Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

From Hawthorne (1879)

[174] From Hawthorne (1879) Henry James American author, theorist, and biographer of Emerson and William Wetmore Story as well as of Hawthorne, Henry James (1843–1916) admired great writers , lofty ideas, and culture steeped in tradition. Several novels of James’s early and later periods—The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors (1903), for instance—have endured to become not only classics but also defining moments in the development of psychological realism in American fiction. From the outset of his prolific career, James distrusted local movements such as Transcendentalism and doubted whether young, provincial America could either inspire or support an original literary imagination. In deciding to write Hawthorne, James chose a figure whose life and art represented a great deal about American character that gave him pause. Although James is traditionally introduced as an American writer, his personal biography complemented his criticism. In 1876—three years before he published Hawthorne —James settled permanently in London; he became a British subject the year before his death. James’s Hawthorne is discussed at length in the introduction to this volume. It will be necessary ...to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne’s career was probably as tranquil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident,in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books illustrate this simplicity;theyareasortofmonumenttoanunagitatedfortune.Hawthorne’s career had few vicissitudes or variations; it was passed for the most part in a small and homogeneous society, in a provincial, rural community; it had few [174] [174] XZ Henry James [175] perceptiblepointsofcontactwithwhatiscalledtheworld,withpublicevents, with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours. Its literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another,five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne’s private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius.That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but Hawthorne was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from present appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and fromthegeneralflatnessoftheliteraryfieldthatsurroundshim,thereisalso,to aspectator,somethingalmosttouchinginhissituation.Hewassomodestand delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honour of a representative attitude—perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderableliterarybaggageandthelargeconditionsofAmericanlife .Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender and unpretending,and the American world on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from an Old Manse, that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep,that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of...