The Complete Novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Complete Novels - Nathaniel Hawthorne страница 9
Название: The Complete Novels
Автор: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027235001
isbn:
And did not Hawthorne write to his betrothed wife?—"Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know not whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena." What we may collect and set down of mere fact about his surroundings and his acts relates itself, therefore, mainly to his outwardly real existence, to the mere shell or mask of him, which was all that anybody could behold with the eyes; and as for the interior and ideal existence, it is not likely that we shall securely penetrate very far, where his own impartial and introverted gaze stopped short. It is but a rough method to infer with brusque self-confidence that we may judge from a few words here and there the whole of his thought and feeling. A fair enough notion may be formed as to the status of his post-collegiate life in Salem, from the data we have, but we can do no more than guess at its formative influence upon his genius. And I should be sorry to give an impression that because his courtship went on in the old house by the graveyard, of which he has written so soberly, there was any shadow of melancholy upon that initiatory period of a new happiness. His reflections concerning the spot had to do with his imaginative, or if one choose, his "supernatural," existence; what actually passed there had to do with the real and the personal, and with the life of the affections. We may be sure that the meeting of two such perfected spirits, so in harmony one with another, was attended with no qualified degree of joy. If it was calm and reticent, without rush of excitement or exuberant utterance, this was because movement at its acme becomes akin to rest. Let us leave his love in that sanctity which, in his own mind, it shared with his genius.
Picturesquely considered, however,—and the picturesque never goes very deep,—it is certainly interesting to observe that Hawthorne and his wife, both of Salem families, should have been born on opposite sides of the same street, within the sound of a voice; should have gone in separate directions, remaining unaware of each other's existence; and then should finally have met, when well beyond their first youth, in an old house on the borders of the ancient burial-ground in which the ancestors of both reposed, within hail of the spot where both had first seen the light.
When they became engaged, there was opposition to the match on the part of Hawthorne's family, who regarded the seemingly confirmed invalidism of Miss Peabody as an insuperable objection; but this could not be allowed to stand in the way of a union so evidently pointed out by providential circumstance and inherent adaptability in those who were to be the parties to it. The engagement was a long one; but in the interval before her marriage Miss Peabody's health materially improved.
III.
The new turn of affairs of course made Hawthorne impatient to find some employment more immediately productive than that with the pen. He was profoundly dissatisfied, also, with his elimination from the active life of the world. "I am tired of being an ornament!" he said with great emphasis, to a friend. "I want a little piece of land of my own, big enough to stand upon, big enough to be buried in. I want to have something to do with this material world." And, striking his hand vigorously upon a table that stood by: "If I could only make tables," he declared, "I should feel myself more of a man."
President Van Buren had entered on the second year of his term, and Mr. Bancroft, the historian, was Collector of the port of Boston. One evening the latter was speaking, in a circle of whig friends, of the splendid things which the democratic administration was doing for literary men.
"But there's Hawthorne," suggested Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who was present. "You've done nothing for him."
"He won't take anything," was the answer: "he has been offered places."
In fact, Hawthorne's friends in political life, Pierce and Jonathan Cilley, had urged him to enter politics; and at one time he had been offered a post in the West Indies, but refused it because he would not live in a slaveholding community.
"I happen to know," said Miss Peabody, "that he would be very glad of employment."
The result was that a small position in the Boston Custom House was soon awarded to the young author. On going down from Salem to inquire about it, he received another and better appointment as weigher and gauger. His friend Pike was installed there at the same time. To Longfellow, Hawthorne wrote in good spirits:—
"I have no reason to doubt my capacity to fulfil the duties; for I don't know what they are. They tell me that a considerable portion of my time will be unoccupied, the which I mean to employ in sketches of my new experience, under some such titles as follows: 'Scenes In Dock,' 'Voyages at Anchor,' 'Nibblings of a Wharf Rat,' 'Trials of a Tide-Waiter,' 'Romance of the Revenue Service,' together with an ethical work in two volumes on the subject of Duties; the first volume to treat of moral duties and the second of duties imposed by the revenue laws, which I begin to consider the most important."
His hopes regarding unoccupied time were not fulfilled; he was unable to write with freedom during his term of service in Boston, and the best result of it for us is contained in those letters, extracts from which Mrs. Hawthorne published in the first volume of the "American Note-Books." The benefit to him lay in the moderate salary of $1,200, from which the cheapness of living at that time and his habitual economy enabled him to lay up something; and in the contact with others which his work involved. He might have saved time for writing if he had chosen; but the wages of the wharf laborers depended on the number of hours they worked, and Hawthorne—true to his instinct of democratic sympathy and of justice—made it a point to reach the wharf at the earliest hour, no matter what the weather might be, solely for the convenience of the men. "It pleased me," he says in one of his letters, "to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence."
But when he had had two years of this sort of toil the Whigs elected a President, and Hawthorne was dropped from the civil service. The project of an ideal community just then presented itself, and from Boston he went to Brook Farm, close by in Roxbury. The era of Transcendentalism had arrived, and Dr. George Ripley, an enthusiastic student of philosophy and a man of wide information, sought to give the new tendencies a practical turn in the establishment of a modified socialistic community. The Industrial Association which he proposed to plant at West Roxbury was wisely planned with reference to the conditions of American life; it had no affinity with the erratic views of Enfantin or St. Simon, nor did it in the least partake of the errors of Robert Owen regarding the relation of the sexes; although it agreed with Fourier and Owen both, if I understand the aim rightly, in respect of labor. Dr. Ripley's simple object was to distribute labor in such a way as to give all men time for culture, and to free their minds from the debasing influence of a merely selfish competition. "A few men of like views and feelings," one of his sympathizers has said, "grouped themselves around him, not as their master, but as their friend and brother, and the community at Brook Farm was instituted." Charles A. Dana and Minot Pratt were leading spirits in the enterprise; the young Brownson, George William Curtis, and Horace Sumner (a younger brother of Charles) were also engaged in it, at various times. The place was СКАЧАТЬ