Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 09.djvu/717

* HAWTHORNE. 657 HAXO. friend and publisher, Ticknor, during a visit that they made together to rhiladelpliia. He luid a premonition that his own deatli would he on a like journey, and so it befell. He went in May, with his friend Pierce, to the White Mountains; on the ISth they came to Plymouth, and there in hi.s sleep Hawthorne died. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, on the '24tli, where his body now lies, close to those of his friends Emerson and Thorcau. Hawthorne's bearing and features were as note- worthy as his personality. His face had a ro- mantic beauty, .symmetrical, full and strong in feature, with a massive brow, and an expression that veiled power behind a poetic refinement. In manner he was shy but always self-possessed, quiet in conversation, and often silent in com- pany. To the end, as in boyhood, he did not shun solitude, living much within himself and seeming to find no better company. The style w-as like the man, exquisite in its purity of diction, finely poetic, delicate, gentle; yet it had a iHanly gravity, that bore witness to the inherited Puritan conscience. These qualities, subtly and strangely blended, give to his .style a unique literary quality, and make him one of the great- est masters of English prose, in spite of the fact that when read continuouslj' his elaborate- ness is sometimes found to cloy. Turning from the man to his work, one finds the dominant note, alike of the short tales and of the novels, well described by Henry James as a "feeling for the latent romance of New England." He found the shadow and the mystery in the Puritan con- science with its oppressing sense of responsibility and ingrained sin. It is the hidden passion, the secret impulse, the double life, the weird and supernatural imaginations, religion grown fierce in the struggle and isolation of early New Eng- land, out of which his poet's fancy loved to create symbolic impersonations. In the early tales, and to the last, he preferred to explore the dark corners of the human heart rather than to de- scribe the expression which they found in social relations. Something of this tendency could be detected in Fatisliaue, but its quintessence is in the tales of old Massachusetts, Goodman Brown, the Legends of the Protnnce House, or in the more whimsically himiorous Village Uncle, and A Rill from the Totcn Pump. When he went abroad for his scenes, he carried New England with him. Rappaccini's Daughter has in it as little of the atmosphere of Italy during the Re- naissance as Roger Malrin's Burial: and when we turn to the novels it is still the romance of the Puritan conscience in its self-tormenting of which we read first and supremely in The f^carlet Letter, with its climax of penance and demoniac triumph at Dimmesdale's shame. And that study of sin festering in darkness, shunning the antidote, and seeking vainly the anodyne, has its counterpart there in Hester Prynne, who finds in sin itself the power of a higher spiritual life; while her child is a joyous and perennially fascinating mystery. The House of the Seven flables is no less characteristic, though the noonday light is here softened to a mystic glow, and we breathe a ghostly atmosphere of vicari- ous sorrow and atonement. The Blithedale Ro- mance, too, could have been dreamed only in New England, and of The Marble Faun, one must say with Henry .Tames, that Hawthorne "took with him to Italy more of the old Puritan conscience than he left behind." One feels it in Donatello, and it is in every fibre of Hilda's ^ being. Here, a.s always, moral guilt, and its ertect upon the individual alone with himself, is the theme on which the reader's thought is con- centrated with vague yet persistent sliadowings of the supernatural and weirdly fascinating reve- lations of the depths of human souls, around which the Italian scene throws the glamour of antiquity. Hawthorne has caught the genius of the place, the sense and the spirit of the land- scape. And as we find New England in this story of Itah', so we find it in the point of view of the Xotc-Books. While he was at liomc he sought relief from the present in the past ; when he was abroad, he viewed the new scene from the stand- point of the old, alwa.vs remote from the ju'esent, and looking at English, French, and Italian so- ciety with the same detachment and aloofness that marked his attitude toward American poli- tics and the socialistic aspirations of the Tran- scendental ists. He was less a moralist than a dilettante in morals, without dogmatism, without insistence, "outside of everything, an alien every- where, an aesthetic solitary" (Henry James). Bibliography. There are Lires of Hawthorne by his son .Julian, yathanicl Uaicthorne and His Wife (Bo.ston, 1885): by Henry James, in the English Men of Letters series (London, 1880) ; by M. D. Conway in the Great Writers series (ib., 1890) ; and by Woodberry, in the American Men of Letters series (Boston, 1002). There is also an excellent Study of Hawthorne, by George Parsons Lathrop, his son-in-law (Boston, 1870), and editor of his irorA-.s, with a ilrmoir ( 1'2 vols., Boston, 1883). Interesting, too, is the Memories of Hawthorne (Boston, 1897), by Rose H.aw- thorne Lathrop. There is an analytical index to the Works, by Evangeline M. O'Connor (Boston, 1882). HA'W'TREY, Charles Henry ( 1858— ). An English actor-manager and playwright, born at Eton, and educated there and at Oxford. At the age of twenty-three he made his theatrical debut. His plays include The Private Secretary, .Jane, and Mr. Martin, the first of which was originally produced in Cambridge in 1883, and was an adaptation from Von Moser's Der Bibliothekar. It proved a tremendous success, and was per- formed 844 consecutive times. In 1884 a com- promise was arranged by which William Gillette's adaptation of the same play could Ije produced in America. Several years ago Hawtrey got con- ■ trol of the Comedy and Avenue theatres in Lon- don. During the season of 1901-02 he brought his company to New York with A Message from Mars, which had already run for 500 perform- ances in London. HAXO, ak's<y. Francois Nicolas BenoIt, Baron (1774-1838). A French general of engi- neers, born in Lorraine. He fought in the armies of the Republic, first in Germany and afterwards under the Fir.st Consul in Italy. His ability was recognized by Napoleon, who sent him to Turkey in 1807 to fortify Constantinople for the Sultan. At the end of the year he returned to Italy, and in 1808 was sent to Spain, where he took an active part in the capture of Saragossa. In 1811, as commander of engineers in the Army of Ger- many, he inspected the fortresses held by the French in Prussia and Poland. Many of them he strengthened, particularly those at Mod- lin and Danzig; and in the latter he in-