Selected Tales and Sketches (3 page)

 

Literary maturity, we might safely suppose, is no less remarkably mysterious than any other kind: it comes, if at all, whenever it does; its forms may be structural, and therefore predictable, but hardly its causes. Yet it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the most important thing Hawthorne ever did for the maturing of his own literary career was to undertake, beginning in 1827, an exhaustive and fairly systematic study of American history in its colonial, provincial, and revolutionary periods. The early results of this program of purposive reading and imaginative “re-cognition” bear sharply on the historical density and difference of the “Provincial Tales.”

The leading facts of “Hawthorne's Reading” have long been clear, for the surviving records of his borrowings from his local subscription library, the Salem Athenaeum, were published in 1949. This well-thumbed list, itself but a minimum suggestion of Hawthorne's voracious habits as a reader, clearly suggests that one of Hawthorne's principal and vital interests swiftly became something we might almost risk calling by the name of “American Studies.” In an age when Everyman was, famously, “his own historian,” Hawthorne merely fulfilled the role more faithfully than almost anyone else. In an age when
many
local institutions like the Salem Athenaeum were anxiously trying to preserve and collect everything that might shed light on the prerevolutionary identity of the nation's colonial experience, Hawthorne simply tried to read it all. Not only the obvious and crucial masterworks such as John Winthrop's
Journal
and Cotton Mather's
Magnalia Christi Americana,
which together form a magisterial frame around the original Puritan century, but more local and embattled texts as well: Edward Johnson's
Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour,
for example, which recapitulated the first two decades of founding under the urgent aspect of an immanent second coming; and Nathaniel Ward's
Simple Cobbler of Aggawam,
whose unwonted wit meant to instruct both New and Old England men in the more timely art of political compromise that yet stopped short of toleration; and
New England's Memorial
by Nathaniel Morton, the nephew and loyal redactor of William Bradford, whose own authoritative account “Of Plymouth Plantation” was piously folded into the larger “non-separatist” account of Puritan motive and meaning; and even William Hubbard's
Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians of New England.

Nor did Hawthorne's reading limit him to one side of the story. Willem Sewel's
History of the Quakers,
which lies directly behind “The Gentle Boy,” tells much that providential and filiopietistic history found it necessary to omit or gloss over. More significantly, perhaps, Hawthorne appears to have learned the meaning of the “radical” dissent of Roger Williams and of the “populist” loyalties of John Wise directly from their own works. He even appears to have known (though perhaps at some second hand) the aboriginal Anglo-naturalism of Thomas Morton, whose
New English Canaan—or
whose infamous outpost at Merry Mount—has enlisted the sympathy of so many who hate Puritanism by instinct. Thus criticism as well as myth went early into the Hawthorne mix.

Hawthorne clearly read George Bancroft's monumental but tendentious “libertarian” account of the Puritan contribution to the
History of the United States
as soon as the first volumes began to appear in 1834. But just as clearly he already knew much of the material on which it was based. Most importantly, perhaps, he was intensely familiar with the authoritative but not always “friendly” account it was supposed to supplant—the endlessly patient though often dull “constitutionalist” analysis of
The History of Massachusetts Bay
by Thomas Hutchinson, plainly the most fair and formidable of the Tory historians of prerevolutionary New England. Neither Hutchinson's secularism nor his loyalty to the king was lost on the Hawthorne who wrote “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” though for other purposes the mentality of Hutchinson would have to be supplemented by that of Benjamin Trumbull, whose
Complete History of Connecticut
everywhere privileges the “higher” considerations of piety, declension, and revival. And behind Hawthorne's alert response to these tomes lay his reading of the available local histories (of the towns of Boston, Salem, and Ipswich, for example, and of the regions of Maine and New Hampshire), and of dozens (probably hundreds) of local sermons and tracts. Apparently he even faced up to the available collections of legal and judicial proceedings from the earliest colonial years. The industrious graduate student is (cautiously) invited to attempt as much.

In the famously self-effacing letter to Longfellow of June 4, 1837, Hawthorne characterizes all this virtually archival reading as “desulcory.” And so it probably was, with regard to its available order and arrangement: who knew, in the 1820s, just how to re-cognize the colonial past? But Hawthorne appears to have read “religiously” as well, when we consider seriousness of purpose or efficacy of outcome. In one sense he merely did his required Americanist homework: before one could fairly “use” American materials, one had significantly to possess them. And in the end, what is often loosely referred to as Hawthorne's artistic
use
of history turns out to be something very like
history.

Best recognized, of course, is Hawthorne's singular success in recovering the experience of those New England Puritans, whose piety and rhetoric have always advanced the most powerful claim to “founding” importance. And yet the evidence of the “Provincial Tales” suggests that it is possible to overstate and even misconstrue the place of Puritanism in the Hawthorne project. Hawthorne himself appears to have favored “The Gentle Boy” over “Malvin” and “Molineux,” reprinting the one in the first of his
actually
published collections, the
Twice-told Tales
of 1837, while reserving the other two for later reissue. But modern criticism uniformly prefers the two “non-Puritan” tales in this group. And more significantly, perhaps, all three reveal a similar dedication to the shape and implication of moral experience in the relevant past. “The Gentle Boy” aptly reminds us that the notoriously puritanic theme of “weaned affections” contains a powerful theologic prejudice against what rationalists and romantics both called nature; but “Malvin” and “Molineux” exist to recall that the complex problem of American guilt and innocence has a significant political as well as a religious dimension.

The crucial issue lurking here, however, is probably biographical, as it involves the question of the personal or familiar bias Hawthorne may have brought to his study of moral history in America. As too many of the older biographies begin their account of this “Capital Son of the Old Puritans” with a highly dramatic account of “Ancestral Salem” in the seventeenth century, so, too, many literary interpreters have assumed that Hawthorne's penchant for and/or his quarrel with Puritanism was simply a given, with the implication that he wrote Puritan history either naturally or else by symptomatic retreat from an uncongenial present to a privileged past.

The facts tend to suggest otherwise. The Salem where Hawthorne was born (in 1804) was commerical rather than theologic in its dominant tone; and its religious cast was more liberal than conservative. His parents both belonged to churches that would become Unitarian when the “standing order” of Congregationalism was split in the 1820s; and all but one member of his extended family would favor churches teaching a decidedly un-Calvinistic understanding of sin and salvation. Accounts of Hawthorne's childhood all indicate that he was indulged rather than disciplined, in the formidable manner of puritanic “Christian nurture”; and the record of his early education reads more like a Novel of Enlightenment than any conceivable Narrative of Surprising Conversion. The (modest) record of the Bowdoin years (1821-25) indicates that Hawthorne neatly avoided all organized attempts to awaken his slumbering sense of sin and save his soul. Further, as we have already noticed, none of his first works indicates that he is merely expressing some Puritanism of nature or early training. When the Puritan mentality does authoritatively appear, in “The Gentle Boy,” its context is one of learning and judgment: conscience and compulsion emerge as facts of the public rather than the private history.

Another way to approach the same fundamental point—that Hawthorne
learned
to do what he did with the past—is to notice that several other works published near the outset of his career also smell distinctly of the lamp of precise historical study. Three “sketches” of noteworthy historical figures, which appeared in the
Salem Gazette
in December 1830 and January 1831, all reveal a Hawthorne who is trying to be somewhat more precise about the import of the national “story” than he could conceivably have been in “The Hollow of the Three Hills” or “The Wives of the Dead.” “Sir William Phips” deftly characterizes the political career and private morale of the man who had been the first governor of New England under its new, “Royal,” and decidedly secularized charter of 1691. “Mrs. Hutchinson,” besides predicting a certain “typic” identity for Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter,
powerfully evokes the strain of theological feminism which mixes itself unstably in the religious recipe of Puritan prophecy. And “Dr. Bullivant” (omitted from this collection) aptly notices the puritanic expulsion of wit as but a merely naturalistic “humor,” even as it elaborately meditates the cause and consequence of what a still unhilarious nineteenth century called gloom. Significant cultural achievements in their own way, each of these brief sketches serves as an important marker of Hawthorne's growing historical interest and precision.

Finally, of course, as even these three sketches tend to predict, it was on Puritanism that Hawthorne did choose to throw the light of his historical intelligence most fully and repeatedly. Yet clearly he must be thought of as
choosing.
Knowledge came from study and, as always, genius came from genius. But some considered project, provincial or otherwise, is clearly at issue in Hawthorne's repeated and increasingly subtle attempts to antholo gize his early uses of American materials. So that, when the major tales of the Puritans do eventually emerge from the uncertain light of the famous “haunted chamber” of Hawthorne's family house in Salem—to which he returned, from Bowdoin, in 1825, and in which he read and wrote for the better part of the next twelve years—they must be thought of as coming as much from knowledge and conscious intention as from bias, as validly from the historical as from some other, more romantic form of imagination.

“Alice Doane's Appeal” self-consciously situates its gothic extravagance in precise relation to the mad logic of the Salem witchcraft of 1692: Leonard Doane does indeed, in the memorable formulation of Frederick Crews, “murder his personified wish”; but the rationale of this murderous aberration is specifically related to rumors of the Devil's insidious power of “spectral” simulation, so that the murdered man only seemed guilty of the deeds that tempted the fantasy of the murderer himself. “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) puts the capstone on Hawthorne's literary use of this peculiar Puritan theme of “specter evidence,” as some pitiable yet far too culpably innocent protagonist “sees” absolutely everyone at a witch meeting that only he has verifiably set out to attend. All of this is somehow predicted by New England's own notorious witchcraft authority, Cotton Mather: the Devil can indeed appear “as an angel of light,” or in the shape of an innocent person; God Himself may permit it as a test of the faith of the elect. All of this is superstitious or hysterical by the sober standards of enlightened reason. And yet before scapegoating Mather, Hawthorne appears to have felt, one had better decide if it expressed some fundamental tendency of human instinct or animal faith. Otherwise the past was all too simply
mad.

Nor, as our argument has so far implied, is Hawthorne's psychology of witchcraft anything but a part of his total achievement in the area of historical re-cognition. “The Minister's Black Veil” (1836) and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836) stand out from the remaining “Puritan” group, providing (between them) as provocative and authoritative an account as we have had of the now cooperating, now contending styles of puritanic piety and politics. And there are other tales as well, just less significant in their
literary
power to do history. But most of these come along a moment later in Hawthorne's extended first period of artistic enterprise. And some account of Hawthorne's third and most complex project of organized self-collection may be required to get the full context and scope of their determined historicism.

 

Along with “Goodman Brown” and many others, Hawthorne's tales of the “May-Pole” and the “Black Veil” spilled forth as part of the virtual flood of publications that followed the breakup, in 1834, of yet another projected collection—“The Story-Teller.” Once more, unhappily, a subtle and multiform literary intention was atomized by editorial fiat; and once more, maddeningly, its reconstruction lies just beyond the reach of surviving evidence. What does survive, however, clearly indicates that Hawthorne had labored very carefully, over a span of four or more years, to put together a work which would collectively embody an extended commentary on the emergent state of American culture. And though, as always, “the might-have-been is but boggy ground to build on,” all the signs suggest that when certain arbiters of popular taste vetoed the publication of “The Story-Teller” as such, American literature lost one of its most sophisticated narrative experiments.

What Hawthorne delivered to a prospective publisher (early in 1834, apparently) was the completed manuscript of a proposed two-volume work in which many individual tales and localized sketches were all set within a rather precise and dramatically significant frame: some concrete “narrator” —a well-identified personage, with a history and developing story of his own—was to deliver each of the individual literary productions, and each was to be associated with some particular and well-evoked though as yet “unstoried” American place; furthermore, some unfolding thread of travel and of story was to connect all the more specific manifestations of the story-telling art. Perhaps Hawthorne was deliberately trying to domesticate the example of Washington Irving's very popular
Sketch-Book
(1820), which called up the storied places of England even as it borrowed a few very old, probably archetypal folk tales for relocation in the Kaatskil region of upstate New York. In any case, some principle of situationality or “world liness” was clearly trying to insist on itself, in relation to even the most imaginative of literary performances. Evidently a mind haunted by reverie and recollection was to be given a local habitation and a name.