Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1892, volume 3).djvu/154

128 become one of the most renowned. In the preface to the &ldquo;Marble Faun&rdquo; he said afterward that &ldquo;no author without a trial can conceive the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight.&rdquo; But his early works were a series of sketches of just such romances, and &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter&rdquo; was a romance drawn from the shadow and mystery and bareness of the earliest civilized life of that country, a tale which made its gloom marvellously picturesque and pathetic, and proved that American genius could find no more prolific subjects for imaginative treatment in literature than those that the annals of its own country could furnish. &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter&rdquo; interprets with profound perception and sympathetic delicacy and skill the old New England spirit and character and life which have powerfully influenced the development of American civilization. As a study of the solitary human soul involved in sin and struggling with its own weakness and sophistry, seeking in the darkness of concealment the succor that could be found only in the full light of penitence, the romance is a remarkable addition to imaginative literature, and distinctively characteristic of Hawthorne's genius.

In the summer of 1850, after the publication of &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter,&rdquo; Hawthorne removed to Lenox, in Berkshire co., Mass., and occupied, as he said, &ldquo;the ugliest little old red farm-house you ever saw,&rdquo; on the bank of the pretty lake known as &ldquo;The Stockbridge Bowl,&rdquo; with a southward vista of high hills. He was now one of the most famous authors of his time, but he secluded himself here as elsewhere, and almost his only companion was Herman Melville, the author of &ldquo;Typee,&rdquo; who lived at Pittsfield. In the old red farm-house Hawthorne wrote &ldquo;The House of the Seven Gables,&rdquo; which was published early in 1851, and which he preferred to &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter,&rdquo; thinking it more characteristic of his mind and more proper and natural for him to write. It is certainly equally characteristic with &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter,&rdquo; for it is another presentation of what Melville called the &ldquo;tragic phase of humanity,&rdquo; which Hawthorne instinctively treated with extraordinary subtlety and power. The canvas of &ldquo;The House of the Seven Gables&rdquo; is larger than that of &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter.&rdquo; There are more figures, and they are more finely elaborated, and there is a cheerful play of humor and sunshine. Phoebe, Hepzibah, Judge Pyncheon, and Clifford are masterly delineations, like portraits of Titian and Rembrandt and Raphael which do not fade with time. The popular success of &ldquo;The House of the Seven Gables&rdquo; was even greater than that of its predecessor. The sunshine of prosperity seemed to quicken the fertility of the author's genius, and in the summer of 1851 he wrote &ldquo;The Wonder Book,&rdquo; a charming retelling for children of some of the classical myths, and in the same year the &ldquo;Snow Image and Other Twice-told Tales&rdquo; was made ready, but it was not published until 1852. In the autumn of 1851 the roving author, like a Bedouin poet, struck his tent again, and removed to West Newton, near Boston, where he wrote &ldquo;The Blithedale Romance.&rdquo; This tale was suggested by the life at Brook Farm, its motives, and some of its characters. But, as Hawthorne said, it must not be read &ldquo;as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm, which, essentially, it has not, but merely for its own story and character.&rdquo; It is, as Mr. Lathrop says, the story of a man dominated by a theory, and, by blind abandonment to it, ruining himself and those who trust him. But upon this simple motive the author plays with his familiar and marvellous skill. The sweet and shadowy Priscilla, the superb Zenobia, the intensely self-concentrated and powerful Hollingsworth, old Moodie, and the placid, solitary observer, Miles Coverdale, are drawn at once with airy delicacy and incisive force. The final scene of the romance was suggested by a melancholy incident in Concord, which deeply affected Hawthorne's imagination, the suicide by drowning of a farmer's daughter, an interesting girl whose mind had grown morbid in the melancholy consciousness of the hopeless difference between the circumstances of her life and her educated tastes and refined accomplishments. Her body was found at night, and raised by the light of torches, Hawthorne giving his strong arm to the painful service. The success of &ldquo;The Blithedale Romance&rdquo; was not less than that of the other tales.

In the summer of 1852 Hawthorne removed to Concord, where he had bought a house which he called &ldquo;The Wayside,&rdquo; and which he said Henry Thoreau told him was once occupied by a man who thought he should never die. This fancy was the motive of &ldquo;Septimius Felton.&rdquo; In August, 1852, he published a campaign life of Franklin Pierce, his old college friend, a candidate for the presidency. Hawthorne was very loth to undertake it; but Pierce pressed him, and he could not refuse. Although a Democrat, Hawthorne took no active part in politics, and the political situation of the country merely irritated him. He had no sympathy with the anti-slavery controversy, and he could not affect a sympathy that he did not feel. The controversy, however, was so earnest and radical, absorbing every other public interest, dissolving and reorganizing political parties, that Hawthorne's position deeply pained many of his friends. But he looked upon the contest with an air of remote indifference, which was characteristic and sincere, but none the less strange and inexplicable to ardent combatants. His friend Pierce was elected. During the subsequent winter Hawthorne wrote the &ldquo;Tanglewood Tales,&rdquo; a second series of the &ldquo;Wonder Book,&rdquo; and in the spring of 1853, after much reluctance upon his part to take office, he was appointed to the consulate at Liverpool, the most lucrative place in the gift of the president. In the summer of 1853 he sailed for Liverpool with his family. He lived in England for four years, and the record of his English life is found in the &ldquo;English Note-Books&rdquo; and &ldquo;Our Old Home.&rdquo; At the end of 1857 he went to France, Switzerland, and Italy, returning to England in 1859. His &ldquo;French and Italian Note-Books&rdquo; contain the story of his travels. In Italy he sketched the tale of &ldquo;The Marble Faun,&rdquo; which he completed in England, and it was published simultaneously in Boston and London in 1860, the English edition bearing the title &ldquo;Transformation.&rdquo; It was seven years since his last publication of a romance, and he had now laid the scene in Italy and not in New England. But the genius of the story-teller was unchanged. There are the same vast, shadowy suggestion, the fascination of the problem of moral guilt, the interaction of the strongest individualities; there are passion, sorrow, human feeling, a solemnity in human life, all wrought into a love-tale which is told with the power that throws upon the reader a glamour of enchantment.

Hawthorne returned to the United States just as the fierce anti-slavery controversy was deepening into war. In 1857 he had written to Bridge that