Nathaniel Hawthoour.

CHARACTERIZATION BY GEORGE B. SMITH.'

1. The growth of the modern novel has been marked by many changes and developments, but it may be said that its psychological interest was first exhibited in a very high degree by Haw

thorne. His deep study of the soul had scarcely been equalled before by writers of fiction. His stories do not, of course, display all the gifts which we witness in profusion in such men as Fielding and Scott; but in their deep concentration of thought upon the motives and the spirit of man, they stand almost alone.

2. Compared with the writers of his own country, there is no difficulty in assigning his proper position as a novelist to this illustrious writer. He has no equal. It is rare to meet with his artistic qualities anywhere; it is rarer still to find them united to the earnestness which so distinguished him. Whether as the result of an inheritance of the old Puritan blood or not matters little, but in him there was apparently a sincerity truly refreshing among so many writers whose gifts have been vitiated by the lack thereof. Admirably did Russell Lowell depict him when he wrote the following lines in his Fable for Critics:

"There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,

So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet,

Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet :

'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,

With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,
Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,
With a single anemone trembly and rathe.

His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,
That a suitable parallel sets one to seek.
He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck:
When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,

So, to fill out her model, a little she spared
From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared.
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man.”

3. That Hawthorne will ever be what we call a very popular novelist is open to much doubt. The habits of abstraction to which he was accustomed from his boyhood had their influence upon his thought, which is not always expressed in a manner adapted to the average reader. At times he appears to be living away from the world altogether; and society likes now what is concrete, something which it can handle and appraise, whether

in literature, science, or art. He had a shrinking from the lionizing which is done on trust, that unpleasant phase which has crept over society during the last few years. The principle of giving the highest praise to the man who can play the loudest on the big drum was a hateful one to him. A silent rebuke to the fussiness of the nineteenth century, and to its fulsome adulation of what is unworthy, may be traced in his pages. This man had a strong and fearless spirit, and though he discussed questions occasionally which have been found too high for settlement in all ages, he did so with humility and on reverent knee..

4. Hawthorne had unquestionably, moreover, a strong poetic element in his nature, sublimated by constant contact with the various forms of sorrow. Through worldly loss he came to an insight into spiritual truths to which he might otherwise have been a stranger. At times he appears almost to distrust men, but it is never really so; he laments man's indecision for the right, the evil growths which enwrap his soul, and that dark veil of sin which hides from him the smiling face of his Creator. "Poet let us call him," with Longfellow; but greater still, an interpreter, through whose allegories and awe-inspiring creations breathes the soul that longs after the accomplishment of the dream of unnumbered centuries, the brotherhood of man. The world has been enriched by his genius, which is as a flower whose fragrance is shed upon man, but whose roots rest with God.

FROM THE SCARLET LETTER.

[INTRODUCTION.-The selections here given form the first two chapters of Hawthorne's unique romance of the Scarlet Letter. Says Mr. H. T. Tuckerman: “In truth to costume, local manners, and scenic features, the Scarlet Letter is as reliable as the best of Scott's novels; in the anatomy of human passion and consciousness it resembles the most effective of Balzac's illustrations of Parisian or provincial life; while in developing bravely and justly the sentiment of the life it depicts, it is as true to humanity as Dickens.”]

I. THE PRISON-DOOR.

1. A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak and studded with iron spikes.

5

10

2. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia* of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house, somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in 15 the old church-yard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its 20 oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-I-5. A throng... spikes. Analyze this sentence. 6. Utopia. Etymology?

8. it.

"it"

What is the logical subject represented by the anticipative subject

known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly 25 vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their 30 fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that. the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

3. This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old 35 wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the 40 threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human 45 frailty and sorrow.

II. THE MARKET-PLACE.

1. The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. 50 Among any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified* the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured* some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of

...

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-23. known . . . era. What is the figure of speech? 23-28. Before . . . prison. What is the structure - periodic or loose?— Point out a striking metaphor in this sentence.

42. inauspicious portal. Explain.

52. petrifled. What is the figure?-Etymology?

53, 54. augured... betokened. Discriminate between these synonyms.