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Who then are the men that issue this invitation to silence the press by violence? Who but an insolent brawling minority, a few noisy fanatics who claim that their own opinions shall be the measure of freedom for the rest of the community, and who undertake to overawe a vast pacific majority by threats of wanton outrage and plunder? These men are for erecting an oligarchy of their own and riding rough shod over the people and the people's rights. They claim a right to repeal the laws established by the majority in favor of the freedom of the press. They make new laws of their own to which they require that the rest of the community shall submit, and in case of a refusal, they threaten to execute them by the ministry of a mob. There is no tyranny or oppression exercised in any part of the world more absolute or more frightful than that which they would establish.

So far as we are concerned we are determined that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged. In whatever form it makes its appearance we shall raise our voice against it. We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be as it ever has been, as free a subject of discussion and argument and declamation, as the difference between whiggism and democracy, or as the difference between the Arminians and the Calvinists. If the press chooses to be silent on the subject it shall be the silence of perfect free will, and not the silence of fear. We hold that this combination of the few to govern the many by the terror of illegal violence, is as wicked and indefensible as a conspiracy to rob on the highway. We hold it to be the duty of good citizens to protest against it whenever and wherever it shows itself, and to resist it if necessary to the death.

One piece of justice must be done to the South. Thousands there are of persons in that quarter of the country who disapprove, as heartily as any citizen of the North can do, the employment of violence against the presses or the preachers of the anti-slavery party. There are great numbers also, as we are well informed, who think that only harm could result from directing the penalties of the law against those who discuss the question of slavery. They are for leaving the mode of discussing this question solely to the calm and considerate good sense of the North, satisfied that the least show of a determination to abridge the liberty of speech in this matter is but throwing oil on the flames.

1836

August 8, 1836; 1884

Symbolic and Ethical

Idealism

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

(1804-1864)

To understand Hawthorne the reader must set aside an attractive legend. Only accidental circumstances support the tradition of the shy recluse, brooding in solitude upon the gloomier aspects of Puritan New England, whose writings are a kind of spiritual autobiography. Instead, during most of his life, Hawthorne was decidedly a public figure, capable, when necessary, of a certain urbanity. As a writer, he set out quite consciously to exploit his antiquarian enthusiasms and his understanding of the colonial history of New England. He was absorbed by the enigmas of evil and of moral responsibility, interwoven with man's destiny in nature and in eternity; but in this interest he was not unusual, for he shared it with such contêmporaries as Poe, Emerson, and Melville, and with others more remote, such as Milton and Shakespeare.

It is true that for some years after his graduation from col

lege he lived quietly in quiet Salem, but a young man engrossed in historical study and in learning the writer's craft is not notably queer if he does not seek society or marriage, especially if he is poor. In later years Hawthorne successfully managed his official duties, made a large circle of friends, and performed the extrovert functions of a foreign consul with competence, if without joy. The true Hawthorne is revealed just as much by "The Old Manse," an essay light-spirited and affectionate, as by "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Ethan Brand," or The Scarlet Letter. We understand better his full manliness and humanity now that Professor Randall Stewart has restored their pristine vigor to the gently henpecked texts that Mrs. Hawthorne published of his Note-Books.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4, 1804, Hawthorne was five generations removed from his Puritan American forebears.

When the boy was twelve, his widowed mother took him to live with her brother in Maine, but old Salem had already enkindled his antiquarian inclination. To Salem he returned to prepare for college. At Bowdoin College (1821-1825), where he was, he said, “An idle student," but "always reading," he made a friend of Longfellow, his classmate, and lifelong intimates of Horatio Bridge and of Franklin Pierce, later president of the United States.

The next twelve years, of so-called "seclusion," in his mother's Salem home, were years of literary apprenticeship. He read widely, preparing himself to be the chronicler of the antiquities and the spiritual temper of colonial New England. His first novel, Fanshawe (1828), an abortive chronicle of Bowdoin life, was recalled and almost completely destroyed. He made observant walking trips about Massachusetts; remote portions of New England he frequently visited as the guest of his uncle, whose extensive stage-coach business provided the means. In 1832 there appeared in a gift book, The Token, his first published tales, including "The Gentle Boy." Other stories followed, in The Token and various magazines, to be collected in 1837 as TwiceTold Tales (enlarged in 1842), a volume of masterpieces, but only a few discerning critics, such as Poe, then understood what he was doing.

He had become secretly engaged to Sophia Peabody in 1838, and since his stories were not gaining popular support, he

secured remunerative employment in the Boston Custom House. Seven months at Brook Farm, a socialistic co-operative, led him to abandon the idea of

taking his bride there; on their marriage in 1842 they settled in Concord, at the Old Manse, Emerson's ancestral home. There he spent four idyllic years, during which the stories of Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) were published serially and as a volume.

His sales were still meager, and he returned to Salem as surveyor in the Custom House (1846-1849). He lost this position, with other Democrats, at the next election, but in 1850 he published The Scarlet Letter, which made his fame, changed his fortune, and gave to our literature its first symbolic novel, a year before the appearance of Melville's Moby-Dick. In this novel were concentrated the entire resources of Hawthorne's creative personality and experi

ence.

After a short time in the Berkshires, Hawthorne settled in 1852 at the Wayside, Concord, which became his permanent home. He was at the height of his creative activity. The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a great novel of family decadence, was followed by The Blithedale Romance (1852), a minor novel on the Brook Farm experiment. Among the tales of The SnowImage (1851), were "Ethan Brand" and "The Great Stone Face." A Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853) entered the literature of juvenile classics.

The Life of Franklin Pierce

(1852) was recognized handsomely by the new president, who appointed his college friend as consul at Liverpool (18531857). Hawthorne faithfully performed the duties, which he found uncongenial, while seeing much of England and recording his impressions in the English Note-Books (published after his death) and Our Old Home (1863), a sheaf of essays. A long holiday on the Continent resulted in the French and Italian Note-Books (not published in his lifetime), and The Marble Faun (1860), a novel with an Italian setting, whose moral allegory, while not satisfactorily clarifed, continues to interest the student of Hawthorne's thought. In 1860 Hawthorne brought his family back to the Wayside, where he died four years later, in 1864.

Although in many of his stories, and in the two great novels, Hawthorne created genuine characters and situations, he holds his permanent audience primarily by the interest and the consistent vitality of his criticism of life. Beyond his remarkable sense of the past, which gives a genuine ring to the historical reconstructions, beyond his precise and simple style, which is in the great tradition of familiar narrative, the principal appeal of his work is in the quality of its allegory, always richly ambivalent, providing enigmas which each reader solves in his own terms. Reference is made, in the stories below, to his discovery of the Puritan past of his family, the perse

cutors of Quakers and "witches"; but wherever his interest started, it led him to a long investigation of the problems of moral and social responsibility. His enemies are intolerance, the hypocrisy that hides the common sin, and the greed that refuses to share joy; he fears beyond everything withdrawal from mankind, the cynical suspicion, the arrogant perfectionism that cannot bide its mortal timewhatever divorces the prideridden intellect from the common heart of humanity. It is not enough to call him the critic of the Puritan; the Quaker or the transcendental extremist might be equally guilty; and Wakefield, Aylmer, and Ethan Brand are not Puritans. His remedy is in nature and in the sweetness of a world freed not from sin, but from the corrosive sense of guilt.

In progress is the definitive Centenary Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Ohio State), ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, Claude M. Simpson, and Matthew J.

Bruccoli; Fredson Bowers, textual editor. An earlier edition is The Complete Works***, 12 vols., edited by George P. Lathrop, 1883. The Heart of Hawthorne's Journals was edited by Newton Arvin, 1929. Randall Stewart edited The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1932, and The English Note

books, 1941.

Recent revaluation began with Na

thaniel Hawthorne, by Randall Stewart, 1948. George E. Woodberry's superseded for its scope and data. See

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1902, is still not

also Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vols., 1884;

Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1949; H. H. Waggoner, Hawthorne, A Critical Study, rev. ed., 1963; R. R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, 1957; Harry Levin, Power of Blackness, 1960; H. H. Hoeltje, Inward Sky* * * 1962; Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1955; Terence Martin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1965; and Richard Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction ***, 1964.

My Kinsman, Major Molineux1

After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and generous approbation which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power which did not emanate from themselves, and they usually rewarded their rulers with slender gratitude for the compliances by which, in softening their instructions from beyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of those who gave them. The annals of Massachusetts Bay will inform us, that of six governors in the space of about forty years from the surrender of the old charter, under James II., two were imprisoned by a popular insurrection; a third, as Hutchinson 2 inclines to believe, was driven from the province by the whizzing of a musket-ball; a fourth, in the opinion of the same historian, was hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as well as their successors, till the revolution, were favored with few and brief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of the court party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely a more desirable life. These remarks may serve as a preface to the following adventures, which chanced upon a summer night, not far from a hundred years ago. The reader, in order to avoid a long and dry detail of colonial affairs, is requested to dispense with an account of the train of circumstances that had caused much temporary inflammation of the popular mind.

It was near nine o'clock of a moonlight evening, when a boat crossed the ferry with a single passenger, who had obtained his conveyance at that unusual hour by the promise of an extra fare. While he stood on the landing-place, searching in either pocket for the means of fulfilling his agreement, the ferryman lifted a lantern, by the aid of which, and the newly risen moon, he took a very accurate survey of the stranger's figure. He was a youth of barely eighteen years, evidently country-bred, and now, as it should seem,

1. This story is one of the early narratives Hawthorne published in The Token for 1832. It was included twenty years later in The Snow-Image, the source of this text. As an allegory it is concerned with Hawthorne's familiar polarity of good and evil, of light and darkness, in the affairs of mankind. The effect is heightened, however, by the interest in character and action, in which the real and the fantastic are mingled. As in "Young Goodman Brown" or the

much later "Ethan Brand" the fantastic is associated with the actual-here with such elements of experience as the journey into life of an innocent lad, or, at the ideal level, with the conflict between the reactionary Crown authority and the rebellious democratic ideas of American colonials.

2. Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780), royal governor of Massachusetts and historian of colonial New England.

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