There is possibly no better example in his own writings of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s dictum "Easy reading is damn hard writing" than his preface to the first edition
of Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), a
20-page piece called "The old manse".
In the summer of
1845, Hawthorne was living in that hotbed of dreamy
intellectuals, the sleepy village of Concord, Massachusetts,
and he owed his new publisher in New
York an introductory sketch for the latest collection
of his short stories.
He wasn’t very well, the muse for creative
writing wasn't upon him – he felt he was only up to editing work – and although
he had a pretty good idea of the kind of piece he wanted to write, "if I were
to attempt writing it now, the result would be most pitiable".
Fast forward nine months and Hawthorne sent the preface to his editor, who
rejoiced in the name Evert Duyckinck, together with the following explanation
for its delay:
"Nothing that I tried to write would flow out of
my pen, till a very little while ago – when forth came this sketch, of its own
accord, and much unlike what I had purposed. I like it pretty well, at this
present writing; and my wife better than I. It is truth, as you will perceive,
with perhaps a gleam or two of ideal light thrown over it – yet hardly the less
true for that. I have written it as impersonally as I could, considering the
nature of the thing, and do not feel as if there were any indelicacy in it,
towards myself or anyone else."
The resulting piece is one of Hawthorne's greatest triumphs. Although he
elsewhere chided himself on the narrowness of his horizons – at this point he
had not travelled a great deal, and not at all outside America, so I
believe – his sketch of the old house where he was staying and its environs
through the changing seasons is a masterpiece. He is able to combine two of his
greatest strengths, evoking the atmosphere of a place and taking a historical
event (in this case, an early battle in the Revolutionary War) and weaving it
into his narrative as effortlessly as the flow of the Concord River that forms
the focal point of his tale.
"It may well be called the Concord – the river of peace and quietness – for it is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that
ever loitered, imperceptibly, towards its eternity, the sea. Positively, I had
lived three weeks beside it, before it grew quite clear to my perception which
way the current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
north-western breeze is vexing its surface, on a sunshiny day. From the
incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of becoming
the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a wild, free mountain
torrent. While all things else are compelled to subserve some useful purpose,
it idles its sluggish life away, in lazy liberty, without turning a solitary
spindle, or affording even water-power enough to grind the corn that grows upon
its banks. The torpor of its movement allows it nowhere a bright pebbly shore,
nor so much as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course. It
slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow-grass, and bathes the
overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the roots of elms and
ash-trees, and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow along its plashy shore;
the yellow water-lily spreads its broad, flat leaves on the margin; and the
fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally selecting a position just so far
from the river's brink, that it cannot be grasped, save at the hazard of
plunging in."
Of the conversation that that he and his friend Ellery Channing had
after lunch cooked over a fire of pine cones beside the river after journeying
down it in a skiff, he writes:
"It was the very spot in which to utter the extremest nonsense, or
the profoundest wisdom – or that ethereal product of the mind which partakes of
both, and may become one or the other, in correspondence with the faith and
insight of the auditor."
Hawthorne's style
is a million miles away from that dubbed the "Gothic architecture" style by
Longfellow, referring to some of Hawthorne's
contemporaries in his review of the first edition of Twice-told Tales (1837). Praising "the exceeding beauty of the
writer's style", Longfellow writes: "It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed
he uses words as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful
bound, his spirit crosses and recrosses the bright and rushing stream of
thought".
But below the limpidity and brightness, there is darkness, darkness
that pervades even his early works, such as ''My Kinsman, Major Molineux'', "Roger Malvin's burial" and "The gentle boy". As Melville wrote in his appreciation
of Mosses, the “black conceit
pervades him, through and through”. And Melville was in no doubt about the
source of the insights and capacity for sympathetic understanding of the fellow
writer who was to become his friend:
"… we see that suffering, some time or other and
in some shape or other – this only can enable any man to depict it in others.
All over him, Hawthorne’s
melancholy rests like an Indian Summer, which, though bathing a whole country
in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every towering hill, and
each far-winding vale."
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