The House of the Seven Gables (Illustrated Edition). Nathaniel Hawthorne

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      The founders of the American branch were men of independent character, proud, active, energetic, capable of extreme sternness and endowed with passionate natures, no doubt. But they were men of affairs; they touched the world on the practical side, and, even during the decline of the family fortunes, continued to do so. All at once, in the personality of the younger Nathaniel Hawthorne, this energy which persisted in them reversed its direction, and found a new outlet through the channel of literary expression. We must suppose that he included among his own characteristics all those of his predecessors; their innate force, their endurance, their capacity for impassioned feeling; but in him these elements were fused by a finer prevailing quality, and held in firm balance by his rare temperament. This must be borne in mind, if we would understand the conjunction of opposite traits in him. It was one of his principles to guard against being run away with by his imagination, and to cultivate in practical affairs what he called "a morose common sense." There has been attributed to him by some of those who knew him a certain good-humored gruffness, which might be explained as a heritage from the self-assertive vitality of his ancestors. While at Liverpool he wrote to one of his intimates in this country, and in doing so made reference to another acquaintance as a "wretch," to be away from whom made exile endurable. The letter passed into the hands of the acquaintance thus stigmatized long after Hawthorne was in his grave; but he declared himself to be in no wise disturbed by it, because he knew that the remark was not meant seriously, being only one of the occasional explosions of a "sea-dog" forcefulness, which had come into the writer's blood from his skipper forefathers. Hawthorne had, in fact, parted on friendly terms from the gentleman of whom he thus wrote. On the other hand we have the traits of sensitiveness, great delicacy, reserve and reverie, drawn from both his father and his mother. Captain Hathorne had been a man of fine presence, handsome, kindly, and rather silent; a reader, likewise; and his son's resemblance to him was so marked that a strange sailor stopped Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem Custom House, many years afterward, to ask him if he were not a son or nephew of the Captain, whom he had known.

      His mother belonged to an excellent family, the Mannings, of English stock, settled in Salem and Ipswich ever since 1680, and still well represented in the former place. She, too, was a very reserved person; had a stately, aristocratic manner; is remembered as possessing a peculiar and striking beauty. Her education was of that simple, austere, but judicious and perfected kind that—without taking any very wide range—gave to New England women in the earlier part of this century a sedate freedom and a cultivated judgment, which all the assumed improvements in pedagogy and the general relations of men and women since then have hardly surpassed. She was a pious woman, a sincere and devoted wife, a mother whose teachings could not fail to impress upon her children a bias towards the best things in life. Nathaniel's sister Elizabeth, although a recluse to the end of her days, and wholly unknown to the public, gave in her own case evidence indisputable of the fine influences which had moulded her own childhood and that of her brother. She showed a quiet, unspoiled, and ardent love of Nature, and was to the last not only an assiduous reader of books but also a very discriminating one. The range of her reading was very wide, but she never made any more display of it than Hawthorne did of his. An intuitive judgment of character was hers, which was really startling at times: merely from the perusal of a book or the inspection of a portrait, she would arrive at accurate estimates of character which revealed a power of facile and comprehensive insight; and her letters, even in old age, flowed spontaneously into utterance of the same finished kind that distinguished Nathaniel Hawthorne's epistolary style. How fresh and various, too, was her interest in the affairs of the world! For many years she had not gone farther from her secluded abode in a farm-house at Montserrat, than to Beverly or Salem; yet I remember that, only six months before her death, she wrote a letter to her niece, a large part of which was devoted to the campaign of the English in Egypt, then progressing: with a lively and clear comprehension she discussed the difficulties of the situation, and expressed the utmost concern for the success of the English army, at the same time that she laughed at herself for displaying, as an old woman, so much anxiety about the matter. Now, a mother who could bring up her daughter in such a way as to make all this possible and natural, must be given much credit for her share in developing an illustrious son. Let us not forget that it was to his mother that Goethe owed in good measure the foundation of his greatness. Mrs. Hathorne had large, very luminous gray eyes, which were reproduced in her son's; so that, on both sides, his parentage entitled him to the СКАЧАТЬ