The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Appendix to Volume XII: Tales, Sketches, and other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop: Biographical Sketch of Nathaniel HawthorneLathrop, George Parsons
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The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Appendix to Volume XII: Tales, Sketches, and other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop: Biographical Sketch of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lathrop, George Parsons
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
of all who were in sympathy with this real and human side of his life."
But there was another side of his being, for which we may adopt the name
that Dr. Loring has given it, the "supernatural." It was this which gave
him his high distinction. "When he entered upon his work as a writer, he
left behind him his other and accustomed personality by which he was
known in general intercourse. In this work he allowed no interference,
he asked for no aid. He was shy of those whose intellectual power and
literary fame might seem to give them a right to enter his sanctuary. In
an assembly of illustrious authors and thinkers, he floated, reserved
and silent, around the margin in the twilight of the room, and at last
vanished into the outer darkness; and when he was gone, Mr. Emerson said
of him: 'Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night.' The working of
his mind was so sacred and mysterious to him that he was impatient of
any attempt at familiarity or even intimacy with the divine power within
him. His love of personal solitude was a ruling passion, his
intellectual solitude was an overpowering necessity.... Hawthorne said
himself that his work grew in his brain as it went on, and was beyond
his control or direction, for nature was his guide.... I have often
thought that he understood his own greatness so imperfectly, that he
dared not expose the mystery to others, and that the sacredness of his
genius was to him like the sacredness of his love."
And did not Hawthorne write to his betrothed wife?--"Lights and shadows
are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know not whence
they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them.
It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena." What we may
collect and set down of mere fact about his surroundings and his acts
relates itself, therefore, mainly to his outwardly real existence, to
the mere shell or mask of him, which was all that anybody could behold
with the eyes; and as for the interior and ideal existence, it is not
likely that we shall securely penetrate very far, where his own
impartial and introverted gaze stopped short. It is but a rough method
to infer with brusque self-confidence that we may judge from a few words
here and there the whole of his thought and feeling. A fair enough
notion may be formed as to the status of his post-collegiate life in
Salem, from the data we have, but we can do no more than guess at its
formative influence upon his genius. And I should be sorry to give an
impression that because his courtship went on in the old house by the
graveyard, of which he has written so soberly, there was any shadow of
melancholy upon that initiatory period of a new happiness. His
reflections concerning the spot had to do with his imaginative, or if
one choose, his "supernatural," existence; what actually passed there
had to do with the real and the personal, and with the life of the
affections. We may be sure that the meeting of two such perfected
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