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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

AND HIS WIFE.

CHAPTER I.

ANCESTRAL MATTERS.

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THE forefathers of a distinguished man (especially in this country) are not of much practical use to him. What he is, outweighs what they can contribute. Instead of their augmenting his dignity, his own proper lustre is reflected back on them; and such interest as we take in them is for his sake. For his distinction so far as it may have any relation to them at all seems to be the culmination or flower of their prevailing traits and tendencies, added to that personal and forming quality in him, without which no mere accumulation even of the best material would be of avail. How much the material in question may amount to, and of how great importance it may be as a factor in the individual's character, is, indeed, still undetermined. It is not necessary, here, to enter upon a discussion of the merits of the theory of Heredity; but we may, perhaps, assume that faults and frailties are more readily and persis

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tently reproduced than virtues, since the former belong to a man's nature, as distinguished from that self-effected modification of his nature, which we call character. A tendency to drunkenness, for example, or to pocket-picking, is more easily traced in a man's ancestry than a tendency to love one's neighbor as one's self, or to feel as charitably disposed towards those who injure us as towards those who injure our enemies. In other words, nature is passive, and character is active; and activity is more apt than passivity to be original, or peculiar.

It might seem an ungracious task, however, to analyze this great reservoir of ancestry with a view to reveal the imperfections of an individual. If a man contrives to get through life respectably and honorably, why ferret out the weaknesses which he strove to conceal? Would not vice be encouraged by the knowledge that even the greatest figures of history partook of its infirmity? The present writer, for his own part, confesses to feeling no sympathy with those who answer these questions in the affirmative. If it be true that human nature is evil, we shall gain nothing by blinking the fact. If the truth be humiliating, so much the wholesomer for us who are humiliated; the complacency born of ignorance of and still more of ignoring-that which exists, can have in it no health or permanence. Sooner or later it will be overthrown, and then, the greater the security has been, the more disastrous will be the catastrophe. We are too apt to forget that intellec

tual eminence can exist side by side with moral frailty or depravity; and we are prone to infer that because a man does right, he has felt no temptation to do wrong. But, in reality, the beauty, the pathos, and the power of the spectacle of humanity lies in the fact that it is a spectacle of a mortal struggle between two eternal forces, a struggle more or less stubbornly and conspicuously maintained, but common and inevitable to every one of us. The greatest men, so far as we know anything about them, have not been those who were virtuous without effort. Ever since Christ was tempted in the wilderness, and prayed that the cup might pass from him, and accused God of forsaking him, character has been, not innate, but the issue of this endless conflict between the desire of good and the tendency to evil; and its strength has been in proportion to the weight of the tendency as well as to the intensity of the desire. Indeed, the desire can be intense only in so far as the tendency is weighty. The imminence of peril creates the faculty to analyze and overcome it. If Christ was greater than other men, it was not because he did right more easily than they, but, on the contrary, because he resisted in his own person the tendencies to evil of the whole human race. Good men are not monsters: they know, better than others, what it means to be human. No doubt, we seldom have an opportunity to perceive the painful and laboring steps by which goodness or greatness is achieved; only the result comes into our range of

vision. The reason is, that strength is silent and calm, and has the reserve and humility of a conqueror who knows the cost of victory, and how precarious and incomplete all victory is. It cannot talk about itself; it cannot find anything in itself worth talking about. Looking at itself from within, as it were, it sees only its negative aspect. None the less it is well for outsiders to investigate the processes of the growth and development of heroes, not in order to console ourselves for our shortcomings, but to gain encouragement from the discovery that human weakness is the very essence and occasion of human strength.

Now, as regards the subject of this biography,a man whose personal weight and influence was strongly impressed upon all who knew him, and whose private moral life was as free from degradation as his writings are, there is no reason to doubt that he inherited, or at all events possessed in himself, a full share of the faults and foibles of mankind. in general. He was, moreover, hampered by certain inconveniences or misfortunes incident to the period and society in which he was placed, such as Puritanism, Calvinism, narrow social and moral prejudices, the tyranny of local traditions and precedents, and very limited pecuniary resources. Furthermore, he was brought up (as will appear later on) under what might be considered special disadvantages. His mother, a woman of fine gifts but of extreme sensibility, lost her husband in her twenty-eighth year; and, from an exaggerated, almost Hindoo-like con

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