Main Street

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This eBook was produced by David Widger

THE SNOW-IMAGE

AND

OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES

MAIN STREET

By

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Respectable-looking individual makes his bow and addresses the public.
In my daily walks along the principal street of my native town, it has
often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward, and the
vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along this
thoroughfare during the more than two centuries of its existence, could
be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would bean exceedingly
effective method of illustrating the march of time. Acting on this idea,
I have contrived a certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat in the nature
of a puppet-show, by means of which I propose to call up the multiform
and many-colored Past before the spectator, and show him the ghosts of
his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents, with no greater
trouble than the turning of a crank. Be pleased, therefore, my indulgent
patrons, to walk into the show-room, and take your seats before yonder
mysterious curtain. The little wheels and springs of my machinery have
been well oiled; a multitude of puppets are dressed in character,
representing all varieties of fashion, from the Puritan cloak and jerkin
to the latest Oak Hall coat; the lamps are trimmed, and shall brighten
into noontide sunshine, or fade away in moonlight, or muffle their
brilliancy in a November cloud, as the nature of the scene may require;
and, in short, the exhibition is just ready to commence. Unless
something should go wrong,--as, for instance, the misplacing of a
picture, whereby the people and events of one century might be thrust
into the middle of another; or the breaking of a wire, which would bring
the course of time to a sudden period,--barring, I say, the casualties to
which such a complicated piece of mechanism is liable,--I flatter myself,
ladies and gentlemen,--that the performance will elicit your generous
approbation.

Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold-not,
indeed, the Main Street--but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over
which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.

You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive wood,--
the ever-youthful and venerably old,--verdant with new twigs, yet hoary,
as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have accumulated
upon its intermingled branches. The white man's axe has never smitten a
single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single one of the withered
leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have been harvesting
beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending boughs, there is
already a faintly traced path, running nearly east and west, as if a
prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen into the heart of
the solemn old wood. Onward goes this hardly perceptible track, now
ascending over a natural swell of land, now subsiding gently into a
hollow; traversed here by a little streamlet, which glitters like a snake
through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly hides itself among the
underbrush, in its quest for the neighboring cove; and impeded there by
the massy corpse of a giant of the forest, which had lived out its
incalculable term of life, and been overthrown by mere old age, and lies
buried in the new vegetation that is born of its decay. What footsteps
can have worn this half-seen path? Hark! Do we not hear them now
rustling softly over the leaves? We discern an Indian woman,--a majestic
and queenly woman, or else her spectral image does not represent her
truly,--for this is the great Squaw Sachem, whose rule, with that of her
sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red chief, who stalks by her
side, is Wappacowet, her second husband, the priest and magician, whose
incantations shall hereafter affright the pale-faced settlers with grisly
phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the woods, at midnight. But greater
would be the affright of the Indian necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool
of water at his feet, he could catch a prophetic glimpse of the noonday
marvels which the white man is destined to achieve; if he could see, as
in a dream, the stone front of the stately hall, which will cast its
shadow over this very spot; if he could be aware that the future edifice
will contain a noble Museum, where, among countless curiosities of earth
and sea, a few Indian arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a
vanished race!

No such forebodings disturb the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet. They pass
on, beneath the tangled shade, holding high talk on matters of state and
religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs will
endure forever. Meanwhile, how full of its own proper life is the scene
that lies around them! The gray squirrel runs up the trees, and rustles
among the upper branches. Was not that the leap of a deer? And there is
the whirr of a partridge! Methinks, too, I catch the cruel and stealthy
eye of a wolf, as he draws back into yonder impervious density of
underbrush. So, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go the Indian queen
and the Indian priest; while the gloom of the broad wilderness impends
over them, and its sombre mystery invests them as with something
preternatural; and only momentary streaks of quivering sunlight, once in
a great while, find their way down, and glimmer among the feathers in
their dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever
pass into this twilight solitude,--over those soft heaps of the decaying
tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green with water-moss, and
penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been
uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It has been a wilderness
from the creation. Must it not be a wilderness forever?

Here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue glasses, with bows of Berlin
steel, who has taken a seat at the extremity of the front row, begins, at
this early stage of the exhibition, to criticise.

"The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny!" observes he, scarcely under
his breath. "The trees look more like weeds in a garden than a primitive
forest; the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet are stiff in their pasteboard
joints; and the squirrels, the deer, and the wolf move with all the
grace of a child's wooden monkey, sliding up and down a stick."

"I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks," replies the
showman, with a bow. "Perhaps they are just. Human art has its limits,
and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator's
imagination."

"You will get no such aid from mine," responds the critic. "I make it a
point to see things precisely as they are. But come! go ahead! the stage
is waiting!"

The showman proceeds.

Casting our eyes again over the scene, we perceive that strangers have
found their way into the solitary place. In more than one spot, among
the trees, an upheaved axe is glittering in the sunshine. Roger Conant,
the first settler in Naumkeag, has built his dwelling, months ago, on the
border of the forest-path; and at this moment he comes eastward through
the vista of woods, with his gun over his shoulder, bringing home the
choice portions of a deer. His stalwart figure, clad in a leathern
jerkin and breeches of the same, strides sturdily onward, with such an
air of physical force and energy that we might almost expect the very
trees to stand aside, and give him room to pass. And so, indeed, they
must; for, humble as is his name in history, Roger Conant still is of
that class of men who do not merely find, but make, their place in the
system of human affairs; a man of thoughtful strength, he has planted the
germ of a city. There stands his habitation, showing in its rough
architecture some features of the Indian wigwam, and some of the log-
cabin, and somewhat, too, of the straw-thatched cottage in Old England,
where this good yeoman had his birth and breeding. The dwelling is
surrounded by a cleared space of a few acres, where Indian corn grows
thrivingly among the stumps of the trees; while the dark forest hems it
in, and scenes to gaze silently and solemnly, as if wondering at the
breadth of sunshine which the white man spreads around him. An Indian,
half hidden in the dusky shade, is gazing and wondering too.

Within the door of the cottage you discern the wife, with her ruddy
English cheek. She is singing, doubtless, a psalm tune, at her household
work; or, perhaps she sighs at the remembrance of the cheerful gossip,
and all the merry social life, of her native village beyond the vast and
melancholy sea. Yet the next moment she laughs, with sympathetic glee,
at the sports of her little tribe of children; and soon turns round, with
the home-look in her face, as her husband's foot is heard approaching the
rough-hewn threshold. How sweet must it be for those who have an Eden in
their hearts, like Roger Conant and his wife, to find a new world to
project it into, as they have, instead of dwelling among old haunts of
men, where so many household fires have been kindled and burnt out, that
the very glow of happiness has something dreary in it! Not that this
pair are alone in their wild Eden, for here comes Goodwife Massey, the
young spouse of Jeffrey Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at
her breast. Dame Conant has another of like age; and it shall hereafter
be one of the disputed points of history which of these two babies was
the first town-born child.

But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within view. Peter Palfrey
likewise has built himself a house, and so has Balch, and Norman, and
Woodbury. Their dwellings, indeed,--such is the ingenious contrivance of
this piece of pictorial mechanism,--seem to have arisen, at various
points of the scene, even while we have been looking at it. The forest-
track, trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these sturdy and
ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it never could have
acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many Indian
moccasins. It will be a street, anon! As we observe it now, it goes
onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy strip
of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a decided
line, along which human interests have begun to hold their career. Over
yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid side by side to
make a causeway. In another place, the axe has cleared away a confused
intricacy of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which had been tossed
together by a hurricane. So now the little children, just beginning to
run alone, may trip along the path, and not often stumble over an
impediment, unless they stray from it to gather wood-berries beneath the
trees. And, besides the feet of grown people and children, there are the
cloven hoofs of a small herd of cows, who seek their subsistence from the
native grasses, and help to deepen the track of the future thoroughfare.
Goats also browse along it, and nibble at the twigs that thrust
themselves across the way. Not seldom, in its more secluded portions,
where the black shadow of the forest strives to hide the trace of human-
footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf, on the watch for a kid or a young calf;
or fixes his hungry gaze on the group of children gathering berries, and
can hardly forbear to rush upon them. And the Indians, coming from their
distant wigwams to view the white man's settlement, marvel at the deep
track which he makes, and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment
that this heavy tread will find its way over all the land; and that the
wild-woods, the wild wolf, and the wild Indian will alike be trampled
beneath it. Even so shall it be. The pavements of the Main Street must
be laid over the red man's grave.

Behold! here is a spectacle which should be ushered in by the peal of
trumpets, if Naumkeag had ever yet heard that cheery music, and by the
roar of cannon, echoing among the woods. A procession,--for, by its
dignity, as marking an epoch in the history of the street, it deserves
that name,--a procession advances along the pathway. The good ship
Abigail has arrived from England, bringing wares and merchandise, for the
comfort of the inhabitants, and traffic with the Indians; bringing
passengers too, and, more important than all, a governor for the new
settlement. Roger Conant and Peter Palfrey, with their companions, have
been to the shore to welcome him; and now, with such honor and triumph as
their rude way of life permits, are escorting the sea-flushed voyagers to
their habitations. At the point where Endicott enters upon the scene,
two venerable trees unite their branches high above his head; thus
forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he pauses, with
his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the first impression of their new-
found home. The old settlers gaze not less earnestly at him, than he at
the hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings. They like his
bearded face, under the shadow of the broad-brimmed and steeple-crowned
Puritan hat;--a visage resolute, grave, and thoughtful, yet apt to kindle
with that glow of a cheerful spirit by which men of strong character are
enabled to go joyfully on their proper tasks. His form, too, as you see
it, in a doublet and hose of sad-colored cloth, is of a manly make, fit
for toil and hardship, and fit to wield the heavy sword that hangs from
his leathern belt. His aspect is a better warrant for the ruler's office
than the parchment commission which he bears, however fortified it may be
with the broad seal of the London council. Peter Palfrey nods to Roger
Conant. "The worshipful Court of Assistants have done wisely," say they
between themselves. "They have chosen for our governor a man out of a
thousand." Then they toss up their hats,--they, and all the uncouth
figures of their company, most of whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as
their old kersey and linsey-woolsey garments have been torn and tattered
by many a long month's wear,--they all toss up their hats, and salute
their new governor and captain with a hearty English shout of welcome.
We seem to hear it with our own ears, so perfectly is the action
represented in this life-like, this almost magic picture! But have you
observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott?---a rose of beauty
from an English garden, now to be transplanted to a fresher soil. It may
be that, long years--centuries indeed--after this fair flower shall have
decayed, other flowers of the same race will appear in the same soil, and
gladden other generations with hereditary beauty. Does not the vision
haunt us yet? Has not Nature kept the mould unbroken, deeming it a pity
that the idea should vanish from mortal sight forever, after only once
assuming earthly substance? Do we not recognize, in that fair woman's
face, a model of features which still beam, at happy meets, on what was
then the woodland pathway, but has out since grown into a busy street?

"This is too ridiculous!--positively insufferable!" mutters the same
critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. "Here is a
pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card, with a pair
of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it
the prototype of hereditary beauty!"

"But, sir, you have not the proper point of view," remarks the showman.
"You sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial
exhibition. Pray, oblige me by removing to this other bench, and I
venture assure you the proper light and shadow will transform the
spectacle into quite another thing."

"Pshaw!" replies the critic; "I want no other light and shade. I have
already told you that it is my business to see things just as they are."

"I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition," observes a
gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested,--"I
would suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, and
who came with him from England, left no posterity; and that,
consequently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any
specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us."

Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the showman
points again to the scene.

During this little interruption, you perceive that the Anglo-Saxon
energy--as the phrase now goes--has been at work in the spectacle before
us. So many chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to have the
aspect of a village street; although everything is so inartificial and
inceptive, that it seems as if one returning wave of the wild nature
might overwhelm it all. But the one edifice which gives the pledge of
permanence to this bold enterprise is seen at the central point of the
picture. There stands the meeting-house, a small structure, low-roofed,
without a spire, and built of rough timber, newly hewn, with the sap
still in the logs, and here and there a strip of bark adhering to them.
A meaner temple was never consecrated to the worship of the Deity. With
the alternative of kneeling beneath the awful vault of the firmament, it
is strange that men should creep into this pent-up nook, and expect God's
presence there. Such, at least, one would imagine, might be the feeling
of these forest-settlers, accustomed, as they had been, to stand under
the dim arches of vast cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary
worship in the old ivy-covered churches of rural England, around which
lay the bones of many generations of their forefathers. How could they
dispense with the carved altar-work?--how, with the pictured windows,
where the light of common day was hallowed by being transmitted through
the glorified figures of saints?--how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it
must have been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries?--
how, with the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles,
pervading the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of
audible religion? They needed nothing of all this. Their house of
worship, like their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. But the
zeal of a recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts,
enriching everything around them with its radiance; making of these new
walls, and this narrow compass, its own cathedral; and being, in itself,
that spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architecture,
pictured windows, and the organ's grand solemnity are remote and
imperfect symbols. All was well, so long as their lamps were freshly
kindled at heavenly flame. After a while, however, whether in their time
or their children's, these lamps began to burn more dimly, or with a less
genuine lustre; and then it might be seen how hard, cold, and confined
was their system,--how like an iron cage was that which they called
Liberty.

Too much of this. Look again at the picture, and observe how the
aforesaid Anglo-Saxon energy is now trampling along the street, and
raising a positive cloud of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. For there
the carpenters are building a new house, the frame of which was hewn and
fitted in England, of English oak, and sent hither on shipboard; and here
a blacksmith makes huge slang and clatter on his anvil, shaping out tools
and weapons; and yonder a wheelwright, who boasts himself a London
workman, regularly bred to his handicraft, is fashioning a set of wagon-
wheels, the track of which Wall soon be visible. The wild forest is
shrinking back; the street has lost the aromatic odor of the pine-trees,
and of the sweet-fern that grew beneath them. The tender and modest
wild-flowers, those gentle children of savage nature that grew pale
beneath the ever-brooding shade, have shrank away and disappeared, like
stars that vanish in the breadth of light. Gardens are fenced in, and
display pumpkin-beds and rows of cabbages and beans; and, though the
governor and the minister both view them with a disapproving eye, plants
of broad-leaved tobacco, which the cultivators are enjoined to use
privily, or not at all. No wolf, for a year past, has been heard to
bark, or known to range among the dwellings, except that single one,
whose grisly head, with a plash of blood beneath it, is now affixed to
the portal of the meeting-house. The partridge has ceased to run across
the too-frequented path. Of all the wild life that used to throng here,
only the Indians still come into the settlement, bringing the skins of
beaver and otter, bear and elk, which they sell to Endicott for the wares
of England. And there is little John Massey, the son of Jeffrey Massey
and first-born of Naumkeag, playing beside his father's threshold, a
child of six or seven years old. Which is the better-grown infant,--the
town or the boy?

The red men have become aware that the street is no longer free to them,
save by the sufferance and permission of the settlers. Often, to impress
them with an awe of English power, there is a muster and training of the
town-forces, and a stately march of the mail-clad band, like this which
we now see advancing up the street. There they come, fifty of them, or
more; all with their iron breastplates and steel caps well burnished, and
glimmering bravely against the sun; their ponderous muskets on their
shoulders, their bandaliers about their waists, their lighted matches in
their hands, and the drum and fife playing cheerily before them. See! do
they not step like martial men? Do they not manoeuvre like soldiers who
have seen stricken fields? And well they may; for this band is composed
of precisely such materials as those with which Cromwell is preparing to
beat down the strength of a kingdom; and his famous regiment of Ironsides
might be recruited from just such men. In everything, at this period,
New England was the essential spirit and flower of that which was about
to become uppermost in the mother-country. Many a bold and wise man lost
the fame which would have accrued to him in English history, by crossing
the Atlantic with our forefathers. Many a valiant captain, who might
have been foremost at Marston Moor or Naseby, exhausted his martial ardor
in the command of a log-built fortress, like that which you observe on
the gently rising ground at the right of the pathway,--its banner
fluttering in the breeze, and the culverins and sakers showing their
deadly muzzles over the rampart.

A multitude of people were now thronging to New England: some, because
the ancient and ponderous framework of Church and State threatened to
crumble down upon their heads; others, because they despaired of such a
downfall. Among those who came to Naumkeag were men of history and
legend, whose feet leave a track of brightness along any pathway which
they have trodden. You shall behold their life-like images--their
spectres, if you choose so to call them--passing, encountering with a
familiar nod, stopping to converse together, praying, bearing weapons,
laboring or resting from their labors, in the Main Street. Here, now,
comes Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man, walking swiftly, as being
impelled by that fiery activity of nature which shall hereafter thrust
him into the conflict of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain and
counsellor of Cromwell, and finally bring him to a bloody end. He
pauses, by the meetinghouse, to exchange a greeting with Roger Williams,
whose face indicates, methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and more
expansive, than that of Peters; yet not less active for what he discerns
to be the will of God, or the welfare of mankind. And look! here is a
guest for Endicott, coming forth out of the forest, through which he has
been journeying from Boston, and which, with its rude branches, has
caught hold of his attire, and has wet his feet with its swamps and
streams. Still there is something in his mild and venerable, though not
aged presence--a propriety, an equilibrium, in Governor Winthrop's
nature--that causes the disarray of his costume to be unnoticed, and
gives us the same impression as if he were clad in such rave and rich
attire as we may suppose him to have worn in the Council Chamber of the
colony. Is not this characteristic wonderfully perceptible in our
spectral representative of his person? But what dignitary is this
crossing from the other side to greet the governor? A stately personage,
in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary beard, and a gold chain across his
breast; he has the authoritative port of one who has filled the highest
civic station in the first of cities. Of all men in the world, we should
least expect to meet the Lord Mayor of London--as Sir Richard Saltonstall
has been, once and again--in a forest-bordered settlement of the western
wilderness.

Farther down the street, we see Emanuel Downing, a grave and worthy
citizen, with his son George, a stripling who has a career before him;
his shrewd and quick capacity and pliant conscience shall not only exalt
him high, but secure him from a downfall. Here is another figure, on
whose characteristic make and expressive action I will stake the credit
of my pictorial puppet-show.

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