One of the stories that mankind has always liked to believe is that of the existence of a marvellous country whose climate was perfect, whose people were happy, whose king was wise and good, and where wealth abounded. The old travellers of the Middle Ages dreamed of finding this land somewhere in the far East. Many books were written about it, and many tales told by knight and palmer of its rivers of gold, mines of precious stones, and treasure vaults of inexhaustible riches. But, although from time to time some famous traveller like Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville described the great wealth of Ormus or Cathay, yet no one ever found the real country of his imagination, and the dream passed down from generation to generationunfulfilled. The Spaniards called this countryEl Dorado, and perhaps their vision of it was the wildest of all, for not only were they to find inexhaustible riches, but trees whose fruit would heal disease, magic wells which yielded happiness, and fountains of immortal youth. Thus dreamed the Spaniard of the fifteenth century, and when Columbus found the new world it was believed that it included El Dorado. Leader after leader mustered his knights and soldiers and sought the golden country. They traversed forests, climbed mountains, forded rivers, and waded through swamps and morasses; they suffered hunger, thirst, and fever, and the savage hostility of the Indians; they died by hundreds and were buried in unmarked graves, and expedition after expedition returned to Spain to report the fruitlessness of their search. But the hope was not given up. New seekers started on the quest, and it seemed that the ships of Spain could hardly hold her eager adventurers.
In a strange way this dream of El Dorado was realized. Two soldiers of fortune, bolder, hardier, luckier than the rest, actually found notone country but two, which were in part at least like the golden world they sought. High upon the table-land of Mexico and guarded by its snow-capped mountains they found the kingdom of the Aztecs, with their vast wealth of gold and silver. Safe behind the barrier of the Andes lay the land of the Incas, whose riches were, like those of Ophir or Cathay, not to be measured. Both of these countries possessed a strange and characteristic civilization. In fact, even to this day, scholars are puzzled to know the source of the knowledge which these people possessed.
In Mexico Hernando Cortez found a government whose head was the king, supported by a tribunal of judges who governed the principal cities. If a judge took a bribe he was put to death. In the king's tribunal the throne was of gold inlaid with turquoises. The walls were hung with tapestry embroidered with figures of birds and flowers. Over the throne was a canopy flashing with gold and jewels. There were officers to escort prisoners to and from court, and an account of the proceedings was kept in hieroglyphic paintings. All the laws of thekingdom were taught by these paintings to the people. The Aztecs had orders of nobility and knighthood; they had a military code and hospitals for the sick. Their temples glittered with gold and jewels, and they had ceremonies of baptism, marriage, and burial. They had monastic orders, astrologists and astronomers, physicians, merchants, jewellers, mechanics, and husbandmen. Their palaces were treasure-houses of wealth. In fact, they were as unlike the Indians of the eastern coast of America as the Englishman of to-day is unlike the half-naked savage who in the early ages roamed through England, subsisting upon berries and raw flesh.
In Peru Francisco Pizarro found a great and powerful empire, ruled over by a wise sovereign. In the whole length and breadth of the land not one poor or sick person was left uncared for by the state. Great highways traversed mountain passes and crossed ravines and precipices to the most distant parts of the kingdom. Huge aqueducts of stone carried the mountain streams for hundreds of miles to the plains below. Massive fortresses, whose masonry was so solid thatit seemed part of the mountain itself, linked the cities together, and a postal system extended over the empire composed of relays of couriers who wore a peculiar livery and ran from one post to another at the rate of one hundred and fifty miles a day. The walls of temples and palaces were covered with plates of gold encrusted with precious stones. The raiment of the king and nobles was embroidered with jewels. The lakes in the royal court-yards were fringed with wild flowers brought from every corner of the empire and representing every degree of climate. In a word, it was the dream of El Dorado fulfilled.
Although these two countries were alike peopled by races who had lived there since remote antiquity, neither had ever heard of the existence of the other, and thus we have the picture of two civilizations, very similar, springing up independently.
The conquest of Mexico by Cortez in 1521 changed the entire life of the people. Their forts and cities were ruined; three of their kings had fallen during the struggle; the whole country had been divided among the conquerors, and theAztecs were made slaves. Cortez rebuilt the City of Mexico and filled the country with cathedrals and convents. He tried to convert the natives to Christianity, and Mexico became Spanish in its laws and institutions.
But the old civilization had passed away; there was no more an Aztec nation; and though in time the Indians and Spaniards formed together a new race, it did not partake of the spirit of the old.
What Cortez did for Mexico, Pizarro accomplished twelve years later in Peru. On the death of their monarch, the Inca, the Peruvians lost spirit and were more easily conquered than the Aztecs. Peru became a Spanish province, and, like Mexico, was considered by the crown only as a treasure-house from which to draw endless wealth. No regret was felt for the two great and powerful nations that had ceased to exist.
In the meantime the settlement of America went on rapidly. Florida, the valley of the Mississippi, Canada, and New England became powerful colonies forming the nucleus of new countries, which had never heard of the civilizationsof Mexico and Peru, and whose only knowledge of Indians was gathered from the savage tribes from which they had wrested the soil. In 1610 the Spanish historian Solis wrote an account of the subjugation of Mexico, in which the conquerors were portrayed in glowing colors. This work was read chiefly by scholars. In 1779 the English historian Robertson gave in hisHistory of the New Worlda brilliant sketch of the Spanish conquests in America. But not until 1847 was the world offered the detailed narrative of the conquest and ruin of the Aztec empire.
This work was from the pen of the American scholar, William H. Prescott, who was already known as the author of a history of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, a work which had brought him a European reputation.
Prescott was born in Salem, Mass., in 1796, in an old elm-shaded house. From his earliest years he was a teller of stories, and had a high reputation among his boy friends as a romancer. Walking to and from school with his companions he invented tale after tale, sometimes thenarrative being continued from day to day, lessons and home duties being considered but tiresome interruptions to the real business of life. Very often one of these stories begun on Monday would be continued through the whole week, and the end be celebrated on Saturday by a visit to the Boston Athenæum, into whose recesses he would beguile his fellows, while they buckled on the old armor found there, and played at joust and tournament, imagining themselves to be Lancelot, Ronsard, or Bayard, as the case might be.
A life of Gibbon which Prescott read in his teens led to an enthusiastic study of history and to the resolve to become if possible a historian himself. While a student at Harvard one of his eyes was so injured by the carelessness of a fellow pupil that he lost the entire use of it; but he kept to the resolution to fulfil the task he had set for himself. His fame began with the publication of theHistory of Ferdinand and Isabella, which was published almost simultaneously in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Russia. It covers the history of Spain from the Moorishinvasion through the period of national glory which illumined the reign of Isabella. The civil wars, the Jewish persecutions, the discovery of the New World, the expulsion of the Moors, the Italian wars, and the social life of the people, their arts and pursuits, their amusements, and the literature of that age, are vividly presented.
The recognition of his merits was welcome to Prescott. While doubting which subject to choose for his labors he had heard several lectures upon Spanish literature, prepared for delivery at Harvard College, and at once applied himself to the study of the Spanish language, history, and romance as a preparation for his life work, and two years after began his celebrated work. The book was eleven years in preparation, and is full of enthusiasm for the romance and chivalry of the Old World. Prescott'sHistory of the Conquest of Mexicobegan with a sketch of the ancient Aztec civilization, proceeded to a description of the conquest by Cortez, and concluded with an account of the after career of the great commander, the wholework seeming a brilliant romance rather than sober history.
The materials for Prescott's work were gathered from every known available source. The narratives of eye-witnesses were brought forth from their hiding-places in the royal libraries of Spain, and patiently transcribed; old letters, unpublished chronicles, royal edicts, monkish legends, every scrap of information attainable, was transmitted to the worker across the sea, who because of his partial blindness had to depend entirely upon others in the collection of his authorities. These documents were read to Prescott by a secretary, who took notes under the author's direction; these notes were again read to him, and then after sifting, comparing and, retracing again and again the old ground, the historian began his work. He wrote upon a noctograph with an ivory stylus, as a blind man writes, and because of great physical weakness he was able to accomplish only a very little each day. But week by week the work grew. His marvellous memory enabled him to recall sixty pages of printed matter at once. His wonderfulimagination enabled him to present the Mexico of the sixteenth century as it appeared to the old Spanish cavaliers, and as no historian had ever presented it before. He made of each episode of the great drama a finished and perfect picture. In fact, theHistory of the Conquest of Mexicois more than anything else a historical painting wrought to perfection by the cunning of the master hand.
Prescott spent six years over this work, which enhanced his fame as a historian and kept for American literature the high place won by Irving. Indeed, Irving himself had designed to write the history of the conquest of Mexico, but withdrew in favor of Prescott.
Three months after the publication of his work on Mexico, Prescott began theHistory of the Conquest of Peru, the materials for which had already been obtained. But these documents proved much more complete than those describing the Mexican conquest.
The conquest of Mexico was achieved mainly by one man, Cortez; but while Pizarro was virtually the head of the expedition against Peru,he was accompanied by others whose plans were often opposed to his own, and whose personal devotion could never be counted upon. Each of these men held regular correspondence with the court of Spain, and Pizarro never knew when his own account of the capture of a city or settlement of a colony would be contradicted by the statement of one of his officers. After the capture and death of the Inca, which was the real conquest of the country from the natives, Pizarro was obliged to reconquer Peru from his own officers, who quarrelled with him and among themselves continually.
The conquest is shown to be a war of adventurers, a crusade of buccaneers, who wanted only gold. The sieges and battles of the Spaniards read like massacres, and the story of the death of the Inca like an unbelievable horror of the Dark Ages. This scene, contrasted with the glowing description of the former magnificence of the Inca, shows Prescott in his most brilliant mood as a writer. Perhaps his greatest gift is this power of reproducing faithfully the actual spirit of the conquest, a spirit which,in spite of the glitter of arms and splendor of religious ceremonial, proves to have been one of greed and lowest selfishness.
The Conquest of Peru, published in 1847, when Prescott was fifty-two years old, was the last of his historical works. These three histories, with three volumes of an uncompleted life of Philip II., which promised to be his greatest work, and a volume of essays comprise Prescott's contribution to American literature, and begin that series of brilliant historical works of which American letters boast.
Prescott, during the most of his literary life, was obliged to sit quietly in his study, leaving to other hands the collection of the materials for his work. For, besides the accident which during his college life deprived him of one eye, he was always delicate. Sometimes he would be kept for months in a darkened room, and at best his life was one of seclusion. The strife of the world and of action was not for him. In his library, surrounded by his books and assisted by his secretary, he sought for truth as the old alchemists sought for gold. Patient and tirelesshe unravelled thread after thread of the fabric from which he was to weave the history of the Spanish conquests.
If Prescott had had access to documents which have since come to light, if he had been able to visit the places he described, and to study their unwritten records, his work would have been a splendid and imperishable monument to the dead civilization of the Aztec and Peruvian.
As it is, it must serve as a guiding light pointing to the right way, one which shed lustre on the new literature of his country and opened an unexplored region to the American writer.
In an old New England farm-house kitchen, a barefoot boy, dressed in homespun, one day sat listening to a lazy Scotch beggar who piped the songs of Burns in return for his meal of bread and cheese and cider. The beggar was good-natured, and the boy was an eager listener, andBonnie Doon,Highland Mary, andAuld Lang Synewere trilled forth as the master himself may have sung them among the Scottish "banks and braes." Never before had the farmer boy heard of the famous peasant, and a new door was opened through which he passed into an undreamed of world. A few months later the school-master gave him a copy of Burns's poems, and with this gift the boy became a poet himself. For these songs of roadsidesand meadows, of ploughed fields and wet hedgerows, were to him familiar pictures of every-day life, whose poetry, once revealed, had to express itself in words.
The boy was the son of John and Abigail Whittier, Quaker farmers owning a little homestead in the valley of the Merrimac, near the town of Haverhill, Mass. In honor of an ancestor he had been named John Greenleaf Whittier, the Greenleaf, as he tells us in one of his poems, having become Americanized from the Frenchfeuille verte,green leaf, a suggestion, perhaps, of far away days in which the family might have been men of the wood, keepers of the deer or forest guarders in France during feudal ages. In his boyhood, life in the Merrimac valley was primitive enough. The house was small and plain, the kitchen being the living room, and the parlor dedicated to Sunday and holiday use only. The floor was sanded and on the wide fire-place benches the men and children of the family sat at night to whittle axe-handles, mend shoes, crack nuts, or learn the next day's lessons. Often a stranger was foundamong them; some Quaker travelling on business, or a stranger on his way to some distant town, or perhaps a professional beggar to whom the hospitality of the place was well known. Once when the mother had refused a night's shelter to an unprepossessing vagabond, John was sent out to bring him back. He proved to be an Italian artisan, and after supper he told them of the Italian grape gatherings and festivals, and of the wonderful beauty of Italy, paying for his entertainment by presenting to the mother a recipe for making bread from chestnuts.
Sometimes the visitor would be an uncanny old crone who still believed in witches and fairies, and who told how her butter refused to come, or how her candle had been snuffed out by a witch in the form of a big black bug. One old woman in the neighborhood was renowned for her tales of ghosts, devils, fairies, brownies, sprenties, enchanted towers, headless men, haunted mills that were run at night by ghostly millers and witches riding on broom-sticks by the light of the full moon, and descendingunguarded chimneys to lay their spells upon cream-pot and yeast-bowl.
After such an evening's entertainment the boy needed courage to leave the bright kitchen fire and climb up the narrow stairs to the loft where he slept, and where the sound of the night-wind crept through the frosty rafters, and the voice of the screech-owl came dismally from the trees outside.
Haverhill boasted at that time its village conjurer, who could remove the spells of those wicked spirits, and whose gaunt form could be seen any day along the meadows and streams gathering herbs to be stewed and brewed into love-potions, cures for melancholy, spells against witchcraft, and other remedies for human ills. He was held in great respect by the inhabitants, and feared almost as much as the witches themselves.
An ever-welcome guest at the Whittiers was the school-master, whose head was full of the local legends, and whose tales of Indian raids and of revolutionary struggles were regarded as authentic history. This Yankee pedagogue,moreover, could, with infinite spirit and zest, retell the classic stories of the Greek and Latin poets.
Twice a year came to the little homestead the Yankee pedler, with his supply of pins, needles, thread, razors, soaps, and scissors for the elders, and jack-knives for the boys who had been saving their pennies to purchase those treasures. He had gay ribbons for worldly minded maids, but these were never bought for Quaker Whittier's daughters. But to Poet John's thinking the pedler's choicest wares were the songs of his own composing, printed with wood-cuts, which he sold at an astonishingly low price, or even, upon occasions, gave away. These songs celebrated earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, hangings, marriages, deaths, and funerals. Often they were improvised as the pedler sat with the rest around the hearth fire. If a wedding had occurred during his absence he was ready to versify it, and equally ready to lament the loss of a favorite cow. To Whittier this gift of rhyming seemed marvellous, and in after years he described this wandering minstrel as encircled, tohis young eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality.
Such was the home-life of this barefooted boy, who drove the cows night and morning through the dewy meadows, and followed the oxen, breaking the earth into rich brown furrows, whose sight and smell suggested to him always the generous bounty of nature. From early spring, when the corn was planted in fields bordered by wild rose-bushes, to late autumn, when the crop lay bound into glistening sheaves, his life was one of steady toil, lightened sometimes by a day's fishing in the mountain streams or by a berrying excursion up among the hills.
In cold weather he went to school in the little school-house that he celebrates in one of his poems, and very often, as he confessed, he was found writing verses instead of doing sums on his slate.
This old phase of New-England life has now passed away, but he has preserved its memory in three poems, which are in a special sense biographical. These poems are,The Barefoot Boy,My Schoolmaster, andSnow-Bound. The firsttwo are simple, boyish memories, but the last is a description not only of his early home, but of the New-England farm life, and is a Puritan idyl.
All are full of the idealization of childhood, for the poet could never break loose from the charm which had enthralled him as a boy. The poetry of common life which lay over the meadow lands and fields of grain, which gave a voice to the woodland brook, and glorified the falling rain and snow, was felt by Whittier, when, as a child, he paused from his work to listen to the robin's song among the wheat or watch the flocks of clouds making their way across the summer sky.
When he was nineteen years of age the country-side mail-carrier one day rode up to the farm and took from his saddle-bags the weekly paper, which he tossed to the boy, who stood mending a fence. With trembling eagerness Whittier opened it, and saw in the "Poet's Corner" his first printed poem. He had sent it with little hope that it would be accepted, and the sight of it filled him with joy, and determined his literary career. A few months later the editor of thepaper, William Lloyd Garrison, drove out to the homestead to see the young verse-maker. Whittier was called from the field where he was hoeing, and in the interview that followed Garrison insisted that such talent should not be thrown away, and urged the youth to take a course of study at some academy. But, although the farm supplied the daily needs of the family, money was scarce, and the sum required for board and tuition was impossible to scrape together. A young farm assistant, however, offered to teach Whittier the trade of shoemaking, and his every moment of leisure was thereafter spent in learning this craft. During the following winter the lad furnished the women of the neighborhood with good, well-made shoes, and with the money thus earned he entered Haverhill Academy in April, 1827, being then in his twentieth year. For the next six months his favorite haunts in field and wood were unvisited, except on the Saturdays and Sundays spent with his family. He gained some reputation as a poet by the publication of the ode which he wrote in honor of the new academy, and although hereturned to the farm after six months of study, it was only to earn more money for further schooling.
His poems and sketches now began to appear in the different newspapers and periodicals, and he did some editing for various papers. This work brought him into notice among literary people, but it was his political convictions that first gave him a national reputation.
From the first Whittier stood side by side with William Lloyd Garrison in his crusade against slavery, and many of his best poems appeared in theLiberator, Garrison's own paper. These poems, with others, were collected in a volume calledVoices of Freedom. It was these songs, which rushed onward like his own mountain brooks, that made Whittier known from one end of the country to the other as an apostle of liberty. All Whittier's poems of this period belong to the political history of the country, of which they are as much a part as the war records.
In all this work there is no trace of bitterness or enmity. His songs of freedom were but the bugle-notes calling the nation to a higher humanity.Like the old Hebrew prophets, he spared not his own, and many of his most burning words are a summons to duty to his brothers in the North. If he could remind the South that the breath of slavery tainted the air
"That old Dekalb and Sumter drank,"
"That old Dekalb and Sumter drank,"
"That old Dekalb and Sumter drank,"
he could also, inBarbara Frietchie, pay loving tribute to the noble heart of one of her best-loved sons. His was the dream of the great nation to be—his spirit that of the preacher who saw his people unfaithful to the high trust they had received as guardians of the land which the world had been taught to regard as the home of liberty. It was this high conception that gave to his work its greatest power, and that made Whittier, above all others, the poet of freedom; so that although the mission of these poems has ceased, and as literature they will not appeal to succeeding generations as forcibly as they did to their own, as a part of national history they will be long preserved.
Whittier's other poems deal so largely with the home-life of his day that he is called the poet ofNew England. All its traditions, memories, and beliefs are faithfully recorded by him. InSnow-Boundwe have the life of the New-England farmer. InMabel Martinwe see again the old Puritan dogmatism hunting down witches, burning or hanging them, and following with relentless persecution the families of the unhappy wretches who thus came under the ban. InMogg Megoneis celebrated in beautiful verse one of those legends of Indian life which linger immortally around the pines of New England, while theGrave by the Lake, theChangeling, theWreck of Rivermouth, theDead Ship of Harpswell, and others in the collection called theTent on the Beach, revive old traditions of those early days when history mingled with legend and the belief in water-spirits and ghostly warnings had not yet vanished.
In some exquisite ballads, such asSchool Days, we have the memory of the past, fresh as the wild violets which the poet culled as a boy, whileMaud Mulleris a very idyl of a New-England harvest-field in the poet's youth. InAmong the Hillswe have some of Whittier's best poems ofcountry life, while many minor poems celebrate the hills and streams of which he was so fond. Whittier wrote, also, many beautiful hymns, and his poems for children, such asKing Solomon and the AntsandThe Robin, show how easy it was for his great heart to enter into the spirit of childhood.Child Life, his compilation of poems for childhood, is one of the best ever made, while another compilation, calledSongs of Three Centuries, shows his wide familiarity and appreciation of all that is great in English poetry.
After the sale of the old home of his childhood Whittier lived in the house at Amesbury, which for many years his sister shared. His last collection of poems, calledSundown, was published in 1890, for some friends only, as a memento of his eightieth birthday. He died two years later, and was buried in the yard of the Friends' meeting-house in Amesbury, a short distance from his birthplace.
In 1804 the town of Salem, in Massachusetts, was the most important seaport in America. With the regularity of the tides its ships sailed to China, the East Indies, the Feejee Islands, South America, and the West Indies, and its seamen were as well known in the harbors of these distant places as in their native town. Throughout the Revolution Salem, with some neighboring smaller ports, was the hope of the colonists. No American navy existed; but the merchants and marines turned their vessels into ships of war, and under the name of privateers swept the seas of British cruisers, capturing in six years over four hundred and fifty prizes. During the war of 1812, again, the naval service was led by the hardy Salem captains, and the brave littleseaport gave generously to the cause of the nation. Salem from the first was identified with American independence. Upon her hillsides one memorable day the inhabitants gathered to watch the fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon, and through her streets, a few weeks later, the body of the heroic Lawrence was borne in state. Among the thronging crowds that day must have wandered the boy Nathaniel Hawthorne, then in his tenth year. Born in Salem, he came of a line of seafaring men who had fought their way to fame and fortune in the teeth of wind and wave; his family having its American beginning at the time when Indian and white man alike made their homes in the shadowy aisles of the New-England forests. These ocean-roving ancestors were among the first to take an American ship to St. Petersburg, Sumatra, Australia, and Africa. They fought pirates, overcame savages, suffered shipwreck and disaster, and many of them found their graves in the waters of some foreign sea. Hawthorne's own father was lost on a voyage.
From this race of hardy sailors Hawthorneinherited the patience, courage, and endurance which were the basis of his character, a character touched besides by that melancholy and love of solitude which is apt to distinguish those born by the sea. It is this combination, perhaps, of Puritan steadfastness of purpose and wild adventurous life that descended to Hawthorne in the form of the most exquisite imagination tinctured with the highest moral aspirations. It was the sturdy, healthy plant of Puritanism blossoming into a beautiful flower.
In this old town of Salem, with its quaint houses, with their carved doorways and many windows, with its pretty rose-gardens, its beautiful overshadowing elms, its dingy court-house and celebrated town-pump, Hawthorne passed his early life, his picturesque surroundings forming a suitable environment for the handsome, imaginative boy who was to create the most beautiful literary art that America had yet known. Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with memories of the witches hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves andwarehouses held priceless stores of merchandise. Between this haunting spirit of the past and the broader, newer life of the future, Hawthorne walked with the serene hope of the youth of that day. The old, intolerant Puritanism had passed away. Only the fine gold remained as the priceless treasure of the new generation.
Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town. He went to school and to church, loved the sea and prophesied that he should go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading, and ready to fight with any school-fellows who had, as he expressed it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, finding life a good thing whether he was roaming the streets, sitting idly on the wharves, or stretched on the floor at home reading a favorite author.
Almost all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and Hawthorne, like his fellows, lived in the magic world of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Bunyan.The Pilgrim's Progresswas an especial favorite with him, its lofty spirit carryinghis soul into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without understanding. For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Me., where the family lived for a time. Here, he says, he led the life of a bird of the air, with no restraint and in absolute freedom. In the summer he would take his gun and spend days in the forest, doing whatever pleased his vagabond spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes pass the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, warmed by the blaze of the fallen evergreens.
But he had to return to Salem to prepare for college, whither he went in 1821, in his seventeenth year. He entered Bowdoin, and had among his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. Here Hawthorne spent happy days, and long afterward, in writing to an old college friend, he speaks ofthe charm that lingers around the memory of the place when he gathered blueberries in study hours, watched the great logs drifting down the current of the Androscoggin from the lumber districts above, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and squirrels in hours which should have been devoted to the classics.
In this same letter, which forms the dedication to one of his books, he adds that it is this friend, if any one, who is responsible for his becoming a writer, as it was here, in the shadow of the tall pines which sheltered Bowdoin College, that the first prophecy concerning his destiny was made. He was to be a writer of fiction, the friend said, little dreaming of the honors that were to crown one of the great novelists of the world.
After leaving Bowdoin Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the next twelve years of his life. Here he produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals and won for him a narrow reputation. But the years which a man usually devotes to his best work were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of agreat future, for good as is some of the work produced at this time, it never would have won for the author the highest place in American literature. These stories and sketches were afterward collected and published under the titleTwice-Told TalesandThe Snow Image. Full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, they were the best imaginative work yet produced in America, but in speaking of them Hawthorne himself says that in this result of twelve years there is little to show for its thought and industry.
But the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance. Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of Puritan times in New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty. In the days of which he wrote, a Puritan town was exactly like a large family bound together by mutual interests, the acts of each life being regarded as affecting the whole community. Hawthorne has preserved this spirit of colonialNew England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears, and the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only in public records and church histories, was given new life. In Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian fights, village pillories, town-meetings, witch-burnings, and church-councils was already a memory. With his steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock at his side he had left the pleasant New-England farm lands and was found only in the court-houses, where his deeds were recorded. Hawthorne brought him back from the past, set him in the midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and showed him a sufferer for conscience' sake.
This first romance, published under the titleThe Scarlet Letter, revealed to Hawthorne himself, as well as to the world outside, the transcendent power of his genius. Hawthorne, who was despondent of the little popularity of his other books, told the publisher who saw the first sketch ofThe Scarlet Letter, that he did not know whether the story was very good or very bad. The publisher, however, at once perceivedits worth and brought it out one year from that time, and the public saw that it had been entertaining a genius unawares. Hawthorne's next book,The House of the Seven Gables, is a story of the New England of his own day. A clever critic has called it an impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New-England town. Through its pages flit quaint contrasting figures that one might find in New England and nowhere else. The old spinster of ancient family, obliged to open a toy and gingerbread shop, but never forgetting the time when the house with seven gables was a mansion of limitless hospitality, is a pathetic picture of disappointed hope and broken-down fortune. So is her brother, who was falsely imprisoned for twenty years, and who in his old age must lean upon his sister for support; and the other characters are equally true to the life that has almost disappeared in the changes of the half-century since its scenes were made the inspiration of Hawthorne's romance.
The House of the Seven Gableswas followed by two beautiful volumes for children,The WonderBookandTanglewood Tales. InThe Wonder BookHawthorne writes as if he were a child himself, so simple is the charm that he weaves around these old, old tales. Not content with the Greek myths, he created little incidents and impossible characters that glance in and out with elfin grace. One feels that these were the very stories that were told by the centaurs, fauns, and satyrs themselves in the shadows of the old Attic forests. Here we learn that King Midas not only had his palace turned to gold, but that his own little daughter, Marigold, a fancy of Hawthorne's own, was also converted into the same shining metal. We learn, too, the secrets of many a hero and god of this realm of fancy which had been unsuspected by any other historian of their deeds. Every child who readsThe Wonder Bookdoubts not that Hawthorne had hobnobbed many a moonlit night with Pan and Bacchus in their vine-covered grottos by the riverside. This dainty, ethereal touch appears in all his work for children.
A like quality gives distinction to his fourth great novel, which deals with a man supposed tobe a descendant of the old fauns. This creation, named Donatello, from his resemblance to the celebrated statue of the Marble Faun, is not wholly human, although he has human interests and feeling. Hawthorne makes Donatello ashamed of his pointed ears, though his spirit is as wild and untamed as that of his rude ancestors. In this book there is a description of a scene where Count Donatello joins in a peasant dance around a public fountain. And so vividly is his half-human nature here brought out that Hawthorne seems to have witnessed somewhere the mad revels of the veritable fauns and satyrs in the days of their life upon the earth. Throughout this story Hawthorne shows the same subtle sympathy with uncommon natures, the mystery of such souls having the same fascination for him that the secrets of the earth and air have for the scientist and philosopher.
The book coming betweenThe House of the Seven GablesandThe Marble Faunis calledThe Blithedale Romance. It is in part the record of a period of Hawthorne's life whenhe joined a community which hoped to improve the world by combining healthy manual labor with intellectual pursuits, and proving that self-interest and all differences in rank must be hurtful to the commonwealth. This little society lived in a suburb of Boston, and called their association Brook Farm. Each member performed daily some manual labor on the farm or in the house, hours being set aside for study. Here Hawthorne ploughed the fields and joined in the amusements, or sat apart while the rest talked about art and literature, danced, sang, or read Shakespeare aloud. Some of the cleverest men and women of New England joined this community, the rules of which obliged the men to wear plaid blouses and rough straw hats, and the women to content themselves with plain calico gowns.
These serious-minded men and women, who tried to solve a great problem by leading the lives of Arcadian shepherds, at length dispersed, each one going back to the world and working on as bravely as if the experiment had been a great success. The experiences of Brook Farmwere shadowed forth inThe Blithedale Romance, although it was not a literal narrative.
Immediately after this Hawthorne was married and went to live in Concord, near Boston, in a quaint old dwelling called The Manse. And as all his work partakes of the personal flavor of his own life, so his existence here is recorded in a delightful series of essays calledMosses from an Old Manse. Here we have a description of the old house itself, and of the author's family life, of the kitchen-garden and apple-orchards, of the meadows and woods, and of his friendship with that lover of nature, Henry Thoreau, whose writings form a valuable contribution to American literature. TheMosses from an Old Mansemust ever be famous as the history of the quiet hours of one of the greatest American men of letters. They are full of Hawthorne's own personality, and reveal more than any other of his books the depth and purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.
In 1853 his old friend and schoolmate, President Pierce, appointed Hawthorne American Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroadseven years, spending the last four on the Continent, some transcriptions of his experience being found in the celebratedMarble Faunand in several volumes ofNote-Books.The Marble Faun, published in Europe under the titleTransformation, was written in Rome, and was partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa which he occupied near Florence. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower, "haunted," as Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square in Florence." He also states in the same letter that he meant to put the old castle bodily in a romance that was then in his head, which he did by making the villa the old family castle of Donatello, although the scene of the story is laid in Rome.
After Hawthorne's return to America he began two other novels, one founded upon the old legend of the elixir of life. This story was probably suggested to him by Thoreau, who spoke of a house in which Hawthorne oncelived at Concord having been, a century or two before, the abode of a man who believed that he should never die. This subject was a charming one for Hawthorne's peculiar genius, but the story, with another,The Dolliver Romance, was interrupted by the death of Hawthorne in 1864.
In point of literary art the romances of Hawthorne are the finest work yet done in America, and their author was a man of high imagination, lofty morality, and pure ideals; an artist in the noblest meaning of the word.
Seventy years ago the Round Hill School at Northampton, Mass., was perhaps the most famous school in New England. The founder, George Bancroft, had modelled it upon a celebrated school in Switzerland, in the hope that it would prove a starting-point for a broader system of elementary training than had yet existed in America, and everything was done to develop the physical and moral, as well as the mental, traits of the pupils. The school was beautifully situated, commanding a superb view, and had, besides the school-rooms, a gymnasium and play-rooms that were kept warm in cold weather and furnished with tools for carpentering. Here the boys could make bows and arrows, squirrel-traps, kites, sleds, and whatever their fancydictated. There were large play-grounds on the slopes of the hill, and here was the village of "Cronyville," every house, hut, or shanty in which had been built and was owned by the boys themselves. There were many varieties of architecture in "Cronyville," but each dwelling had at least a large chimney and a small store-room. After school hours each shanty was its owner's castle, where entertainments were held, and the guests feasted with roasted corn, nuts, or apples, which the entire company had helped to prepare on the hearth of the wide chimney. Sometimes the feast was enlivened by recitations, poems, and addresses by the pupils, among whom was at one time the future historian, John Lothrop Motley, and very often the festivities would end in one of those earnest talks that boys fall into sometimes when tired out with play. Bancroft's assistant and partner in the school was Dr. Cogswell, who superintended the course of study, which was carried out by the best teachers procurable in America, England, and France. The boys were in the main good students, some of them brilliant ones, and theyenjoyed so much freedom that their spirits gained them sometimes an unenviable reputation. The solemn keeper of a certain inn on the stage line between Northampton and Boston suffered so much from their pranks that he refused to allow them to stop over night, and only consented to give them dinner upon promise of good behavior.
The school became so popular that the best families in all parts of the country sent their boys there, but, financially, it was not a success, and after seven years' trial Bancroft was forced to abandon it, though his partner struggled on a few years longer. If the experiment had been entirely successful the cause of education might have been advanced fifty years ahead of the old method, for both founders were men devoted to the cause of education and longed to see newer and broader methods supersede the old ones.
As a boy Bancroft had studied at the Exeter Academy; finishing his course there he entered Harvard at thirteen, was graduated in his seventeenth year, and a year later was sent abroad by Harvard to fit himself for a tutorship in theUniversity. During his four years' absence he studied modern languages and literatures, Greek philosophy and antiquities, and some natural history. But he made history the special object of study, and bent all his energies to acquiring as wide a knowledge as possible of the sources and materials that make up the records of modern history. During his vacations he visited the different countries of Europe, travelling in regular student fashion. He would rise at dawn, breakfast by candlelight, and then fill the morning with visits to picture galleries, cathedrals, and all the wonders of foreign towns; after a light luncheon he would start again on his sight-seeing, or visit some person of note, meeting during his travels almost every distinguished man in Europe. At night, if not too tired, he would study still politics, languages, and history, and when he returned to America he had made such good use of his time that he was equipped for almost any position in its intellectual life.
His obligations to Harvard led him to accept a tutorship there, which, however, proved so distasteful to him that he only held it one year. Itwas after this experience that he founded his school at Round Hill. During the years that he was trying to make the Round Hill school a model for boys' schools, the idea of his work as the historian of the United States came to him. Undismayed by the scope of the work, which he meant should include the history of the United States from the time of the landing of Columbus to the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, Bancroft, month after month, settled the plan more definitely in his mind; and when the time came for him to begin the work he only looked forward eagerly to the task of writing the records of three hundred years of the world's progress during the most absorbing period known to history. It is doubtful if at this time there was any other man living better qualified for this task than Bancroft. He had been a student of history and politics since boyhood. He had traced the stream of history from its sources in the East through the rise of the great modern nations. He had mastered the politics of the ancient world, whose language, literature, and art were also familiar to him, and civilizedEurope had been his field of study during the years which leave the most profound impressions upon the mind.
To him the rise and establishment of the United States as a great nation presented itself as one of the most brilliant passages of the world's history, and no labor seemed tiresome which should fittingly chronicle that event.
Besides his literary requirements Bancroft possessed eminent qualities for practical life. He was successively Governor of Massachusetts, Secretary of the Navy, and for a time Acting-Secretary of war; he served his country as Minister to Great Britain. He was made Minister to Prussia and afterward Minister to Germany when that country took its place as a united nation. Some of the most important treaties between the United States and foreign powers were made during Bancroft's diplomatic career, and in every act of his political life showed a talent for practical affairs. While he was Secretary of the Navy he founded the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Previous to this there was no good system bywhich the boys who desired to enter the navy could receive instruction in any other branch than that of practical seamanship. In the old navy the middies were taught, while afloat, by the chaplains, who gave them lessons in odd hours in writing, arithmetic, and navigation; if the pupils were idle they were reported to the captain, whose discipline was far from gentle. A boy eager to learn could pick up a great deal by asking questions and noticing what was going on about him, and sometimes the officers would volunteer their help in a difficult subject. Later each ship had one regular school-master, who made the voyage with the ship, twenty middies being appointed to each man-of-war. This system was superseded by schools, which were established at the different navy-yards, and which the boys attended in the intervals of sea duty; but, as in the case of the other methods, the instruction was desultory, and the pupils had not the advantage of education enjoyed by the cadets of the West Point Military Academy, though it was evident the necessity for it was the same.