Hawthorne the Man: A Mystery Still

REVIEWS 407 too large to be examined here. We may note that Washington too denounced the injustices under which his race suffered, and he used the same language of condemnation in the South and in the North. The debate is largely a matter of relative emphasis. But it is foolish to submerge in controversy Washington's great achievement. He was a very great man. His boundless energy and devotion, the constructive fertility. of his mind, and his qualities of head and heart, abundantly justify the pride and admiration of a multitude of Americans, black and white. He was probably the greatest Negro in history. HAWTHORNE THE MAN: A MYSTERY STILL* GoRDON RoPER Of the three biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne published in this past year-by Robert Cantwell, Randall Stewart, and Mark Van DorenMr . Cantwell's is the most comprehensive in presenting the social and literary background and the most limited in the quality of its literary judgment. Mr. Cantwell, a former editor of the book section of Time, is interested primarily. in Hawthorne the man, not the author. Assuming, with little demonstration, that Hawthorne was one of the finest artists of his time, Mr. Cantwell subordinates Hawthorne's literary works to other material in his solution of the mystery of Hawthorne's personality. That personality fascinates him: the lonely, secluded spirit in the robust body, surrounded by worldly friends in a dynamic age; the spirit that transmuted second-rate Gothic and sentimental material into dark psychological studies of sin and isolation in his tales and novels, and yet packed his private journals with sharp sun-lighted observations of the real life about him in town and ·on the road. The paradoxes of Hawthorne's personality have interested previous biographers, but (with some justification) Mr. Cantwell believes that the biographies published before this year merely perpetuate or elaborate a romantic picture of a morbid Hawthorne first suggested by his son Julian in Hawthorne and His Wife ( 1~84). To correct this picture, Mr. Cantwell has been indefatigable in research. Apparently he has read all the Hawthorne journals, letters, tales, sketches, novels, and fugitive journalism ; he has read all the previous biographies and the current scholarship; he has investigated the lives of almost all the persons (it would seem) directly or indirectly connected with Hawthorne during his life; he has travelled the countryside where Hawthorne passed, pored over old maps of towns and country, read the newspapers and books that Hawthorne probably read. *Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years. By RoBERT CANTWELL. New York: Rinehart [Toronto: Clarke, Irwin]. 1948. Pp. xiv, 499. ($6.00) 408 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY The masses of detail that he has gathered are arrayed in this first volume which recounts minutely the events of Hawthorne's life from the arrival of his forefathers in the seventeenth-century New World up to 1850 when Hawthorne at the age of forty-five published The Scarlet Letter. A second volume, on the years 1851-64, is to follow. Biographers before Cantwell, Stewart, and Van Doren have stressed the passive quality in Hawthorne's personality; Mr. Cantwell has championed the active. He sees Hawthorne ·as "a great man, leading an active and vigorous life of considerable excitement and some hazard/' uan active politician in the Democratic Party," "a skillful journalist." "The depth and the nature of his political work is mysterious. That is ~he true mystery of his life. He was forever visiting scenes where explosions had occurred or where violence of some sort was threatened, or where smugglers were active. Loneliness and seclusion were his portion, certainly, but they had less to do with his writing and with his view of the world than with his duties in the customs service." Mr. Cantwell has scented mystery behind Hawthorne's trips about New England, especially in the late eighteen-thirties, on which he made careful observations in his journals of the people and places he saw. He has noted that Hawthorne was in Maine during the "Aroostook War" between the Canadas and Maine; in Salem during the White murder, leaving before witnesses -were called to trial; in Pittsfield just after an explosion in a public powder magazine during the tension in...