XXXIX. AMERICAN PROSE WRITERS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. In spite of her apparent barrenness at the late Exhibition, a barrenness which probably resulted mainly from the actual riches of that vast country, its prodigious territory, and its still growing youth; in spite of our susceptibilities; and in spite of her own, America is a great nation, and the Americans are a great people ; and if that Fair of the World had been a book fair, as at Leipsic, I suspect that we should have seen our kinsfolk over the water cutting a very good figure with their literary ware. Certain it is, that when a people hardly seventy years old, who have still living among them men that remember when their republic was a province, can claim for themselves such a divine as Dr. Channing, and my friend Professor Norton, the friend of Mrs. Hemans; such an historian as Mr. Prescott; and such an orator as Daniel Webster, they have good right to be proud of their sons of the soil. To say nothing of these ornaments of our common language, or of the naturalists Wilson and Anderton-are they American? they are worth fighting for; or of the travelers, Dana, Stephens, and Willis, who are certainly transatlantic; or of the fair writers, Mrs. Sigourney and Miss Sedgwick, both my friends; or of the poor Margaret Fuller, drowned so deplorably only the other day, with her husband and her infant, on her own shores; her Italian husband said only the day before leaving Florence, that it had been predicted to him that he should die at sea; or of the great historian of Spanish literature, Mr. Ticknor (another friend!); or of a class of writers in which New England is rich-orator-writers, whose eloquence, first addressed to large audiences, is at once diffused and preserved by the press-witness the orations of Mi Sumner, and the lectures of Mr. Whipple and Mr. Giles; to say nothing of these volumes, which will bear a competition with any of their class in the elder country, let us look at the living novelists, and see if they be of any ordinary stamp. The author of the "Sketch-book" is almost as much a classic with us as in his own country. That book, indeed, and one or two that succeeded it, were so purely English in style and feeling, that when their success-their immense and deserved success—— induced the reprint of some drolleries which had for subject New York in its Dutch state, it was difficult to believe that they were by the same author. Since then, Mr. Washington Irving, having happily for literature filled a diplomatic post in Spain, has put forth other works, half Spanish, half Moorish, equally full of local color and local history, books as good as history, that almost make us live in the Alhambra, and increase our sympathy with the tasteful and chivalrous people who planned its halls and gardens. Then he returned home; and there he has done for the backwoods and the prairies what he before did for the manor-house of England and the palace of Granada. Few, very few, can show a long succession of volumes, so pure, so graceful, and so varied as Mr. Irving. To my poor cottage, rich only in printed paper, people often come to borrow books for themselves or their children. Sometimes they make their own selection; sometimes, much against my will, they leave the choice to me; and in either case I know no works that are oftener lent than those that bear the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon. Then Mr. Cooper! original and natural as his own Pioneers; adventurous as Paul Jones; hardy as Long Tom; persevering and indomitable as that Leather-stocking whom he has conducted through fifteen volumes without once varying from the admirable portrait which he originally designed. They say that he does not value our praise that he has no appreciation for his appreciators. But I do not choose to believe such a scandal. It can only be a "they say." He is too richly gifted to be wanting in sympathy even with his own admirers; and if he have an odd manner of showing that sympathy, why it must pass as "Pretty Fanny's way." Since these light words were written, I grieve to say that Mr. Cooper is dead. I trust his gifted daughter will become his biographer. Few lives would be more interesting. Next comes one with whom my saucy pen must take no free dom-one good and grave, and pure and holy-whose works, by their high aim and their fine execution, claim the respect of all. Little known by name, the excellently selected reprints of my friend Mr. Chambers have made Mr. Ware's letters from Palmyra and from Rome familiar to all, who seek to unite the excitement of an early Christian story, a tale of persecution and of martyrdom, with a style and detail so full of calm and sober learning, that they seem literally saturated with classical lore. So entire is the feeling of scholarship pervading these two books, in one of which Zenobia appears in her beautiful Palmyra a powerful Queen, in the other dragged through the streets of Rome a miserable captive, that we seem to be reading a translation from the Latin. There is not a trace of modern habits or modes of thinking; and if Mr. Ware had been possessed by the monomania of Macpherson or of Chatterton, it would have rested with himself to produce these letters as a close and literal version of manuscripts of the third century. Another talented romancer is Dr. Bird, whose two works on the conquest of Mexico have great merit, although hidden behind the mask of most unpromising titles (one of them is called, I think, "Abdallah the Moor, or the Infidel's Doom"). I never met with any one who had read them but myself, to whom that particular subject has an unfailing interest. His "Nick of the Woods," a striking but very painful Indian novel, and his description of those wonderful American caves, in which truth leaves fiction far behind, are generally known and duly appreciated. These excellent writers have been long before the public; but a new star has lately sprung into light in the Western horizon, who in a totally different manner—and nothing is more remarkable among all these American novelists than their utter difference from each other-will hardly fail to cast a bright illumination over both hemispheres. It is hardly two years since Mr. Hawthorne, until then known only by one or two of those little volumes which the sagacious hold as promises of future excellence, put forth that singular book, "The Scarlet Letter;" ùpropos to which, Dr. Holmes, who so well knows the value of words, uses this significant expression: "I snatch the book along whose burning leaves And it is the very word. "We do snatch the book ;" and until we have got to the end, very few of us, I apprehend, have sufficient strength of will to lay it down. The story is of the early days of New England; those days when, as Mr. Whittier has shown in his clever mystification, called "Margaret Smith's Journal," the Pilgrim Fathers, just escaped from persecution in Europe, persecuted those who presumed to follow their example, and to exercise liberty of thought and worship in the new home of freedom. Lamentable inconsistency of human action! Nothing but the strongest historical evidence could make us believe that they who had cast away fortune and country, and every worldly good for conscience' sake, should visit with fire and fagot the peaceful Quaker and poor demented creatures accused of witchcraft, and driven by the accusation into the confession, perhaps into a diseased craving for the power and the crime. But so it is. Oppression makes oppression; persecution propagates persecution. There is no end to the evil when once engendered. The "Scarlet Letter" is not, however, a story of witch, or of Quaker, although an atmosphere of sorcery seems to pervade the air, but one of that strict and rigid morality peculiar to the Puritans, who loved to visit with legal penalties such sins as are kept in check by public opinion. Accordingly, our first sight of Hester, is exposed upon a scaffold, wearing upon her breast a scarlet A, glittering with gold embroidery, and carrying in her arms a female infant. She had been sent, without her husband, under the protection of some of the elders of the colony, and the punishment was not inerely caused by the birth of this child of shame, but by her resolute concealment of the partner of her guilt. Step by step the reader becomes acquainted with the secret. The participator of her frailty was a young and eloquent preacher, famed not only for learning and talent, but for severe sanctity. The husband arrives under a false character, recognized only by the erring wife, before whom, cruel, vindictive, hating and hateful, he appears as a visible conscience, and the sufferings of the proud and fiery Hester, suffering a daily martyrdom of shame and scorn, and of the seducer perishing under the terrible remorse of undeserved praise, respect, and honor, are among the finest and most original conceptions of tragic narrative. Detestable as the husband is, and with all the passionate truth that Mr. Haw thorne has thrown into the long agony of the seducer, we never, in our pity for the sufferer, lose our abhorrence of the sin. Scarcely a twelvemonth has passed, and another New England story, "The House with the Seven Gables," has come to redeem the pledge of excellence given by the first. In this tale, Fate plays almost as great a part as in a Greek Trilogy. Two centuries ago, a certain wicked and powerful Colonel Pyncheon, was seized with a violent desire to possess himself of a certain bit of ground, on which to build the large and picturesque wooden mansion from which the story takes its title. Master Maule, the original possessor, obstinate and poor, refused all offers of money for his land; but being shortly afterward accused, no one very well knows why, of the fashionable sin of witchcraft, the poor man is tried, condemned, and burnt; the property forfeited and sold; and the rich man's house erected without let or pause. But the shadow of a great crime has passed over the place. A bubbling spring, famous for the purity and freshness of its waters, turns salt and bitter, and the rich man himself, the great, powerful, wicked Colonel Pyncheon is found dead in his own hall, stricken by some strange, sudden, mysterious death on the very day of his taking possession, and when he had invited half the province to his house-warming. Both proprietors, the poor old wizard, and the wealthy Colonel, leave one child, and during two succeeding centuries these races, always distant and peculiar, come at long intervals strangely across each other. Nothing can exceed the skill with which this part of the book is managed. The story is not told; we find it out; we feel that there is a legend; that some strange destiny has hovered over the old house, and hovers there still. The slightness of the means by which this feeling is excited is wonderful. The mixture of the grotesque and the supernatural in Hoffman and the German School, seems coarse and vulgar blundering in the comparison; even the mighty magician of Udolpho, the Anne Radcliffe whom the French quote with so much unction, was a bungler at her trade, when compared with the vague, dim, vapory, impalpable ghastliness with which Mr. Hawthorne has contrived to envelop his narrative. Two hundred years have passed. The Maules have disappeared; and the Pyncheons are reduced by the mysterious death. |