики та граматики Л.В.Горішна
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