Hawthorne: (English Men of Letters Series)James, Henry
General
Hawthorne: (English Men of Letters Series)
James, Henry
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
grant of land had been offered him as an inducement to residence,
figures in New England history as having given orders that "Anne
Coleman and four of her friends" should be whipped through Salem,
Boston, and Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded
to in that fine passage in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_,
in which Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder of the
American branch of his race:--
"The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family
tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my
boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still
haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past,
which I scarcely claim in reference to the present, phase of
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence
here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and
steeple-crowned progenitor--who came so early, with his
Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a
stately port, and make so large a figure as a man of war and
peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is
seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church; he had all
the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a
bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have
remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of
his hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will
last longer, it is to be feared, than any of his better
deeds, though these were many."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: It is proper that before I go further I should
acknowledge my large obligations to the only biography of our author,
of any considerable length, that has been written--the little volume
entitled _A Study of Hawthorne_, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the
son-in-law of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this
ingenious and sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great
pains to collect the more interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am
greatly indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not pitched in the key which
many another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to my sense
the truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate
essay the present little volume could not have been prepared.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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