Gradually, from the midst of the young author's obscurity, there issued an attraction which made the world wish to know more of him. One by one, the quiet essays and mournful-seeming stories came forth, like drops from a slow-distilling spring. The public knew nothing of the internal movement which had opened this slight fountain, nor suspected the dark concamerations through which the current made its way to the surface. The smallest mountain rill often has a thunder-storm at its back; but the average reader of that day thought he had done quite enough, when he guessed that the new writer was a timid young man fabling under a feigned name, excellent in his limited way, who would be a great deal better if he could come out of seclusion and make himself more like other people.
The first contributions were made to the “Salem Gazette” and the “New England Magazine”; then his attempts extended to the “Boston Token and Atlantic Souvenir,” edited by S. G. Goodrich; and later, to other periodicals. Mr. Goodrich wrote to his young contributor (October, 1831): “I am gratified to find that all whose opinion I have heard agree with me as to the merit of the various pieces from your pen.” But for none of these early performances did Hawthorne receive any considerable sum of money. And though his writings began at once to attract an audience, he had slight knowledge of it. Three young ladies — of whom his future sister-in-law, Miss Peabody, was one — were among the first admirers; and though Hawthorne baffled his readers and perhaps retarded his own notoriety by assuming different names in print, [Footnote: Among these were “Oberon” and “Ashley Allen Royce,” or “The Rev. A. A. Royce.” The latter was used by him in the Democratic Review, so late as March, 1840.] they traced his contributions assiduously, cut them out of magazines, and preserved them. But they could not discover his personal identity. One of them who lived in Salem used constantly to wonder, in driving about town, whether the author of her favorite tales could be living in this or in that house; for it was known that he was a Salem resident. Miss Peabody, who had in girlhood known something of the Hathorne family (the name was still written either way, I am told), was misled by the new spelling, and by the prevalent idea that Nathaniel Hawthorne was an assumed name. This trio were especially moved by “The Gentle Boy” when it appeared, and Miss Peabody was on the point of addressing “The Author of 'The Gentle Boy,'“ at Salem, to tell him of the pleasure he had given. When afterward told of this, Hawthorne said, “I wish you had! It would have been an era in my life.” Soon after, the Peabodys returned to Salem, and she learned from some one that the new romancer was the son of the Widow Hathorne. Now it so chanced that her family had long ago occupied a house on Union Street, looking off into the garden of the old Manning family mansion; and she remembered no son, though a vague image came back to her of a strong and graceful boy's form dancing across the garden, at play, years before. Her mind therefore fastened upon one of the sisters, who, she knew, had shown great facility in writing: indeed, Hawthorne used at one time to say that it was she who should have been the follower of literature. Full of this conception, she went to carry her burden of gratitude to the author, and after delays and difficulties, made her way into the retired and little-visited mansion. It was the other sister into whose presence she came, and to her she began pouring out the reason of her intrusion, delivering at once her praises of the elder Miss Hathorne's fictions.
“My brother's, you mean,” was the response.
“It is your brother, then.” And Miss Peabody added: “If your brother can write like that, he has no right to be idle.”
“My brother never is idle,” answered Miss Louisa, quietly.
Thus began an acquaintance which helped to free Hawthorne from the spell of solitude, and led directly to the richest experiences of his life. Old habits, however, were not immediately to be broken, and months passed without any response being made to the first call. Then at last came a copy of the “Twice-Told Tales,” fresh from the press. But it was not until the establishment of the “Democratic Review,” a year or two later, that occasion offered for a renewal of relations. Hawthorne was too shy to act upon the first invitation. Miss Peabody, finally, addressing him by letter, to inquire concerning the new periodical, for which he had been engaged as a contributor, asked him to come with both his sisters on the evening of the same day. Entirely to her surprise, they came. She herself opened the door, and there before her, between his sisters, stood a splendidly handsome youth, tall and strong, with no appearance whatever of timidity, but, instead, an almost fierce determination making his face stern. This was his resource for carrying off the extreme inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess brought out Plaxmau's designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton of Harvard, [Footnote: The book may have been Felton's Homer with Flaxman's drawings, issued in 1833.] and the party made an evening's entertainment out of them.
The news of this triumph, imparted to a friend of Miss Peabody's, led to an immediate invitation of Hawthorne to dinner at another house, for the next day. He accepted this, also, and on returning homeward, stopped at the “Salem Gazette” office, full of the excitement of his new experiences, announcing to Mr. Foote, the editor, that he was getting dissipated. He told of the evening with Miss Peabody, where he said he had had a delightful time, and of the dinner just achieved. “And I've had a delightful time there, too!” he added. Mr. Foote, perceiving an emergency, at once asked the young writer to come to his own house for an evening. Hawthorne, thoroughly aroused, consented. When the evening came, several ladies who had been invited assembled before the author arrived; and among them Miss Peabody. When he reached the place he stopped short at the drawing-room threshold, startled by the presence of strangers, and stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing away. His assumed brusquerie no longer availed him; he was stricken with dismay; his face lost color, and took on a warm paleness. All this was in a moment; but the daughter of the house moved forward, and he was drawn within. Even then, though he assumed a calm demeanor, his agitation was very great: he stood by a table, and, taking up some small object that lay upon it, he found his hand trembling so that he was forced to put it down again.
While friends were slowly penetrating his reserve in this way, he was approached in another by Mr. Goodrich, who induced him to go to Boston, there to edit the “American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge.” This work, which only continued from 1834 to September, 1837, was managed by several gentlemen under the name of the Bewick Company. One of these was Bowen, of Charlestown, an engraver; another was Goodrich, who also, I think, had some connection with the American Stationers' Company. The Bewick Company took its name from Thomas Bewick, the English restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to do his memory honor by its admirable illustrations. But, in fact, it never did any one honor, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny popular affair, containing condensed information about innumerable subjects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the hands of several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a salary of five hundred dollars a year; but it appears that he got next to nothing, and that he did not stay in the position long. There is little in its pages to recall the identity of the editor; but in one place he quotes as follows from Lord Bacon: “The ointment which witches use is made of the fat of children digged from their graves, and of the juices of smallage, cinquefoil, and wolf's-bane, mingled with the meal of fine wheat,” and hopes that none of his readers will try to compound it. In the tale of “Young Goodman Brown,” when Goody Cloyse says, “I was all anointed with the juice of small-age and cinquefoil and wolf's-bane,” and the Devil continues, “'Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,' — 'Ah, your worship knows the recipe,' cried the old lady, cackling aloud.” A few scraps of correspondence, mostly undated, which I have looked over, give one a new view of him in the bustle and vexation of this brief editorial experience. He sends off frequent and hurried missives
to one of his sisters, who did some of the condensing and compiling which was a part of the business. “I make nothing,” he says, in one, “of writing a history or biography before dinner.” At another time, he is in haste for a Life of Jefferson, but warns his correspondent to “see that it contains nothing heterodox.” At the end of one of the briefest messages, he finds time to speak of the cat at home. Perhaps with a memory of the days when he built book-houses, he had taken two names of the deepest dye from Milton and Bunyan for two of his favorite cats, whom he called Beelzebub and Apollyon. “Pull Beelzebub's tail for me,” he writes. But the following from Boston, February 15, 1836, gives the more serious side of the situation: —
“I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going near him … I don't feel at all obliged to him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company; … and I defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars what I do for five hundred.”
Goodrich afterward sent his editor a small sum; and the relations between them were resumed.. A letter of May 5, in the same year, contains these allusions: —
“I saw Mr. Goodrich yesterday…. He wants me to undertake a Universal History, to contain about as much as fifty or sixty pages of the magazine. [These were large pages.] If you are willing to write any part of it, … I shall agree to do it. If necessary I will come home by and by, and concoct the plan of it with you. It need not be superior in profundity and polish to the middling magazine articles…. I shall have nearly a dozen articles in The Token, — mostly quite short.”
The historical project is, of course, that which resulted in the famous “Peter Parley” work. “Our pay as historians of the universe,” says a letter written six days later, “will be about one hundred dollars, the whole of which you may have. It is a poor compensation, but better than the Token; because the writing is so much less difficult.” He afterward carried out the design, or a large part of it, and the book has since sold by millions, for the benefit of others. There are various little particulars in this ingenious abridgment which recall Hawthorne, especially if one is familiar with his “Grandfather's Chair” and “True Stories” for children; though the book has probably undergone some changes in successive editions. This passage about George IV. is, however, remembered as being his: “Even when he was quite an old man, this king cared as much about dress as any young coxcomb. He had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is a pity that he was a king, for he might otherwise have been an excellent tailor.”
Up to this time (May 12) he had received only twenty dollars for four months' editorial labor. “And, as you may well suppose,” he says, “I have undergone very grievous vexations. Unless they pay me the whole amount shortly, I shall return to Salem, and stay there till they do.” It seems a currish fate that puts such men into the grasp of paltry and sordid cares like these! But there is something deeper to be felt than dissatisfaction at the author-publisher's feeble though annoying scheme of harnessing in this rare poet to be his unpaid yet paying hack. This deeper something is the pathos of such possibilities, and the spectacle of so renowned and strong-winged a genius consenting thus to take his share of worldly struggle; perfectly conscious that it is wholly beneath his plane, but accepting it as a proper part of the mortal lot; scornful, but industrious and enduring. You who have conceived of Hawthorne as a soft-marrowed dweller in the dusk, fostering his own shyness and fearing to take the rubs of common men, pray look well at all this. And you, also, who discourse about the conditions essential to the development of genius, about the milieu and the moment, and try to prove America a vacuum which the Muse abhors, will do well to consider the phenomenon. “It is a poor compensation, yet better than the Token”; so he wrote, knowing that his unmatched tales were being coined for even a less reward than mere daily bread. He took the conditions that were about him, and gave them a dignity by his own fine perseverance. It is this inspired industry, this calm facing of the worst and making it the best, which has formed the history of all art. You talk of the ages, and choose this or that era as the only fit one. You long for a cosey niche in the past; but genius crowds time and eternity into the present, and says to you, “Make your own century!”
Meanwhile, if he received no solid gain from his exertions, Hawthorne was winning a reputation. In January he had written home: “My worshipful self is a very famous man in London, the 'Athenaeum' having noticed all my articles in the last Token, with long extracts.” This refers to the 'Athenaeum' for November 7, 1835, which mentioned “The Wedding Knell” and “The Minister's Black Veil” as being stories “each of which has singularity enough to recommend it to the reader,” and gave three columns to a long extract from “The Maypole of Merry Mount”; the notice being no doubt the work of the critic Chorley, who afterward met Hawthorne in England. Thus encouraged, he thought of collecting his tales and publishing them in volume form, connected by the conception of a travelling story-teller, whose shiftings of fortune were to form the interludes and links between the separate stories. A portion of this, prefatory to “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,” has been published in the “Mosses,” with the heading of “Passages from a Relinquished Work.” Goodrich was not disposed to lavish upon his young beneficiary the expense of bringing out a book for him, and the plan of reprinting the tales with this framework around them was given up. The next year Bridge came to Goodrich and insisted on having a simple collection issued, himself taking the pecuniary risk. In this way the “Twice-Told Tales” were first brought collectively before the world; and for the second time this faithful comrade of Hawthorne laid posterity under obligation to himself. It was not till long afterward, however, that Hawthorne knew of his friend's interposition in the affair.
Mr. Bridge had not then entered the navy, and was engaged in a great enterprise on the Androscoggin; nothing less than an attempt to dam up that river and apply the water-power to some mills. In July of 1837, Hawthorne went to visit him at Bridgton, and has described his impressions fully in the Note-Books. It was probably his longest absence from Salem since graduating at Bowdoin. “My circumstances cannot long continue as they are,” he writes; “and Bridge, too, stands between high prosperity and utter ruin.”
The change in his own circumstances which Hawthorne looked for did not come through his book. It sold some six or seven hundred copies in a short time, but was received quietly, [Footnote: Some of the sketches were reprinted in England; and “A Rill from the Town Pump” was circulated in pamphlet form by a London bookseller, without the author's name, as a temperance tract.] though Longfellow, then lately established in his Harvard professorship, and known as the author of “Outre-Mer,” greeted it with enthusiasm in the “North American Review,” which wielded a great influence in literary affairs.
On March 7, 1837, Hawthorne sent this note to his former classmate, to announce the new volume.
“The agent of the American Stationer's Company will send you a copy of a book entitled 'Twice-Told Tales,' — of which, as a classmate, I venture to request your acceptance. We were not, it is true, so well acquainted at college, that I can plead an absolute right to inflict my 'twice-told' tediousness upon you; but I have often regretted that we were not better known to each other, and have been glad of your success in literature and in more important matters.” Returning to the tales, he adds: “I should like to flatter myself that they would repay you some part of the pleasure which I have derived from your own 'Outre-Mer.'
“Your obedient servant,
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 731