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

From Sketches from Concord and Appledore (1895)

From Sketches from Concord and Appledore (1895) Frank Preston Stearns Frank Preston Stearns (1846–1917) was the son of George Luther Stearns, the fiery reformer who supported John Brown in Kansas, belonged to Concord’s “Secret Six,” and helped establish the Freedmen’s Bureau. The son’s life took a very different direction. Educated at Sanborn’s academy in Concord and then at Harvard, Stearns, who was the same age as Julian Hawthorne and on friendly terms with the Alcott girls and the Emerson children, became an authority on Italian art and published several books and articles on the subject. Stearns’s extended commentary that follows reveals his appreciation of Hawthorne’s merit as a person and an artist. Devoting minimal attention to Hawthorne’s Salem roots, Stearns begins with the suggestion that Hawthorne ’s Brook Farm experience was the impetus behind his need to find a career. Lathrop and James had already advanced the same suggestion, but Stearns’s sarcastic representation of the utopian experiment elevates Hawthorne in the reader’s mind as a person of good sense who mistakenly became involved with some very strange people. Further, Stearns’s genteel representation of the Hawthornes’ marriage, his reserved development of Hawthorne’s shyness through an analogy drawn from Thoreau’s characterization of how wild apple trees are grown, and his conviction that Hawthorne’s allegories make a more lasting impression on readers than do many sermons they might otherwise hear all suggest that Stearns was one of the first biographers at the end of the nineteenth century to take a fresh look at Hawthorne. Stearns’s view of Hawthorne is thus unburdened by the rush of critical opinions that appeared in print during the 1870s and 1880s, and it informed his later treatments of Hawthorne in Cambridge Sketches (1905) and The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1906). The literary celebrities of Concord, with the exception of Thoreau, were not indigenous. Emerson may have gone there from an hereditary tendency [, and] . . . Hawthorne . . . by way of the Brook Farm experiment. How, with his reserved and solitary mode of life, he should have embarked in such a gregarious enterprise is not very clear; but the election of General Harrison [223] [223] XZ hawthorne in his own time [224] had deprived him of a small government office[,] ...his writings brought him very little, and perhaps he hardly knew what to do with himself. All accounts agree that he joined the West Roxbury association of his own free-will,and without solicitation of any kind.He not only threw himself into this hazardous scheme with an energy that astounded his friends but he embarked in it all the money he had in the world, which was nearly a thousand dollars. He has left no notation from which we might infer what his hopes or his motives were. . . . George Ripley and his friends do not seem to have made any definite calculation of what might be the result of their experiment. They expected, by working six hours a day and limiting themselves to the simplest and most frugal living, to have six left for literary pursuits and the enjoyment of profound conversation. Any practical farmer would have told them that this could not be done and make both ends meet at the close of the year.Any political economist would have told them that a community which disregards the advantage of division of labor, could not compete with one which recognizes that advantage. . . . The greater number of the Brook Farm community were transcendentalists , and we have no desire to depreciate the work which the transcendentalists accomplished. They were the needful men and women of their time; the importers of fresh thought and a more elevated mental activity. . . . Since the time of the early Christians there was never a more pure-minded and loyal-hearted congregation than that which was gathered at Brook Farm. They were really the best society of the day. George Ripley himself, one of the finest scholars and most agreeable writers of that time, afterwards found his right place as literary editor of the New York Tribune. . . . There were poets,painters,musicians in the community; especially John S.Dwight,who as the life-long editor of the “Journal of Music,” also deserves a place on the roll of our public educators. George William Curtis was one of the youngest members of the community, but always one of the most brilliant. Sometimes of a rainy day there was very good cheer and...