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Carl Van Doren (1885–1950). The American Novel. 1921.

Page 85

Appointed by George Bancroft to be weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House early in 1839, he served there two years and then entered the community at Brook Farm, not because he was a communist or a transcendentalist but because he was a lover who hoped that the experiment would help him to become a husband. A year sufficed to make it plain that his art could not flourish under such conditions. He left Brook Farm, issued a second series (1842) of Twice-Told Tales, was married, and went to live at the Old Manse in Concord, in the neighborhood of the two other most authentic New England authors, Emerson and Thoreau. There Hawthorne lived for three years, until he returned to Salem as surveyor of the Custom House for three years more; in Concord he wrote, beside certain hack pieces, the Mosses from an Old Manse (1846); there he rounded out his years of preparation for the greater novels. The differences between the Twice-Told Tales and the Mosses are not important, nor are the stories of the later collection always later in composition, but it should at least be noted that whereas the Tales contains a larger number of vivid pictures from past or present, the range of the Mosses is on the whole the greater. Here may be found those profound studies of conscience, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Christmas Banquet, and Roger Malvin’s Burial; while side by side with them are smiling and elusive exercises of Hawthorne’s fancy, The Celestial Railroad and Feathertop. Rappaccini’s Daughter is longer than any tale Hawthorne had written since The Gentle Boy a dozen years before; the average sketch or story in the Mosses is nearly twice as long as in the Tales; and here, moreover, may

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